The Ogres Defeat the Chaos Dwarves

The Ogres remain undefeated as they earn their fourth victory this season.  This time, the wretched Chaos Dwarves taste the bitter gall of defeat.  Victory, however, came at a price as one of the Ogres was killed during the game.  It’s going to be difficult saving up enough gold to buy a replacement with the team’s spiraling expenses.

The Ogres’ first loss is predicted for next week when they play against the seasoned Lizardmen team.  Fast teams have always been a weakness for the Ogres, and with one of the Ogres’ major players out of the game permanently, things are not looking good.

The Ogres are 3-0

Last Saturday the Ogres defeated the Vampire team in a 2-1 victory. The opponent was a little more challenging than the previous two teams. A key move was taking out the 400,000 gp Star Player Count Luthor Von Drackenborg — hired as an inducement to get the beginner Vampire team to play verses the veteran Ogres — early in the game.

The Ogres Win Again

Another victory for the Ogres! This time I paid for it.  I played against the Chaos team, who injured one of my Ogres — my one ST 6 Ogre now has a MV of only 4. Ugh. And this in the first action of the first turn of the game! And my team’s apothecary rolled the exact same result on his healing check! Grrr…

However, revenge came swiftly for the Ogres. Before the first half was over the Ogres had killed three Chaos players! Three! Two of the deaths were prevented by the Chaos apothecaries, but it was still pretty amazing to have so many kills in a game. Even one kill in a game is rare.

Here are a couple of photos from the game. Unfortunately, most of the Chaos players are unpainted, and my Snotlings are still only half-done:

The Ogres Are Back!

I’ve brought my Ogre team back out of semi-retirement and am playing them in the second season of my buddy’s new BloodBowl league. My first game was against the humans, and the Ogres crushed them with a 2-0 final score.

Since my returning team was playing against a newly formed team, my opponents received over a million gold pieces worth of inducements, which made things a little more challenging for me. However, an early game touchback and some lucky die rolls saw me to victory.

Sadly, one of my snotlings was killed during the game — the first kill of the season.

Wrath of the Lich King Now in Beta

The next expansion to World of Warcraft — named Wrath of the Lich King — is now in Beta. This means it’s likely to be released by Christmas! MMO-Champion.com has tons of information on the upcoming changes.

Looks like Xenomech will be coming out of Stasis in a few months.

X-COM: Apocalypse on Windows XP

I think I finally got one of my favorite old DOS games — X-COM: Apocalypse — playable on Windows XP. The traditional way to get this game running on newer machines is to use a cool DOS emulator called DOSBox, but the times I’ve tried it in the past have been unsatisfactory…namely because the sound was poor and stuttered a lot.

But I came across a new way to get this game running and I tried it myself. I haven’t officially been able to test out the game since I did the installation of it by remote, but when I get home I’ll try it.

In case you are interested in trying this yourself, these are the steps I followed:

1. Download and Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
2. Create a new Windows 98 virtual machine.
3. Install the Windows 98 operating system on the virtual machine. I recommend creating an ISO image from your Windows 98 installation CD and mounting that image within the vm. The free program ImgBurn is great for making ISO images.
4. Install X-COM: Apocalypse on the virtual machine. Again, an ISO image of the original CD is recommended. However, as with the OS install, you can just use the real CD in your optical disc drive and tell the vm to use that.

And that’s it. The game is ready to go within the virtual machine!

A couple of caveats on the X-COM installer, though: when first running the installer, it sat at a black screen for a while. Just be patient. Also, after the installation is complete, the installer may sit at a black screen indefinitely. You can safely just kill the process at that point.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

I got the set of core rulebooks for the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons in the mail last Friday! I haven’t started reading them yet, since I want to finish reading the two Wizards Presents books – Worlds and Monsters and Races and Classes — which were released before the core rulebooks came out. The two Wizards Presents books cover the basics of the changes to the fourth edition of the game, along with the reasoning that went into many of the changes. It’s interesting to read how the game has evolved, and why certain decisions were made in this, the latest edition. So far, I have to give a thumbs up to just about everything I’ve read about the new edition.

I’ve also started collecting some D&D miniatures for eventual use. They’ll be much more fun to use than numbered chits.

The miniature packs contain eight random minis, and you don’t know what you’ll get until you open it. I got really lucky the other day when I picked up a couple of packs and got two monsters I was hoping for: a Gelatinous Cube and an Eye of Flame.

Here’s a couple of the bigger monsters I’ve managed to nab so far:

I have to say the Gelatinous Cube is my favorite so far.

Death Race 2008

A pseudo-remake of the original Death Race 2000 movie is coming out this year. My brother sent me a link that had some very, very nice photos.

Hopefully this movie doesn’t turn out to be 90% “prison drama” and only 10% “death-racing action”.

This brings to mind two good post-apocalyptic destruction car-racing boardgames: Thunder Road and Wreckage. Check them out, if your into board games and like this genre (though you’ll probably have to hit eBay for Thunder Road).

Cool New Frogger Game

Interesting…a Frogger arcade game utilizing a Dance Dance Revolution type user interface. That would be pretty fun.

April Fools!

The folks at Blizzard Entertainment put out crazy news items relating to their famous MMORPG World of Warcraft every April Fools day. This year, however, they’ve outdone themselves! Check out these new joke articles:

• World of Warcraft: Molten Core for the Atari 2600

• New “Bard” class

Bravo, guys! Well done!