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Bolt Thrower

  • Bolt Thrower #1 : Titan in review, favourite Android Games, Sherlock & Sherlock Holmes, New Folk

    bolt-thrower

    OK, I warned you guys that I might have to do this from time to time. I’m shamelessly stealing the idea of my fellow staffers Micheal and Ken and having my own named column to talk about a whole grab-bag of crap alongside games. And I’m shamelessly stealing their idea of incorporating my name into the title too. When I stopped to think about how I could riff on my name, the choice of combining a weapon, Games Workshop games and a famous death metal band (even though I hate death metal, y’all seem to love it) was too good to miss in spite of the atrocious pun it represents. So welcome to the inaugural edition of Bolt Thrower - won’t be quite such a regular feature as Next of Ken or Barnestorming, but hopefully still the first of many.

  • Bolt Thrower #13: Lords of Waterdeep, Insomnia, Game of Thrones, Kite Runner, Gears of War, Spacemen 3

    It’s trash culture time. I’ve always been fond of the number 13 because daft people think it’s unlucky. Enough said.

  • Bolt Thrower #2: Introductory Wargames, A Place of Greater Safety, Everlands, Hip-Hop

    bolt-throwerRoll up, ladies and gentlemen! Queue right here for your literal once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be skewered by a shot from the most famous siege engine in Imperial Rome! That’s right, it’s time for Bolt Thrower #2.

    Games

    Fond as they are of their boardgames over at NoHighScores, I’m not sure there’s ever been much written about wargames over there so I thought I’deducate their readership on the finer points of Panzer-pushing, including why the genre is so bafflingly resistant to modernisation, and why it is when designers to break the mold the games are often of startling quality. I’ve also taken the opportunity to lay down four games that I feel are both newbie-friendly and yet epitomise the cutting edge of wargame design. No doubt some of you, especially the wargamers amongst you, many of whom have a much wider range of experience in the genre than I do, will disagree with my picks, so get on the thread and let everyone know about it.

    Books

    At the moment I’m one half of the way through the enormous French Revolution yarn A Place of Greater Safety. The author won the famous Booker Prize for another of her historical novels, but this one actually had better reviews on Amazon so I was expecting great things. I have not, as yet, discovered them. It’s certainly not a bad book by any stretch, but it has this bizarre focus on the intimate details of the lives of three figures at the forefront of the revolution, so close and personal that it neglects to talk about a lot of the wider history. So if you don’t know some of the history, you’ll frequently be left wondering what on earth some of the characters are talking about, and if you do then it ruins much of the suspense. The author also seems to be infuriatingly fond of implicating things rather than stating them directly, which exacerbates the problem. Interesting, well-written and often entertaining, but not a book I can imagine reading more than once.

    I also got lucky and caught the e-bookCodex Nekromantica on one day when it happened to be free. It’s a fun read, a kind of Pratchett-esque take on Lovecraft that focuses squarely on laughs over the depth of imagination, character and cunning metaphors that you get with the real Pratchett. Good job too, as while the author clearly has a talent for fast-moving plots and humorous similes, originality and character aren’t really his strong points and he’s self aware enough to know it, and clever enough to turn it to his advantage by poking ironic fun at his own stereotypes. And as it turns out it’s ideal material to read in the dark while waiting for toddlers to go sleep, so it gave me a lot of pleasure right up until the ending, which was rubbish, leaving a variety of important plot points forgotten and entirely unresolved.

    Mobile

    I’ve finally discovered the joys ofAscendancy on iOS. It does work exceptionally well on that platform and the app is highly recommended by me and about anyone else that’s ever used it. But I found it had a smaller life span for me than many others: got burned out on it after a couple of weeks. I haven’t bothered withReturn of the Fallen. Deckbuilders just aren’t my thing I guess.

    On the other hand I played all the way throughEverlandson my Android phone (it’s also on iOS) and wanted more.Everlands is actually a board game, just one that only exists on mobile devices. While it ostensibly has a theme of animals trying to save one another from an infection of evilness, it’s actually pretty abstract. You play on an empty hex grid, choosing and placing one piece per turn from a selection of units that have attack and hit point values, arrows to indicate which hex sides they attack from, and a special power. When you place a unit it takes damage equal to the attack value of adjacent enemy pieces which can attack across the relevant hex sides and if it survives it attacks back. Any piece that accumulates more damage than its hit points gets flipped to the opposing side. And you’re playing to have the most pieces on the board. It’s a bit likeNeuroshima Hex only cuter, slightly simpler, slightly deeper and a lot more fun. It would make a great 2-player board game and I’ll eat my hat if someone hasn’t already thought about licencing it as a physical product. For a dollar, it’s pretty much a must-have in my book.

    Music

    If you’ve been following the forums, you’ll have noticed that this week F:AT’s been on a massive hip-hop and rap trip. Everyone’s been pitching in and suggesting their favourite tracks and in the interests of enjoying it all myself at minimum effort, I compiled the lot into aSpotify playlist. Where I couldn’t find the suggested track by a given artist, I just substituted the most popular instead, so that’ll be why certain picks didn’t make the list.

    And man, I have to say you lot have good taste in rap (except for whoever posted Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac). Here in the UK we just don’t get the exposure to some of the more inventive underground stuff you’ve been posting so that’s been a real eye-opener, especially Aesop Rock and Clipse both new to me and both great. So far the collective favourite album - with three different tracks recommended by three different users (including me) - is the MF DOOM and Madlib collaborationMadvillainy. And with good reason too: critically acclaimed, cryptic, funky, experimental and in my top three rap albums of all time.

    I can’t say I’m a huge hip-hop fan - I still don’t like the majority of it that I hear. But I’ve long been of the opinion that what makes the difference between good rap and bad rap is not the rapping at all but the quality of the production. The very best rappers are extremely skillful, but I don’t think the majority - even the majority with record deals - do anything particularly special. But a quality producer, laying down some deep, hollow beats and scarred soul samples can create an atmosphere that’s at once funky and terrifying and so good that almost anyone rapping would sound good laid over the top. Hearing all your picks, and listening to you talk about some of your favourite producers: Madlib, RZA, Blockhead and others has only re-enforced my belief.

  • Bolt Thrower #3: Wiz-War review, American Psycho, Dead Space, Triple Town, Synth Pop & Gothic Rock

    bolt-throwerComing at you like a south-bound freight train, or more probably like a spear fired at considerable velocity from an ancient siege engine, it’s Bolt Thrower #3.


  • Bolt Thrower #4: Commands & Colors: Ancients, The Resurrectionist, Conan, Sucker Punch, Super 8, Avadon

    ccaYou know the drill by now. Some feeble pun or other on the multiple meaning of the phrase “Bolt Thrower”. I really can’t be bothered today, so let’s get down to it.

    Games

    There are several games that I’ve reviewed twice, but I’ve made history this week by givingCommands & Colors: Ancients a third going over. The reason for revisiting it is partly because I thought the upcoming Playdek version for iOS made the game of above-average interest for the NoHighScores crowd and partly because I’ve never satisfactorily managed to articulate my feelings on the small fly in the otherwise delightful ointment that this game presents. Which is basically that the system engine is just better suited to simpler games, but you kind of need to detail it more in a review and that’s proved hard. Not sure if I’ve done any better this time. Anyway, it offers a delightfully smooth path into being a conflict simulation while remaining a demanding, thrilling ride. It’s very good, just stopped from greatness by a few too many rules and a bit too much seriousness bolted on to a fairly light framework.

    Books

    I have been reading a book called The Resurrectionist, which is the tale of a surgeon's apprentice in Victorian London, and his fall from polite society into vice and, eventually, shocking crime. It’s a strange and curious book which seems to have attracted a lot of opprobrium from other reviewers who have slated it for weak characters, a dull plot and for advertising itself as a gothic horror when it’s nothing of the sort. I do not agree. Most characters are, I agree, one-dimensional, but the protagonist is most certainly not. Indeed I would argue that the thin manner in which they’ve been drawn is symptomatic of his disinterest in them, of his distance from the rest of humanity. You may gather from this that the main character is largely unsympathetic, which he is, and personally I think that’s what is putting people off the book. It may not be a classic gothic horror, but the setting is certainly gothic and the subject matter is fairly horrible. The plot is very slow burning, certainly, but it is not dull by any stretch, and its leisurely unfolding leaves the author plenty of room to deploy his most potent weapon: an atmosphere so claustrophobic, strangling and dense that you could practically slice it into wedges and serve it at a dinner party. I found it a startlingly well-crafted exercise in word-craft, in setting, and most of all in illustrating how few steps there can be between polite society and barbarism.

    TV & Film

    Since last time I’ve been making a dedicated effort to try and catch up with some of the higher-profile films I missed at the cinema over the last year or two. First up was Super 8, which I enjoyed thoroughly while watching and then almost instantly forgot. Only a couple of weeks after watching it I can quite literally no longer recall what was good about it. I remember thinking the child cast did extremely well and being impressed by the loving manner in which the ‘70s setting was re-created and also wondering why Spielberg didn’t direct it himself since his fingerprints were all over it. But beyond that, no, in recollection it seemed a pretty pointless, schmaltzy film that idly recycled ideas and concepts we’ve seen a hundred times before elsewhere.

    Then it was some action films, both of which had bombed critically but which I was interested enough to watch anyway. I went into my viewing of the 2011 remake ofConan the Barbarian with the lowest possible expectations and came away moderately impressed. It’s nothing special but it does what it says on the tin: action scenes are frequent, well choreographed and drenched in plenty of gore and the cast generally take the whole thing with the correct tongue-in-cheek attitude. Except, sadly, for the lead who threatens to ruin the whole thing with a glowering attempt at being serious. So, fun while it lasted but not something I’d watch again, in stark contrast to the original which actually seems to improve with repeat viewings. Sadly the same cannot be said for the next film which wasSucker Punch.I am left wondering how a film that has so many fantastic ingredients could be so utterly, irredeemably awful. Not only is it soul-suckingly boring - a quite inexcusable crime for a film so packed with action and visual effects - but the mildly erotic elements just come across as being creepy and exploitative. It joined the select few films that I’ve been unable to watch all the way through: after about 70 minutes I forwarded on to see if the ending would improve it at all. It didn’t. Avoid.

    Video games

    I have been tired and ill of late, and going to bed early to read rather than sitting up to play computer games. One thing I have spent some time with is the iOS version of Spiderweb Software’s RPG Avadon: The Black Fortress. It’s very, very old school: gameplay is reminiscent of pre-Baldur’s Gate RPG’s. You wander round big areas on an isomorphic map, getting lost, fulfilling quests, killing monsters and collecting items. For the most part this no longer grabs me as being particularly entertaining and the interface is not brilliant either which doesn’t help. But it’s just about held my interest with one redeeming factor, which is a well-judged and pervasive sense of moral confusion. Gone are usual black-and-white, good versus bad plots typical of fantasy settings. Instead there’s a real sense that the cause for which you are working is unpleasantly oppressive, if necessarily so, and that your enemies frequently have understandable and occasionally noble motivations. There are elements of this in even the smallest side quests in the game, and it changes what would otherwise be a fairly forgettable and dated title into something engaging and playable.

    Also,I have an Xbox 360 now. So this section may expand in future.

    Music

    It has been a time of discovering new music for me. Unfortunately most of it has been music that lots and lots of other people have already discovered and so is likely to be of minimal interest to you all. Kanye West, for example. I mean obviously I’d heard his stuff before and dismissed most of it as light pop hip-hop, but then I heard My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with its big, complex, bombastic sound so unlike the usual stripped down soul samples of other hip-hop and was reasonably impressed: theskit at the end of Blame Game was hilarious. I also heard Florence + The Machine for the first time - genuinely the first ever time - and thought her latest album, Ceremonials was quite fantastic, managing the impossible feat of being simultaneously very modern and very retro. For my money, however, the rest of the albums to completely overshadowed by the enormous, exhilaratingRemain Nameless with its unbelievably lascivious  bass line and divisive lyrical interpretations: is it about casual sex, or God? Within 48 hours I’d gone from never having heard it before to it being one of my top 3 most played tracks of all time on Last fm as I just sat and listened to it on endless repeat.

    I did uncover one relatively obscure band as well, though, Welsh folk-pop duo Paper Aeroplanes. Their material ranges from bouncy up-tempo love songs to more sombre and reflective material. The former is largely forgettable, but they’re at their best at the moodier end of the spectrum: I’ve been particularly haunted bySave It andSame Mistakes, both from their recent EP We Are Ghosts. But the stand out thing about Paper Aeroplanes is not the songs, nor the fingerpicking guitar, but the singer Sarah Howells and her extraordinary ability to rapidly switch around her impressive vocal range to wring every possible ounce of emotion out of her lyrics. I discovered that she’s also worked with a number of trance DJs and producers and picked up some of that material too, figuring that sort of voice would work extremely well in that environment and haven’t been at all disappointed. I used to listen to a lot of trance, back in the days when a good night out consisted of popping a few pills and hitting the dance floor for five hours straight, and cheesy as it might be, it was great to hear some again. I got a particular rush out ofSkies on Fire which, to bring us full circle, turned out to be a remix of a Paper Aeroplanes track. I think I prefer the trance version.

  • Bolt Thrower #4: Commands & Colors: Napoleonics, Making Money, Game of Thrones, Jim Moray

    They’re coming at you thick and fast, a veritable storm of fire. It’s Bolt Thrower time yet again, although there shouldn’t be too many back-to-back versions. I plan to use the opportunity to catch up on some longer-running trash culture themes that I might miss in my fortnightly snapshots.

  • Bolt Thrower #4: Nexus Ops review, Walking Dead, Trollhunter, Cocteau Twins & PJ Harvey

    Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s a projectile from an ancient siege engine!

    Games

    The feature this week is a review of the Fantasy Flight Games re-release of Nexus Ops. I’ve always been impressed by the manner in which Nexus Ops managed to cram the entire design history of dudes on a map games into a tiny, manageable and hugely entertaining package, losing nothing but the epic feel of its more unwieldy ancestors. And the FFG reboot gives you all that back of course, plus a wild bunch of very good variants to solve the occasional staleness of the original game. Yeah, so you don’t get the blacklight figures any more but really, how many people regularly used that feature? Yeah, it’s ugly but so was the original. It’s a quality reprint of an excellent game. Quit complaining.


  • Bolt Thrower #69: Commands & Colors Expansions, Englby, Battle Boys, Talking Heads

    Heard the one about the man who asked for a 69 in his ice cream? It's Bolt Thrower time.

  • Bolt Thrower: Conflict of Heroes, Stellaris, Total Warhammer, Silver Tower, Van Helsing

    So, here we are again for another volley. This time it's to talk about something I've wanted to do for a long time which is to review Conflict of Heroes on Shut Up & Sit Down. For all its shortcomings as a simulation, CoH is one of my all-time favourite wargames. I love its speed and its combination of mechanical and tactical conundrums. I also love the fact that it has tanks.

    After submitting my last two SU&SD pieces I ended up getting excited about something I'd never talk about in public. No, not that: photography. I've always had zero interest in gaming photography, beyond the obvious taking aesthetic pleasure in seeing a nice picture. Truth be told my eye for visual detail is poor, so my own photography tends to be poor. I never took much care in setting up shots for any of my pieces.

    Turns out, however, that it's astonishing what you can do with a little bit of prep, a bit of digging into your camera settings, and some image manipulation software. I still know almost nothing about photography, so whether this newfound passion will burn out as quickly as it flared up remains to be seen. But I might share some results sometime.

    On the PC recently I've mostly been putting in the review hours for Stellarisand Total War: Warhammer. The former is good, the latter is great, but the most interesting thing about playing the two back to back is how it made me consider the vexed question of complexity in strategy video games.

    Now that computers and programmers and game designers have had years to hone their skills, it's common for strategy games to be astonishingly complex under the hood. Players seem to like to have lots of levers to pull to get things done. But in an era where no-one prints manuals anymore, let alone reads them, it leaves an open question as to how you teach people the game.

    Stellaris is fortunate in being able to take a piecemeal approach. You start off in one system and expand gradually, so the game has the luxury of being able to teach you concepts as you come across them. Mostly, this works, but it tends to leave you blind to the bigger picture. I restarted several times because I'd failed to appreciate how a new piece of information dovetailed with something I'd learned earlier.

    Total Warhammer, by contrast, drops you in at the deep end. Your tutorial battle is a mass siege where you'll command units you won't be able to recruit until later in the campaign. Stuff gets flashed up in on-screen textboxes which is a terrible idea in a real-time game. Mostly, it wants you to stop and watch videos which I absolutely wasn't going to do. So it took me a long time, and a game on the easy difficulty setting, before I started to understand it.

    Both, I think, are bumping up against the limit of what a player will accept in terms of learning systems. And although I'm in a small minority in disliking video tutorials, I still think it's a bad way to learn things. Consider: how much do you retain from watching a documentary compared to reading a chapter in a fact book? Either way it feels like the genre is creaking under the strain. It could be a ripe time for a resurgence of simpler XCOM style games and, ahem, board game adaptations.

    Speaking of which, the creator of the original XCOM has a new strategy game in the pipe. It's called Phoenix Point, and it looks like equal parts turn based tactics, global strategy, Lovecraft and Stephen King's The Mist. It also looks awesome. 

    And speaking of Warhammer, I'm toying with the idea of investing in Silver Tower. I'm attracted by the fantastic looking miniatures and the choose your own adventure aspects. I'm turned off by the assembly time and the fact I've already got a ton of dungeon crawl games. Been playing Road to Legend recently and that's been really fun, plus I'm a big fan of the D&D Adventure System games. I've got Heroquest gathering dust too, so do I really need another? The eternal question.

    Finally, I got down and dirty with some old-fashioned monsters this week when I saw Van Helsing for the second time. I don't care if it was a critical bomb, I think it's a fantastic film, full of action, fun and great set pieces. You can really feel the love for the old Universal monster movies seeping through the screen. And while the critics hated it, it made decent money at the box office.  Which makes the lack of a sequel and the delay to an apparent reboot along with The Mummy franchise, as mysterious as darkest Transylvania.

    Can't say the same for the Van Helsing PC action RPG. A feeble Diablo clone with none of the latter franchise's variety or polish. Avoid.