|
First off, I know what you are thinking. Ugh, when is Matt going to get back to doing more Random Crap articles? Well that might be slow in coming because last month I mistimed a stride going down the stairs in the house and broke my tailbone. For those of you who are not up on medical speak I will translate; I broke my ass. It took me about ten days to get to see my doctor who said that I had broken it and that there is not a lot that can be done for a broken tailbone. It'll take about four to eight weeks to fully heal according to my Doctor so I'm just taking medication to stave off the pain I'm feeling until things heal.
While I was sitting on my painful behind in those ten days, I decided to hit some of my sometimes visited gaming store web sites just too see what is new. I just about fell out of my chair again when I looked at what the game store was taking pre-orders for; a Robotech miniatures game. When I was a much younger Matt, I really liked the Robotech cartoon that was imported into the United States. Just the first third of the shows though as that was the Macross Saga and had all the cool transforming aircraft and a real enemy that was willing to fight face to face. Back around this time Palladium Games brought out the Robotech RPG and with some birthday money I had I purchased a copy of it from a local game store. It was a Palladium RPG though and at first I liked it, but then as I got older I found it somewhat lacking. My older brother was the GM for the game we used to play. It was not an RPG; we treated it more like a combat game without miniatures. I really wanted something that was more a combat oriented game and less of the Role-Playing aspect. After several failures of trying to write up my own rules for something like that I just abandoned the idea; fast forward to last month when I found out about the new miniatures combat game. I so wanted to order the game right then and there, but I did not enough funds in my bank account. You see on the web site I wanted to order from, you have to pay the whole pre-order price up front to hold one. I, already having spent a lot on my credit card this past month could not put it on there. There is also the whole thing that I tend to go with knee jerk reactions without thinking things through. That is why I let it sit for a while before ordering it. As of this writing and after crunching the numbers, there is no way I'm going to get involved in the game. Even with some money taken off the price by preordering the price per miniature is too much for me. I know that they are bigger than the average plastic miniature for another game, but there is also the little things that you have to get; things like plastic glue, primer, paint, paint brushes and sealer to get your miniatures ready to play. As much as I would love to have and play the game, it just costs too much to justify buying it. Also with having a one year old nephew running around the house fragile plastic mini's, a container of plastic glue and assorted paints are not going to be the best thing to have lying around while he is on the move.
The whole reason for me to go to the game store page was because I was looking for information about another miniatures game that came out last month. WizKids Games (the makers of HeroClix and other collectable miniatures games) was putting out a Star Trek Miniatures game based on the mechanics from the Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game by Fantasy Flight Games. Only instead of making it starfighter combat, it is more a capital scale combat game. The games "starter" pack comes with everything you need to play right out of the Box. You might like playing the game right off the bat, but grow bored of playing on the same map over and over. According to the description on the Amazon page of the game you can get " . . . sprawling Star Trek space maps made available via an in-store Organized Play program." This is all well and good if you live in a major city, but if you live in the middle of nowhere Texas where the nearest game store is a 100 mile round trip then you have to go to the secondary market to get the maps. This is WizKids M.O. they give you all the stuff that you can start to play the games with, but then they dangle the, "look at this cool and powerful stuff you can get if you come and play in a multi-month Organized Play program." I fell for this with HeroClix and their Infinity Gauntlet OP program, and said never again. Heck the whole giving out of the cool stuff began way before the game came out when at Gen Con they were giving away Kahn commander tokens for you to play the game with if you played a demo game at the show. I decided to swear off the Wizkids stuff right there and just go with a company that I know is not going to jack me around with neat stuff, Fantasy Flight Games.
I know this was short, but I just had to get this off my chest. My ass hurts and I still have to finish one other article in addition to this one. Take care everyone and I hope to see you next month feeling a bit better.
|