Friday 15 February 2013

Warzone: The Resurrection. KICKSTARTER is now Live!


The official Kickstarter is now live at http://warzonegame.com/, check it out, even a pledge of £1 gets you the .pd of the rules and £19 and up gets you the awesome looking new miniatures!  I'm really excited about this now the Kickstarter is live, the problem is, I can't decide which pledge level to go with.....if only I had £333 to splash on this!

Monday 11 February 2013

Gaming resolutions update - January

I know this is a bit late, but January has been an unusually hectic month, and it's only now February is well under way, that I find I have enough time to look back and see how I've (under)performed against the targets i'd set myself.

Wargaming
  1. Complete all three Flames of War armies and my Firestorm Armada fleet to at least tabletop standard, and do not buy any more models for these armies until this is achieved. - It's good and bad news here; I haven't worked on any of these models yet, but on the plus side, I haven't bought anything new yet!
  2. Play a minimum of 1-2 games per month (of any wargame) - CHECK (1 game of FoW played in January, and a game of FoW and a couple of Firestorm armada lined up for February!)
  3. Finishing building up the Epic Space Marine force and play at least one game with it. - Plenty of the infantry based up, but otherwise, no change.
  4. Try using the 'Army Painter technique' to paint my Dark Angels up to TT standard ready for the Easter game. - Nearly all the models are now assembled (I'm waiting on some Terminator Arms through the post), and after that, it's time to start spraying.
  5. Complete enough models and obtain enough scenery to run a Force on Force campaign (Probably 'Day of the Ranger') for my gaming friends and hopefully get them into FoF. - No change here so far, though the campaign is now likely to be Vietnam (From Ambush Valley).
Roleplaying:
  1. Bring my Conspiracy X campaign up to date (and do so after each session) on the Obsidian Portal website.  - Not yet updated.
  2. Run the Conspiracy X campaign a minimum of once each calendar month (as promised to the players already!). - CHECK (One session played in January)
  3. Finish writing the Call of Cthulhu Campaign I have been writing since last year. - No further work carried out as yet (and now i'm writing an All flesh Must Be Eaten campaign for a friend).
So, after a month, there is still some considerable work to do on the modelling side, but I've not failed any of the ongoing ones in the first month, which is a plus... Still, it's one month in, and I've already added another thing to do to my list AFMBE Campaign to write).  However, I think modelling wise at least, February will be a more productive month.

Wednesday 6 February 2013

WARZONE the miniatures game RETURNS!

Mutant Chronicles - 1993
Back in the mid 90's, my roleplaying group and I found a book in the local games store called 'Mutant Chronicles'.  It was a dark, bleak game, set in the Earth's far future, where the human race had leached the planet earth of all resources of any worth, and then gone forth, spreading out and colonising the solar system.

Nations as we know them were long gone, in their place there were instead a number of Mega-corprations, each with its own specialisation, and cultural heritage; Mishima (Japanese/Oriental), Bauhaus (Germanic/Slavic), Capitol (American), Imperial (British/French) and the elusive Cybertronic, a new corporation with highly advanced cybernetic technology and somewhat dubious ways of obtaining their operatives. Conflict was rife, espionage and even open combat were commonplace between these corporations, but they had a greater battle to fight.

Warzone - 1995
After most of the solar system was colonised, explorers disturbed a mysterious artifact on an until then unknown tenth planet beyond Pluto.  It turned out that this 'Seal' (the First seal of Repulsion) had been protecting the Solar system from an ancient evil, the Dark legion; a horde of other-dimensional mutants and undead, headed by five 'Dark Apostles'.  With the seal broken, the Dark Legion flooded into our dimension, and aided by the zealots of 'The Brotherhood' (A religious organisation formed to battle the Dark legion, and unify the corporations), humanity began the fight for its very survival...


Doom Troopers (Genesis/SNES) - 1995
The roleplaying game was fantastic, it had a decent set of mechanics, and an intricate and well thought out backstory.  There were a number of excellent sourcebooks available for it and it it did well, leading to a spin-off wargame called 'Warzone' (which itself had several expansion books and a number of stand-alone boardgame type additions), and a collectible card game, Doom Trooper (Which in turn had its own Console game spin off!).  Both systems and the CCG were very popular from what I gather, the miniatures were good quality sculpts, and just about every different unit type in the roleplaying and wargame was produced as a miniature (Mostly infantry, but some of the smaller vehicles and some of the gargantuan monsters were produced as multi-part, high quality resin and metal models).

Doom Trooper CCG - 1994
In the end, Target Games, the Swedish company that produced the games failed due to its parent company's bankruptcy, but the story and the games remained popular, if unsupported.  Interest in the licence/background has always been there and in recent years we've seen a (admittedly short-lived) collectible miniatures game from Fantasy Flight games, and even in 2008, a big budget movie starring Thomas Jane and Ron Perlman, that was released in cinemas (and was fairly good in my opinion).

All this reminiscing aside, when i was recently cruising the boards over at Dakka Dakka, I read that the current licence holder, Paradox Entertainment, is releasing a new version of the miniature wargame, Warzone!  It is being released on February 15th, and there's been a couple of images of the models floated so far, and they look GOOD!  Personally, i'm very excited about this, and i'm impressed a company has picked this up and produced the game without going to crowdfunding, which seems to be the popular route nowadays.

If you've played any of the games listed above, i'm sure this news will excite you as well, if you haven't, then I will tentatively say, take a look at this game.  If it is pulled off well it will certainly be worth your time.  Mutant Chronicles/Warzone is so under-appreciated in my opinion.  it has such a solid, interesting story to it, and the Warzone rules system was robust as well.  This has the potential to be such a good game, and all the things i've heard so far have been positive. I can't wait.....but to bide you over, below is the official trailer.