So here is an important disclaimer which is always important to put out there first. I have a casual work contact with Asmodee to demonstrate board games for them in stores and at conventions. Asmodee being the parent company of Aconyte the publisher.
Secondly I am a friend of Robbie’s on Facebook, and whilst we aren’t best buds, we do interact with each other on occasion and I consider him a class person.
I am going to try my best to not let these things cloud my judgement in this review, but I accept that subconsciously it might.
What’s is Descent: Journeys in the Dark
Simply put Descent: Journeys in the Dark is good old fashioned dungeon crawler whose linage goes all the way back to Heroquest.
Based very much on the Doom board game published by Fantasy Flight Games, you can see influences from across the gaming hobby, with bits from Space Hulk and Lord of the Rings being identifiable.
It’s set in the world of Terrinoth, a setting shared with Runewars, Runeage and a few other games and RPGs published by Fantasty Flight Games.
It’s a high fantasy universe and you will recognise many of the tropes and races seen in other similar fantasy style settings. It’s not particularly unique, but it is fairly well developed and interesting.
Descent is the dungeon crawler game in that universe, with one player being the evil overlord of the dungeon and the others taking in the tiles of the hero’s.
For a dungeon crawler, let’s be honest it’s one of the best out there, and the only reason it’s not in my collection is that Lindsay and Megan aren’t as enthusiastic about high fantasy as I am!
The Story
This is the story of the genesis of one of the settings villains, and in this book, you see him grow from an angry child living in Castle Talon seeing his father live under the influence of a sorceress, as he grows into a teenager, who chooses to study rune magic in an attempt to gather the power he needs to defend his barony from the undead, and finally into a young man who seizes his inheritance and leads a charge against the forces of an ancient necromancer.
Conclusion
Look this book bills itself as the origin story of the game’s most notorious villains, but as someone who has never played the game, I have little background knowledge of the character, but this doesn’t feel like he is a villain, he seems more heroic, if angsty.
This book, ends up with him seeming to be a flawed hero, who has made questionable choices, but not an outright villain.
It would be nice to see a sequel, because the book leaves me wondering when he actually turns to evil.
The story is really well written, one of Robbie’s best works thus far, and at no point, does the story get dull, there is always something interesting happening.
I have to give this story a solid 4 out of 5 stars.
But come on Robbie, when’s the second part!
Zachareth is out now as an eBook, paperback and audiobook
Once again, if you know me, you know how big a Trekkie I am, my earliest memory of TV is, usurpingly Star Trek: The Original Series on the small black and white TV my parents had before we moved to London.
So no surprise that I like a lot of Star Trek themed songs, and this one from Warp 11 is very cool, you should give their stuff a listen, it’s really great, and entirely about Star Trek!
The Guild, was a brilliant web series from a few years back written by Felica Day, one of geekdoms favourite actors.
To promote the show, which was about a guild in an MMORPG, they released the occasional song, the very first song in the first advent, in 2019 was their first song, so it’s been a while since they have featured.
Let’s have a happy song today, and this was specifically written to be happy, and it’s by one of my favourite ukulele artists (I do like the ukulele a lot), Molly Lewis.
She wrote this after reading Mr Ts autobiography and the video I found of her performance has her explain this, and it’s a really fun and happy song!
It’s the 1st December and for the 4th year running, my nerdy music advent is back, so come back here for the next 24 days for a new nerdy song that I love and want to share!
Today we start with one of the original geek rock bands, Nerf Herder and their track Rock City News from 2002s American Cheese, its an awesome rocky song, and its a lot of fun to listen to.
Not only have I spent most of it unwell with a nasty tummy bug, but the flat has turned up a few issues.
We were in the process of having a water damaged cabinet replaced, when it was discovered that due to some missing airbricks, there were some geet big holes in the wall letting in moisture!
So we are having to have the plaster removed, get airbricks put and, so a damp treatment and then replaster.
Anyway, due to a shortage of available tradesman, it’s gonna be after Christmas before it can actually get done so that’s annoying, as it was the cabinet with the kitchen sink in it!
Ah well, life does love to throw some curveballs at you!
What I Modelling
I started by finishing off a pair of Necron Tomb Blades.
I am now currently working on an Imperial Fists Tactical Squad.
So what’s up next?
Imperial Fists Tactical Squad x 10 & Officers x 6
Kataphron Breachers x 5
Oruck Gutrippas x 12
T’au Crisis Suit Team x 3
Imperial Fiats Contemptor Dreadnought
Ultramarines Intercessors x 10
Silver Tower Heroes
Blood Angels Repulsor
Templar Brethren x 10
Hobgrot Slittaz x 20
What I Am Reading
Finished up listening to Kasrkin which has been an enjoyable listen.
And a little progress has been made on Zachareth, but not as much as I would have liked.
What Tabletop Games I Am Playing
Sadly none at all.
What Video Games I Am Playing
Sadly not a thing, which I am quite upset about, the ill meant I really struggled to sit down to play anything.
What I Am Creating
Nowt I actually did myself, but I did go on Bez’s daily show.
What I Am Backing
I am in on the Steve Jackson Games Campaign for some Car Wars STLs.
What I Am Winning
I am not entirely sure who this was from, it just came with a plain white piece of paper saying “congratulations on your win”, but I won a black Playstation 5 DualSense controller, which is brilliant.
It might have escaped your attention, but I really love the plethora of mini consoles released in recent years.
Well the consoles themselves are cool, and offer a great way to transport some awesome games to play very easily.
I much prefer emulation via RetroArch, but the mini consoles usually bring something with them, as close to original controllers as possible.
I mean you try and get a PC Engine controller outside of the box containing the CoreGrafx Mini!
There is just something so much nicer about playing with controllers that are basically like what we had as kids, and often the knock offs just aren’t as good.
But that leads into another obsession, controllers and that’s a subject for another time!
But the consoles themselves are pretty cool so let’s take a look at what’s in my collection!
The C64 Mini
The C64 Mini (note not the Commodore 64 Mini) comes with 64 classic games for the Commodore 64 and VIC 20.
The design of this one is just so adorable, yeah the keyboard doesn’t work, but it doesn’t need to, and they even got the discolouration right.
The joystick however, is to be honest, rubbish, I hear that the standalone one is better, and I think I may invest in one.
I never had a Commodore 64 as a kid, but plenty of friends did, and I remember wasting plenty of time playing Speedball and Impossible Mission.
The most irritating thing about it was to have it load up, only for it to fail at the last second meaning you had to rewind the tape and load it up again!
This particular console is great, but I wish I had grabbed the Maxi or the VIC20 for the working keyboard, but that would have taken up so much more space.
NES Classic
Now living in the UK, the NES wasn’t that popular or common. We mostly had the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, and when a console did get big, it was the Master System.
I never saw a NES in person until I went to university, but the GameBoy was very common.
I got this when it first came out on release day, and it’s kinda cool, but I guess, the games in it, don’t have the same nostalgia kick for me as they would for others.
I mean I have played a fair few of these games, either in the arcade or in later rereleases down the years.
The big issue with this controller is the puddly length of the controller cables, you can’t use it in the average living room without extension cables.
And the connector itself is a Wii Nunchuck port, so the controllers themselves whilst being very very well built and almost perfect replicas of the originals, they require an adaptor to use them with PC.
Mega Drive Mini
This is my main nostalgia kick, my first console that wasn’t borrowed from a friend, the 16 Bit masterpiece that was the Mega Drive.
My parents got me and my brother one with Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, and a three pack with World Cup Italia 90, Columns and Super Hang-On.
It also came with the Master System Convertor so we could swap games with our friends who owned the earlier system, as well as buy our own games for that system.
It was far and away the best system of the era, the software was great and there were so many fun games on it, I even saved up the money from my paper round for 6 months to buy Virtua Racing for it, cause it cost an eye watering £100 back in 1994!
The mini version is grand, comes with a lot of the big hitters, but sadly missing Sonic 3, the controllers are just *chefs kiss* but a part of me kind of wishes that they bundled the six button controllers simply because games like Eternal Champions and Street Fighter II work better with them.
PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini
The PC Engine was a weird console, it was technically an 8 Bit console, but it’s 16 Bit GPU, and the lateness of its release meant most people considered it part of the 16 Bit era.
The PC Engine was super rare in Europe, but I did know one kid who owned one, that he imported from Japan, and we did have a lot of fun playing bullet hell shooters!
The mini version is a bit of an oddity, carrying both Japanese and English language games, and there are times in here that I am rather upset didn’t get an English version, Snatcher being the biggest disappointment.
Always wanted to play that game, but the lack of a modern release, and the only English version is for the Mega CD, and that was massively censored.
But there are plenty of other games on there, and even Japanese ones which require little, if any reading.
This is a great little console and the only way to get CD Engine controllers in USB, I know 8 Bit Do have released some similar controllers, but they lack the turbo switches and instead only have a turbo button.
A500 Classic
I had an Amiga A500, our best friends had one as well or in some lucky cases, an A1200, I even had a friend with a CD32!
The Amiga was the dominant platform that wasn’t a console for a very long time, and the versatility of what it offered was wonderful.
We used to have just as much fun with Deluxe Paint, as we did with Lemmings, Sensible World of Soccer, Alien Breed and Zool!
This platform was fantastic and the death of Commodore after the failure of the CD32 was devastating to me, but it did essentially allow to IBM PC platform to become the dominant force it is today.
The A500 Mini is the most recent addition to my collection and thanks to the developers awesome system, I have a 32GB USB stick, with every game ever published for the platform on it, including all of the CD32 games.
My only criticism is that the game pad, whilst clearly taking inspiration from the CD32 controller, is quite a bit different, but I guess I can live with that.
SNES Classic
Being British, the SNES, well it wasn’t as big a deal as it’s Sega rival was to us.
I did have a friend with one and there were some absolutely killer games released in the platform. The Mario games are up there as classics, for a long time it was the only way to play Street Fighter II at home, and Mario Cart made its debut here.
The SNES Classic is one of the best mini console offerings, the controller cables are a bit longer than those offered by the NES Classic, but are still rather short.
Playstation Classic
This is the dud of the collection, Sony looked to jump on the bandwagon and put together this offering which in all honesty, just missed the mark, by a long shot.
Ok you have some classics, like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII, but so many games that should have been on here aren’t.
No Gran Turismo, Wipeout, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot or Tomb Raider to name a few.
The controllers are great, but it really feels like Sony just couldn’t be arsed with this one.
The modding scene around it is great, and it’s something I should probably consider, but this is technically Lindsay’s as I bought it as a birthday present for her, so she would need to approve any modding!
What Next
Well there are other options out there, the main one I really want is the SNK Neo Geo Arcade Stick Pro, which will combine my desire for an arcade fighting stick, and a Neo Geo games machine.
An Atari Flashback 9 or better is also wanted, as well as the Mega Drive Mini 2, but that looks to be out of production after only being released in October.
But beyond that, that would be it, unless a Master System Mini or a Dreamcast Mini hits the market. I really cannot see a PlayStation 2 Classic, due to the poor response to the PlayStation Classic and the technical issues would probably prevent development of a Saturn or N64 Mini.
I already have a PlayStation 3 and a Wii, which can play GameCube games, so realistically the only think I want that’s not a mini console, is a PlayStation 2.
What I Am Modelling
I painted up a unit of Sicaran Infiltrators to add to my Adeptus Mechanicum army.
On Saturday, myself, Lindsay and Megan played a game of Ticket to Ride London, and I lost, really badly, Megan blocked a route which ruined my whole strategy, but that’s the game!
And I replaced the little drawer I keep my USB sticks etc with a new one.
My beloved fridge, that I have had since I started university in 2001, has died, it was a fair few years old when I got it, and it’s lasted for 21 years with me, at times having to serve as the houses main fridge.
The last 10 years it’s been exclusively for the storage of pop, snacks and medicine, and since we moved was kept in my studio.
But last week it ceased functioning all together, and we had a look on eBay and Facebook Marketplace and found this London themed Husky fridge for £50, and we picked it up on Wednesday night.
Adding this drive we found sealed and unopened on Facebook marketplace, for a killer price, had allowed us to expand the server space to 13TB in total.
For Dropfleet Commander, I grabbed some Nickar Class Hunter-Killers for my Scourge fleet.
This past weekend, I, Chris and Graham made a pilgrimage to Essex to play in the excellent Adeptus Terra Podcast event, Hivanni Prime.
Myself and Graham travelled down from the north east on Friday, sadly not via Warhammer World, and we got to the venue in Benfleet about
My List
I took Death Guard, and this was my list
+ HQ +
Praetor in Tartaros Terminator Armour, Power Scythe, Combi-Alchem Flamer
Deathshroud Terminator Squad x 5, Land Raider Proteus Carrier
Moritat, Plasma Pistol x 2
+ Elites +
Contemptor Dreadnought, Kheres Assault Cannon x 2, Havoc Launcher
Mortus Poisoner Squad x 10, Heavy Alchem Flamer x 2, Phosphex Bomb, Melta Bombs, Rhino
+ Troops +
Tactical Squad x 10, Vexilla, Artificer Armour, Rad Grenades, Melta Bombs, Power Scythe, Rhino
Tactical Squad x 10, Vexilla, Artificer Armour, Rad Grenades, Melta Bombs, Lightning Claw, Rhino
Heavy Support Squad x 10, Alchem Heavy Flamers, Rhino
Heavy Support Squad x 10, Autocannons, Augury Scanner
+ Fast Attack +
Sabre Strike Squadron x 2
+ Heavy Support +
Fire Raptor Gunship, Autocannon Batteries
Predator Squadron x 2
Sicaran Battle Tank, Lascannon Sponsons
My first game saw me take on Nail and his Imperial Fists, which hammered me hard, the list had a ton of rerolls plus two Spartans and a Typhon, just stuff my list couldn’t handle in the slightest, great game though.
My third game saw me take on Paul and his Dark Angels, in a very close game, that I did lose, but another turn and I may have turned it round, but we ran out of time, but super close.
I reorganised the wall of controllers slightly following some advice from the guys on r/battlestations, so now the cables are tied with Velcro cable ties and you can actually see the controllers themselves!
I finally bought my PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini which is a replacement for the original purchase a few weeks ago.
I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay and bought this and an A500 Mini, but alas the PC Engine, came without a controller, so I had to pack it up and send it back, whilst the A500 just took an age to get dispatched!
No doubt the question will come up about how I win stuff, and honestly, it’s just playing the odds, entering pretty much as many as you can and you are bound to win something!
That’s literally the secret, and let’s see if we can win some decent stuff, still yet to top my original iPad win from back in 2010!
I have been provided with an advance copy of the new Tom Clancy’s The Division book Recruited by Thomas Parrott and published by Aconyte Books, so here is the honest review I promised in exchange for the book.
So here is an important disclaimer which is always important to put out there first. I have a casual work contact with Asmodee to demonstrate board games for them in stores and at conventions. Asmodee being the parent company of Aconyte the publisher.
I am going to try my best to not let these things cloud my judgement in this review, but I accept that subconsciously it might.
Also, I won’t lie, I have looked at other reviews to see what others think, so there may be some influences from them in this book review. If I am going to quote them, I will attribute them. But if I forget to, or something is highly influenced by them, and you think I ought to attribute someone, let me know so that I can.
What is Tom Clancy’s The Division
Based on the Ubisoft game series of the same name, its set in the near future, the Strategic Homeland Division, known simply as The Division, is a group of government sleeper agents, activated to assist emergency responders and the armed forces, when a smallpox like virus, called the Green Poison or Dollar Flu spreads like wildfire across the US, causing the collapse in the government and society.
The job of the Division, is to combat lawlessness and find out the origin of the virus in an attempt to restore order and bring back civilisation.
The Story
This story follows a cell investigating why trucks carrying food to the eastern coast of the US have slowed to a trickle, in order to prevent the survivors of the plague from starving.
Having lost one of their trio before they get out of Washington D.C., they recruit Maria Kanhai, a young veteran and cyber security expert into their cell as they journey west to try and get to the bottom of the problem.
As they travel the huge distances on foot, they travel through an unforgiving world and come across ruthless factions who will do their upmost to hold power for themselves, and keep themselves on top regardless of how it impacts others.
Conclusion
I haven’t played either of the games in the series, and so I am approaching this from fresh eyes, and no doubt didn’t see any references from them.
But I am very familiar with the works of Tom Clancy, and whilst this book sort of resembles, them, it has a voice of its own that is distinct.
A world ravaged by a pandemic is something I think many of us are familiar with now, even if ours didn’t collapse into chaos!
The book is very fast paced, and there is always a concern about who is tracking the cell and why they are being targeted, sometimes, it feels like you are going from set piece to set piece, but the characters and their interactions does make it feel a lot more natural.
And speaking about the characters, they are all very well written, with flaws and virtues that feel very very real, and thus it helps keep you immeresed.
The Division paints a picture of a very bleak world where humanity has quickly devolved into groups that are only looking out for themselves.
I am going to give this 4 out of 5 stars, and I might have to buy the game next time Ubisoft have a sale.
Recruited is available now as an eBook or paperback and even as an audio book!
