Return from Wesnoth

I finally lost my patience with Battle for Wesnoth, which I’ve been playing lately. While I’ve usually been able to endure playing a scenario per day, the latest scenario in the campaign, the Trial of the Horse Clan (or some such; playing the Finnish translation here) almost made me break my mouse in frustration. I doubt that I’m going to return to the game again.

Games and Toys and Defeat Horizons

I’ve continued playing Wesnoth and trying to figure out what it is that annoys me in the game. I think I’ve got at least a part of the answer here: the issue is that what we call “games” actually consists of two different types of interactive objects, and mistaking them for each other is a recipe for disaster. Just an idle thought, let’s see if it goes anywhere.

Playing Battle for Wesnoth

I’ve been playing Battle for Wesnoth lately. It’s a light hex-based fantasy war game that mixes influences from western war games and Japanese skirmish war games. Wesnoth is free software, and really quite impressive for that – it has nice graphics and sounds, plenty of cheesy fantasy dialogue and everything else you’d expect of a game in this genre.

For all its good sides, though, I’m quite dissatisfied by this game overall. The project workflow obviously has worked well, and the production quality is good, but the game’s fundamental design tenets seem faulty to me. Let’s see if I can figure out why.

Some noteworthy new roleplaying games

I just finished adding new games to our Finnish webstore, here. This is something of an annual event for me, as we get new games after Gencon, after which I read the games and write some short descriptions for the site. I usually update the code base of the site at the same time, too, which might take a while when I have other things to worry about as well. Regardless, now I’m done; it seems that all told we have 26 new games in the webstore this year. (In total we have 150 titles in the database, roughly.) I’m thinking that now that I’ve read everything I’ve bought I might make note of some of the more interesting titles here.

Finnish Roleplayer Magazine retrospective

Today the editor of the Finnish Roleplayer Magazine (Roolipelaaja-lehti) Juhana Pettersson declared that the magazine will end publication, effective immediately. The cited reason was chronic unprofitability – despite the best imaginable attempts, a Finnish-language roleplaying magazine of high production values could not be sustained without incurring constant losses in the operation. Apparently the guys at Riimuahjo (the company behind the mag) consider the hobbyist base in Finland sufficient for a magazine of the kind they made, but for some reason or other not enough people were dedicated enough to subscribe to the magazine.

I think that a couple of words are certainly in order here.

A Zombie Cinema variant of sorts

I’ve considered writing some sort of sequel for Zombie Cinema for a couple of years now, mostly because I’m personally a bit bored of playing Zombie Cinema and want a bit of variety; it’s a tricky business, considering the number of constraints that I take on in any such design. I’m pretty happy with my latest effort mechanically, it’s just that the game lacks in really functional genre. Here’s how it works:

Back From Gencon

I stepped off the plane yesterday. Got a flu of some sort on the return trip, will probably wait for it to clear up before continuing towards the north. Let’s have some notes and impressions on the trip, meanwhile.

Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

The Best Product to Rule them All

As I wrote in my last post, there were a multitude of rpg products published at Ropecon. Only one provoked me to play immediately, however. I haven’t more than skimmed most of these products, but I can already tell you which makes the greatest impression to me (aside from my own book, presumably).

Ropecon and new Finnish rpg products

Ropecon is the large annual rpg convention here in Finland, with some 3000-4000 visitors each year. I missed it last year due to Gencon scheduling, but this time around I again managed to participate.

Ropecon is the traditional time for Finnish rpg publication, and people usually hold publication lectures for their new products there. Around the beginning of the decade we used to get one new product per year from one or other rpg enthusiast, ranging from garage-creations to mainstream bookstore publications. This year we have something like 6-10 different products published here in Finland, depending on whether I count stuff published outside Ropecon as well; perhaps it’s the indie ethos or some such, but we’re clearly getting more rpg products than we used to.