By now we’re at the fourth installment in this new War in the East series, and you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to attack another hex, or if I’m going to just keep going to my closet and pulling out different games about Stalingrad. I assure you that both of those things are definitely going to happen. But I also promise that before this post is done, I will have attacked many hexes and shown you several actual in-game screenshots. But before that happens, I have to tell you a story. It’s kind of long, but at the end you’ll know a little more about what I’m trying to tell you. If you don’t like it, I promise to give you your money back.
After the jump, follow me down the board wargaming rabbit hole Continue reading →
By January of this past year, playing Skyrim had become a chore to me. I kept telling myself that when Bethesda released their mod tools–The Creation Kit–that things would somehow get better, that the shortcomings I’d begun to struggle with in the game might be fixed by the modding community that had done such excellent work with Oblivion and the Fallouts. It is entirely possible that I was totally right about that…but I never found out. Just ten days after the Creation Kit arrived in early February, I abandoned Skyrim. I’d hit the wall and was burnt out, but not so much that I didn’t vow to return at some future point in time.
Perhaps it was the cold snap that brought unseasonably cold nights to the East Coast this fall. Perhaps it was just absence making my gaming heart grow fonder. Whatever the reason, recently I started to feel that pull back to Tamriel’s far north province. November marked the anniversary of Skyrim’s release, and after a year of patches, DLC, and fan-made creations, I wondered what the state of the game was. I knew that if done right a fully-modded version of Bethesda’s game could be a brand new experience; a Director’s Cut of sorts. If I chose wisely and installed carefully maybe I could finally get out of Skyrim the experience I’d always wanted to have.
After the jump: Spoiled for choice. Continue reading →
