Petroglyph's GRAXIA games plus some video games In Review Hot

The penalty for that fame is that you had to play Shaun White Skateboarding.

Actually, SHAUN WHITE is pretty good...with some polish and a bigger budget, it could be awesome. It's more like JET SET RADIO than any of the Tony Hawk or SKATE games. It's kind of a skateboarding platformer, mixing in a little KIRBY'S CANVAS CURSE and an Orwellian storyline that's goofy but kind of endearing. It's not so much an action sports title, suprisingly. I gave it a B-, I think it's actualy worth a look. I think the developers had kind of a good idea, but it doesn't really live up to what it could have been.

But no...the penalty for being a hotshot video games reviewer is having to play stuff like BLOOD DRIVE...watch for that scorching review sometime soon.

Great review, Mike! I think I'll pick up GoG on Steam.

YES, Steam is carrying GoG now too, definitely recommend it for ten bucks. My laptop kind of chugs playing it, so beware if you're on an older, crappier machine.

I like Guardians for the PC, but my 3D processor is crap, and this sucker is painfully slow. I want to play it more, but it takes so freaking long that I just end up going back to my 360 and playing Midnight Club.

Heroes is a blast, but you nailed it on the math. It's not hard math, but there sure is a lot of it.

Yeah, I really wish they had done this as an XBLA title. It would have been pretty unique in the XBLA catalog, and I'd probably play the living shit out of it.

As for HEROES, it's just too calculatory. That's why the six player game is a disaster. A "30 minute deckbuilding game" isn't good for two hours of number-crunching.

So much of Orwell's work is goofy and endearing.

S.

One thing that would have helped Heroes would be a simple display that players could update their attack/defense stats with. Even with only two players, sometimes you forget what yours are and then have to go back and count. I don't even want to think what multiplayer could entail.

I also agree that the setting is pretty meh.

A non-generic setting would have gone a really long ways. As it is, it's pretty much a bunch of D&D races in a pseudo-European backdrop. Yeah, never saw that before.

Alright, brace yourself. Rant on.

The setting is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I've fucking had it up to my eyeballs with generic fantasy shit. I'm done with it. It actually makes me _less_ interested in a game if it's your standard z-grade tripe like this Graxia business. There is nothing unique, compelling, or interesting about it, and as a game setting it completely sucks. The same goes for Terrinoth.

Anyone over about, say 18, shouldn't be satisfied with the boring-ass, generic fantasy garbage that continually drags games down any more. We should be asking for better settings. Fantasy doesn't have to be so fucking stupid and repetitive. I'm sick to death of this regurgitated fantasy shit that some thirty five year old game designer is somehow using to try to bring to life some bullshit D&D campaign he was in twenty years ago or where somebody's understanding of fantasy extends to WARCRAFT and Tolkein and goes no further.

I've talked about this before, but at this point, I'm done. I'm just about as interested in GENERIC FANTASY BOARD GAME as I am in a game where an old Dutch guy trades oregano for corn. It's simply not enough, and it's disappointing that such a cretive medium rife with possiblities gets stuck in the same genre crap over and over and over again.

_Fantasy can be amazing_. I'm not against fantasy gaming (obviously), but the same things over and over again, I'm tapping out. Enough is enough.

Even RAVENLOFT and the D&D setting isn't as generic and uninspired as something like Graxia or Terrinoth- not only because it's one of the elemental sources of what passes for modern day fantasy, but also because it has a unique and very particular character.

One of the reasons it took me so long to review these games is because I got them, looked at the art and read about the setting, and I was completely uninterested in it. Once I did get past that I found the gameplay was good and there are reasons to check these out for sure, but ultimately I doubt they'll be around my collection for long because they're generic fantasy and I've got a ton of other games with similar settings that are better- or more inventive.

I do agree with what has been said in the past here, that stock fantasy make games more approachable and identifiable. It is almost a kind of meme that the Elves are going to be green, have ranged weapons, be weak, and some kind of nature bullshit. Humans are blue, average across the board, and live in castles. Undead, orcs, on down the line.

How about a game where the races are fucking Beholders, Mind Flayers, Gelatinous Cubes, and Displacer Beasts? Or high-tech, superintelligent orcs? Or Undead that are actually good and have a higher purpose than making skeletons?

Games could do stuff like this, have really unique and compelling fantasy settings, but designers and publishers are both too fucking cowardly and too lazy to put something out that dares to defy fantasy expectations. But by doing so, they could really innovate and create something fresh and new- and that could lead to more sales than a rank-and-file adventurers versus a dragon game.

Whatever, just don't expect to see many games with dull-ass fantasy settings reviewed over the next year or so.

Yay Friday rant! I suspect it is as much laziness as anything else. Once you start bucking the trend of what is "expected" it will create more cognitive burden on the players to remember something that undead heal not drain life. Consequenlty, more explanation has to go into the setting To a publisher, I think that this increases risk a little because if the game fails, more resources were dumped into it.

Probably much easier to create new fantasy elements rather than change familiar fantasy components.

I don't want to hear about cognitive burden. Isn't hobby gaming supposed to be this thoughtful, intelligent hobby where people too smart to play video games exercise their minds? Worrying about cognitive burden is something for "sheeples" who are too stupid to play anything other than what is "spoon fed" to them by Hasbro, isn't it?

I'm sorry but if you can read 15 pages of rules about how to turn a grey cube into a blue one then you can sort it out if a game dares to go against fantasy convention.

But I do agree- create new fantasy elements for fuck's sake. It doesn't have to be so extensive, just enough for us to hang our imagination onto. There doesn't _have_ to be pages and pages of bullshit fluff text written by a ne'er-do-well genre writer who just can't seem to get their "awesome" story they shit out during high school classes published so they're working for a games publisher writing card text.

Mind Flayers. Heh. I remember how badass they were back when I played D&D in the early 80s. Or some Drow would be a cool race/setting.

Great rant. I agree almost 100%. You're cutting Ravenloft some slack where it deserves to be raked over the same coals, though. I find Terrinoth pretty uninspiring, but it easily beats out Ravenloft in the originality department.

The mind flayer/beholder idea and superintelligent orc idea are still dependent on D&D tropes, so I don't really see the originality there.

A generic fantasy setting for a boardgame serves a function similar to that served by genre fiction. Generally, people crave familiarity and comfort, and only want to be challenged within predefined parameters afforded by something like a whodunit mystery or a espionage thriller. I can't stand reading that stuff, because (with rare exception) the formula dictates the content, but that stuff sells. We're hardcore gamers, so we crave more in terms of content, but the commercial reasons for steering clear of new ideas are pretty clear. Most people don't want to juggle learning a new game system with learning a new setting, like SpaceGhost says.

I think for a lot of designers and publishers, "fantasy" is just another category like "Roman," "Medieval," or "Renaissance." But I'm sick to death of games with those themes as well.

But D&D is a brand, and it's a good brand. And really, how many other fantasy board games have you trying to stop a rampaging flesh golem? It may be a mixture of tropes, but at least it's _different_.

I pulled those D&D monster names as examples of how D&D had something other than the four core LORD OF THE RINGS races or variations thereof.

There isn't ANYTHING original about Terrinoth. Dragon Runes? Come the fuck on. I got over thinking things like that were cool story ideas when I was 15.

It's just really ironic that a fringe, marginal medium that makes a big to-do about creativity and intellect is so beholden to formula and complacency.

INSULA is an example of a recent fantasy game that had a really fresh concept. It's closer to something like BELOW THE ROOT than Tolkien. Spells and weapons are all flowers. THe world is very NAUSICAA-like, big bugs and overgrown forests. It doesn't look anything like this RUNEBOUND crap with the shitty post-BATTLE CHASERS style artwork.

I swear, this generation of fantasy illustrators must have gotten their first boner over Todd McFarlane and Joe Madureros sometime in 1995.

I do want to make it clear that it's one thing when a game like TALISMAN has a fairly generic fantasy theme. That game is almost 30 years old and it's one of the sources. It's another when a game comes out this year and has a boring, generic fantasy theme.

CLAUSTROPHOBIA is another example of good fantasy, it had a fairly original take with some unusual character types.

Terrinoth does have some non-standard elements:

-heroes are from all races (minotaurs, yeti's, etc.)
-orcs aren't evil
-magic being sourced from Dragon runes is at least more original than moon phases or a pantheon of different gods....i suppose it is unique too that anyone can use magic versus other settings where things are often more restricted.

These aren't necessarily compelling, but they are different enough to be unique. How are spells nad weapons being flowers really different from just glorifying a world full of D&D druids (and is this a kids game for like 6+ or something....I bet it is)?

man, the screen shot of whatever game that is looks likes a ton of fun. I think I'm really itching for a RPG cuz I played that FAERY RPG game on XBLArcade and loved it

It's not an RPG, Barney it's a straight-up strategy game. And a pretty good one, though lacking a bit in the scenario and campaign departments.

Michael, the thing that gives Terrinoth the edge over the Ravenloft world (as experienced through the boardgame, I never played the RPG setting) for me is that it has more personality, which comes through mostly in the art and feel of Runewars, though the game mechanics reinforce it in places (I loathe Runebound, and I've never played Descent). It has a darker edge to it, more in line with Frazetta's Conan or the Disciples PC games, if you know those. I don't know any of the Terrinoth back story at all (and don't really care to), but the elves feel darker than standard fanatasy stuff, and the chaos barbarian dudes are marginally interesting.

Don't get me wrong -- Terrinoth is pretty uninspired, but the Ravenloft boardgame has far less character for me than something like Runewars . I see what you mean about mixing up the tropes, but that's just a benefit of having decades of source material to draw from, not any particularly creative effort on the part of the design team. Point taken about mixing fantasy with horror elements, though the times I've played Ravenloft evoke those themes in name only.

Aren't Drow what Games Workshop took, dressed up in S&M gear and called them Druchii (then later shot into space under the name "Dark Eldar")?