Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Saw Watchmen tonight. I've read two reviews of the movie, one bad (Washington Post) and one average (IGN.com). While I agree with a lot of what the IGN review said, I loved this movie. Also, while the ending is pretty implausible, I thought it was better than the one in the book.

Something I think is kinda funny though, is the way the movie is being marketed as a superhero action movie, which I guess it sort of is. But, I saw this guy who brought two kids, one looked around 10 the other maybe 6. The guy gave me the impression that he hadn't read the book and was unaware of the subject matter that was going to be portrayed in the film. This movie aint Spiderman. Hell, it isn't Batman either.

Nobunaga's Ambition

I loved this game on the Super NES. So, the other night I'm in EB Games with my son, and I see that there's a new Nobunaga game on the Playstation 2. If it wasn't for the fact that I am still playing through Fallout 3, not to mention that I got the new Prince of Persia and Gears of War 2 for Christmas and I haven't even opened them up yet, and not to mention that I got Street Fighter 4 because Street Fighter is the only fighting game I really liked, I would have bought Nobunaga's Ambition: Iron Triangle right then then and there.

But, I do have all of those games to play. Not to mention Cold Wars is coming up in a couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll get in April.

More Kids Games

On Valentine's Day my wife and I went out to dinner and a movie, and her friend brought her son over the house and watched our kids. I thought it was pretty cool when we got back that my son Gabriel (on the right) was teaching her son how to play Heroscape. They totally did this all by themselves. They played the simple version of the game and Gabriel's villains eventually lost to Brinley's heroes. I was quite proud of him for doing this on his own.

Another picture.

Changes

Changed some stuff on the left over there, since I haven't been doing any painting I added lists of what I have been doing.

As for games, Cosmic Encounter seems to be a big hit. Pretty chaotic and lots of fun.

Unhappy King Charles

We finished our game with the Royalists (me) winning an auto victory. The Royalists auto win by capturing London and controlling it and at least 3 territories for two turns. Parliament can auto win by capturing the king. Marshall tried to do this and I was worried since I left him pretty exposed, but then I remembered the evasion rule and was able to slip away. Marshall complained in our podcast (http://messygameroom.libsyn.com/) about the king slipping away, but it's in the rules and from what I've read a big part of warfare in the ECW (and other conflicts too).

This pleased me both because I won and because I believe in the divine right of kings.

I really liked the game and I think I will like it even more playing it again since we were getting some of the rules wrong.

More Updates

Since I haven't been updating this blog very much, I'm going to start thinking about it differently. Right now I'm treating each entry as if it were an essay, wherein I try to have some sort of topic and I put some amount of labor into the crafting of the sentences.

Now I'm going to treat it more like a diary.

With that in mind...

My buddy Marshall and I started playing Unhappy King Charles tonight. This was the first game I ever pre-ordered on a manufacturer's web site. The English Civil War (the subject of the game) is one of my favorite historical periods, so I told him that I liked this game before I even played it. Having played two turns so far I like it for the game it is as well. The game has this feeling where there is no "front" that the fighting occurs at, rather there's armies moving around England either looking to cause trouble for the other side or respond to threats. More on this game after we finish playing tomorrow.

The game after the Campaign Phase of the second turn.

Christmas Games

Here's a picture of me teaching Gabriel how to play chess. He liked it ok until I started capturing his pieces with my knight. He yelled at me to stop using the horse.





We played Rhino Rampage before that, and he actually won that game legitimately.