The harshness of the first chapter has let them a bit skiddish, or maybe they just don’t trust me, in either case they went slow and steady, searching for traps and ambush.  I let them creep up and as the Thri-kreen turned into the next big cavern gave them a quick layout and description of the area.  Then in true devious DM fashion I ambushed them jsut as they’d gotten comfortable with the little gauntlets that acted as this encounters first monsters locked down the Thri-Kreen.

Now I had some problems with this encounter when I read it.  It had one standard spider and then a ton of minions.  Nine of them to be exact, which though it sounds like alot of enemies is nothing if the group gets some good burst or blasts attacks.  Which is exactly what happened.  Once the battle started the three skeleton minions at the maps far end were obliterated all at once by the Psion before they even got an attack.  The gauntlets lasted till the second round but then fell themselves. Less than five minutes into the encounter and I was down to one monster.  Thankfully I thought ahead and brought in two extra zombies to give the fight a little extra oomph.

To make it more interesting I actually made the zombies puppets of the spider and as the fight wore on they realized that and decided to ignore them and focus on the spider.  As it dropped so did the zombies and the party one the day without a single death, although the Thri-kreen did end up bloodied again.

So far it feels like the writer is trying to compensate for the difficulty of the first chapter by making the second a breeze.  I’m having to toughen things up to keep it interesting.  Still trying to decide how I’m going to tweak next week as I already know it’s not going to be enough of a challenge on its own.  It is a very different kind of encounter from what they’ve faced so far though so should be interesting.  Hopefully I’ll get its report up on Friday.

Now I’m probably one of those rare people who actually remembers playing the very first Transformers video game way back on the Commadore 64 in the eighties.  It was a fairly primitive little side-scroller that gave me my first chance to play as Optimus and the rest.  With High Moon Studios recent release “War for Cybertron” things have come a long way.

The vast majority of Transformers media to this point, be it games, movies, or the various cartoons, have all focused on the Autobot’s war against the Decepticons here on Earth.  High Moon however decided instead to delve into the much hinted at but little touched history prior to Cybertron’s abandonment.  The entire game takes place in the early days of the war on Cybertron as Megatron attempts to conqueror the planet with his newly formed Decepticon army and crush the valiant, but outgunned Autobots.   The story is told through in engine cutscenes between the action with excellent voice acting and decent writing, certainly no worse than anything else the franchise has put out, and certainly better then some.

The game is a third person run and gun shooter, and really at first glance other than your character being a giant robotic warrior it doesn’t really seem all that innovative or amazing.  That is until the first time you transform.  Every character has the ability to change at anytime from robot to a unique vehicle form.  There is nothing like running towards an enemy blasting away, leaping into the air, transforming into a truck, and landing on top of them.  There are various weapons to choose from in bot mode, and each vehicle form has its own special attacks.  You also fight through the game in a squad of three, choosing which character you want to play at the start of each chapter.  Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses making them all a unique experience to play and helping a little with replayability.  The overall gameplay isn’t particularly deep, but note that what the game may lack in depth it more than makes up for in difficulty.  You will die alot, thankfully the game has a fairly forgiving checkpoint system so death won’t set you back too far.

On top of all that is an incredibly fun multiplayer mode in which you can make your own character and blast away your fellow transformers in various modes and maps.  It’s the first multiplayer I’ve ever really enjoyed on a console.

The game looks great, all the characters are well modeled in both modes, and though these are cybertronian modes vs the classic forms they are known for, they are all readily recognizable by fans.  The environments are well detailed, and each chapter looks different, however all the technological detailing does clutter things up at times and makes it hard to make out turrets and enemy snipers at times.  Which makes the game that much harder.  All the animations are smooth and watching my character flip between bot and vehicle mode never gets old.

Overall Transformers War for Cybertron is a good game.  For fans of the franchise it might even be a great game.  The campaign though fun is also very short, and if that’s all your interested in I’d say rental.  However the multiplayer is a blast and coupled with the campaign makes it a definite buy for me.

Casting for the movie raised my optimism.  Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex turned out to be an inspired choice.  He plays Hex straight as a hard man, one betrayed and scarred both physically and emotionally by the world.  But he keeps enough humanity in him so that the character doesn’t become too much of a cliché.  Then you have John Malkovich as his nemesis the insane Quentin Turnbull.  Malkovich is always a delight to watch, especially as a villain.  The rest of the cast list is decent but none of them really get enough screen time to stretch their acting muscles.  Of all the supporting cast only Megan Fox has any significant screen time and her character is such a cliché and really has so few lines that its hard to judge her acting.  Really any pretty face could have played the part.

At the same time however I started looking at the director and started to get worried.  Turns out this guy’s only previous directorial work was as co-director on “Horton Hears a Who!”.  Prior to that he was an animator at Pixar.  Frankly not a high recommendation for making a big budget action film there.  Then of course you have the writers who’s previous claim to fame are the films “Crank” and its sequel.  That at least gives them a pedigree of action, but neither of those movies is known for its strong story.  Then to add to the quagmire the director was booted after turning in his cut and Francis Lawrence of “I Am Legend” was brought in to reshoot many scenes and re-cut the film.  Even without all this knowledge the fact that the movie had a troubled production history becomes painfully obvious the moment you watch it.  Its like two different movies were stitched together by a blind man.

The movie opens on the darkest moment in Jonah Hex’s life.  His former commander General Quentin Turnbull, having tracked him down after the Civil War, murders his family and brands him as punishment for killing his own son Jeb.  Though it doesn’t follow the comics storyline it’s a good start.  However the movie then shifts to an animated piece as the opening credits roll and we get a convoluted bit of backstory that honestly would have made a much better plot for the film then what we got.  From there the film is a convoluted mix of the supernatural, steampunk style technology, and a spaghetti western.  The film jumps from scene to scene with no real transitions, the directors favoring apparently not caring if the audience has a clue what’s going on.

What should have been a dark gritty R-rated western with a very light supernatural over tone became a bad B-movie with a big budget and only a passing connection to its source material.  Its only redeeming features are the Brolin and Malkovich as the leads.  But even they can’t save a film with such an incoherent story.  The past few years Hollywood has proven that with a good story and good direction a comic book movie can be not only good but incredible.  Jonah Hex had neither, and as a result the movie is not just a bad comic book movie, but just plain bad.  Though peppered with moments of enjoyment the total package is barely worth a rental.  Wait and catch this one on cable people.

This week the group once again made it through the skill test with relative ease.  However Shikirr  failed a perception check and fell for a rather unconvincing mirage which led to a tumble into a patch of thorns and a minus one to all his defenses for the remainder of the encounter.  After hauling him out the party traveled onward and found themselves in a small clearing sheltered from the storm by large boulders, and in the center of this rock enclosed oasis stood a single large cactus heavy with fruit.

A few checks by my suspicious and rather cautious players led to them deciding the fruit was safe and they quickly harvested it.  And then of course the trap was sprung by the goblins hiding on the rock tops.  It’s nice to see they have gotten into the habit of seeing everything as a danger in this new world, they’ve gotten into the spirit of Dark Sun.

Now an interesting aside, in the old Dark Sun goblins were an extinct race.  A legend that no longer existed.  Having them show up here was a surprise and so I explained that the party wasn’t sure what they were but that they’d heard legends of such creatures.  I’m interested in if the official books out in August will explain why these creatures are back on Athas.

But back to the encounter.  The party seeing that these small little creatures looked a little desperate attempted to intimidate them at first, with little luck, and so battle was joined.  The group of goblins had the high ground and consisted of some archers, a pair of melee minions, and two casters along with a drake.  The rocks themselves were covered in a bramble of thorny vines that restricted movement and could inflict damage should a party member stop in it.  All in all a nasty little place to fight.

As for how it went.  A distinct lack of ranged attacks led to an initial run up the rocks by the elf, which turned nasty.  He managed to take out the two minions, who also happened to explode on death, and then fell off the rocks and nearly died, the Avenger used both healing spells getting him back on his feet.  Yuka got bored and so used Shikirr as a ranged attack, tossing him up on the rocks to deal with an archer while Barcan and Jarvix spent their time hurling spells.  In the end other then the near loss of the ranger the group prevailed with the final bloodied caster finally surrendering.

Things like Yuka throwing his teammate up the rocks are why I love D&D.  The social aspect and the creative ways people deal with things is always a blast.  Now hopefully we’ll actually have all six players show up next week since it should be an interesting encounter both because of the foes and because they will finally starting getting some serious story progression.

The game is obviously heavily inspired by the RTS classic Starcraft.  You have three distinct groups at war on an alien world; the human Sapians, the insect like Khraleans, and the cybernetic Titans.  Each race has seven units covering all the basic areas or infantry, armor, artillery, and air support and many of the units have special context specific abilities such as the Khralean infantry who have a tunnel ability or the Titan basic unit who can teleport.  Learning these abilities and the bonus and weaknesses they place upon a unit makes for an added layer of depth.

The game is a sprite based affair played on hex grid maps.  All the units look very distinct with common themes across the races to make it easy to distinguish units at a glance.  They all have simple animations to give the battles a little more sense of life.  Such animations also play on specific terrain grids, specifically the bases grids.  The rest of the terrain grids all use fairly basic artistic depictions of different terrain types from deserts, to forest land, to water.  The style of the game is very similar to games like the Advanced War series that has appeared on Nintendo’s Gameboy and DS systems.  Though not pushing the graphically boundaries of the genre or the processing power of the iPhone the game still looks great and is very polished.

Like the graphical style the game also shares many elements of its actual control system and game play with the Advanced Wars series.  Each turn the player can move any of their units, with different terrain types effect the speed a unit can move over them as well as offering different levels of cover and defense.   The game follows the paper-rock-scissors philosophy of combat which helps keep things balanced.  It’s a much slower paced style of play then an RTS, more like a complicated chess match.  Along with the single player campaign the game also includes single player quick play, online multiplayer, and a pass the phone multiplayer mode which gives the game lots of playing options.

If you’re a fan of turn based strategy games and own an iPhone I definitely recommend the game.  It’s a blast to play, with fairly high production value and a very reasonable price at only ninety-nine cents.  So far it’s by far the best turn based game I’ve found for the system and it’s given me hours of fun so far.