Nathan Wind

I’d be all over Firewall if it had a single player campaign. It looks quite Rainbow 6ey.

Oh man, that spiderbot piloting game on VR Worlds is brutal on the sickness valve. It was a mistake choosing that one for a quick blast before bed. Doom VFR and Rush of Blood are £5-odd in the sale so I grabbed those too but I think it’ll be a little while until I give them a go. Bravo Team is cheap right now. I know it’s meant to be generic but I’ve got an aim controller so is there 8 quid’s worth of fun in it?

Even just looking down into the pit on the menu screen was incredible. I 'woooaahhhhh'd hard. I bought Batman today and that's just unbelievable.

I've been enjoying playing around with this! I'm glad Rez was my first ever VR experience, it's mind blowing. I've played a few other static bits and bobs (Tetris, VR Worlds) and got on fine but Skyrim gave me the travel sickness sweats within twenty minutes

God, will you quit your whining? The solution is obvious.

Good job you don't review Jaguar games. What?!! 2/10 for Bubsy? TOP OF THE LIST! Atari Age is a proper hive of scum and villainy, I'm surprised you made it out alive at all.

Is this a fucking joke?

I can't understand why Gates and Zarlor are so highly rated amongst Lynx owners, they're both dreadful, bland never ending snooze-a-rama's. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Raiden and Zaku Collision in the latter does definitely have it's moments, but it's not bad enough to spoil it.

Zaku is very good. Proper Air Zonky, and an astounding achievement on the hardware.

They also just announced a Masters of the Universe game is in development, so they still clearly have the cashflow to snap up licenses.

The scene is set for some socially distanced Zombicide tomorrow. Exciting times - physically playing a board game with someone for the first time in months! We'll be either end of the table sanitising those mitts, separate sets of dice, I'll handle all the zombie minis, card draws and components.

Well I couldn't resist the mega pack at the current offer price, that's crazy value for money to jump on the VR wagon. I'm really looking forward to Astrobot and Skyrim. Some of the FPS games with the aim controller are also very tempting - that's the stuff of my childhood dreams.

Savage.

Quick and dirty paint up to tabletop quality for the Temple of Elemental Evil hero characters this weekend. Should brighten up the game a bit. I'm going to try and break the habit of a lifetime and do the whole set, which I think means around 24 monsters to paint up too

We have a first play of Terminator Genisys Rise of the Resistance underway at Wind Towers. It takes a few ideas from various games, slaps on a ton of theme and rolls it all up into a really, really cool dungeon crawly campaign game. It uses a similar dice drafting activation system to the Warhammer Quest series, so you roll your four activation dice then assign them to actions. You can move the amount of hexes equivalent to the die you assign or you could assign dice of any number to your weapon in order to attack, but if you stick a 5 or 6 in there it might grant a bonus or an additional effect for example. Same with interactions on scenery such as supply crates, doors or mission objective tokens - certain ones might require certain die values assigned to them and so on. So you have to balance the prioritisation of dice results with all of the 'what-ifs' that come up in a turn. Rather than assigning them all in one go after rolling at the start of your turn however, you do it one at a time so you can react on the fly to the happenings during your turn - this is really cool. Players also decide in which order they go each turn, so if a particular character has an ability that's going to come in useful on the next turn you can switch it up. John Connor has a 'command' special ability in which he can slot one of his die for any other character to take and use on their turn, Kyle Reese has a special die slot which copies one of the die assigned to your attack (placed on your gun card) so you get an extra attack etc. Added to this, as you progress through the campaign you can unlock class cards (Medic, Soldier and so on) which add a further tactical layer of extra dice ability slot,s and you can also earn rank tokens as you gain experience which allow you to re-roll any unassigned dice. There's other fairly standard genre stuff going on like an equipment deck into which stronger equipment and weapons are added as you progress. Each player has their own 'conveyor belt' of enemies to match their character's colour. After each player turn you roll reinforcement dice which correspond to an enemy entrance space and the first enemy from your own conveyor enters play in that space. When it's killed it goes to the back of the queue, so in this way you can never defeat all of the enemies in a game, representing the endless tide of the machines . Only your colour enemies activate on your turn but any boss enemies activate on every player's turn similar to the D&DAS games, and they follow the simple AI routine of moving towards and attacking the nearest character once they're within range. Bosses have more advanced tactics and extra abilities. It seems a wicked game utterly dripping with narrative theme, really well written, which I just happened across in a random Youtube video. I think it's probably been hurt by the Genisys license because if this was a T1 or T2 game I'm sure it'd be everywhere. It's comparable to peers like X-com, DOOM or Gears of War which obviously did really well and it feels very WHQey. The only let down are the slightly poor quality miniatures and cards and the odd typo. I'm very keen to play through the campaign and brilliantly, it gives an alternative skirmish set-up for each mission so you can also replay them as one-shots. A glaring omission from one of my favourite campaign games so far, Journeys in Middle Earth. A well deserved 8.4 on BGG - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/250396/terminator-genisys-rise-resistance