-+@ Charge! @+-

and that in more than one way describes Radical Racers...



Art Credits:
Hinko and Wasperine by Beth Zyglowicz
Greedy Kilm by Jen Reed with background by Holmberg/Nov.

Three more for Exodus Flight, most of which can be viewed on the EF page. Work on the RP customs have slowed down quite a bit, but that's to be expected what with the end of summer and all. Still the customs are getting a bit of attention in other quarters, with TG getting some errata on the engine.

Of course, the SP tournament is still ongoing although the number of games have slowed down dramatically now that people have used up all their tokens. It's good to know that there are still people playing in the tournament that is almost running itself. There's been calls for more tournaments too, although I have to wonder how viable it will be come December.

The fourth Double Jeopardy contest ends in about half a day and there's been disappointing responses. Oh well, guess that's from the disappointing winners that have been chosen or something. I haven't yet picked a winner, although I do think that there are very strong entries in this month's competition.

The website is still going on... I'm still putting up the card scans on my site after the demise of everything on the official site. It's still getting crazy hits every day, and today, someone sent me a broken link report. I guess it must be getting bigger and stronger everyday. Quite a bit to do there - put up the alt art and the preview decks, then the Japanese cards before I can move to fiction. I think I've decided to post the fiction in reverse order - i.e. latest first - don't ask me why...

The B5 league started last weekend and up till today, only 3 games have been played. That might not seem a lot but bear in mind that each game lasts at least 3 hours (and can take up to 7 hours) and has at least 3 players, that probably means more manhours have been spent playing those 3 games than have been spent on the Doomtrooper league this month (that's a trick statement, there's no Doom league this month so no hours have been spent there). Alwyn is doing a good job running the league and my commendations goes out to Rune.

While I'm on the subject of B5, the next expansion seems to be going slower. Sure, there are some young turks who are so keen to get their ideas into the set that they are almost spamming the forums. The SWD players will probably tell them that they need "patience, my young padawan". Still, Bruce is probably mulling the cards over in his head and we'll hopefully get a list of about 180 cards by the end of the month or early November.

Both the two games mentioned above had updates in the past few days, although I still have been busily trying to finish up Hyborian Gates. The images are all clipped now and the spoiler is more than halfway done. I just have to push myself to get the spoiler done soonish and then to import the cardlist into the gML. Lots of work there... would probably take me 30 minutes to import everything and to get it working.... if I remember how to do it correctly.



The distraction of the week though is Radical Racers which went public beta today. That's after 2 days of not so hard work... but the game is one of the lowest standard adaptation I've ever done for the engine. It needs to be spruced up with bells and whistles (literally and figuratively) to get it running up to scratch (pun intended). Still the owner of the game has been rather pleased with what has been done so far. I know I can do better, but well, I need lots more time to do that.

Having said that though, it was a bit hairy at some points since rather than copy from an existing game, I actually wrote the scripts from scratch for this one. It's a lot more difficult than I remember it to be and I can just pity new PLs who are trying to get everything up to scratch. And what I am doing here is really, really basic... for me that is. No wonder people get hang-ups about automations and game design. It's not that easy after all.

So that's the second original game that has gone live in under a week. I've even updated the links on the right to include the game as well. These games are all good though since they have:
1) Finished cards, complete with art
2) Rules
3) A webpage where everything is hosted
4) Some support from the creators of the game.
Final Twilight shares all that of course which was why it was adapted so quickly. I pity those people who want to design a CCG to make money, but don't know how and need experience from the inside. There seems to be lots of those flying around, but they come up lacking somehow. Mostly. I haven't been blown away by the Original games so far though. Not even by some of the really high powered ones - Allegiance, for one... and the MTG clone Mystical Empires...

I was digging through my weekend bag and dug up a starter deck of Naruto cards and a booster pack of Spiderman cards. Whoa, I forgot I bought those almost a month ago. What do I think about the cards? I think one is a kiddie game and the other is unappealing at least to me. I'm just going to keep copies of them in my cardback collection file.

With all the cards lying around, I searched for the good part of the week for a good online store that will ship cardbox boxes for cards to me cheaply. Well, tough, there isn't any that I can find. Bear in mind that most online stores charge $70 for shipping. Urgh. Ebay proved no better either... nobody wanted to sell those boxes outside the US. So what did I do? Today, I cut up a huge FedEx box and made two 1200 card count boxes. I think they can take 1200 cards... I didn't count, but the boxes are long. They don't look too professional, but since they are just storage boxes anyways, I think they are better than having cards lying in piles all over the place.

It's almost the end of the month and things are going to go crazy... particularly with the anniversary the week after that. Mark has been busy on Monster Rancher and Tony is still plugging away at Fluxx so hopefully both those games will go public then. I hope Hyborian Gates will join them on that day too.

I still haven't got everything done for my top 10 list for the anniversary... I guess that needs work... and there's the usual stuff - plates posts, statistics and all the internals that nobody else sees.

One thing everyone will see, but hopefully not notice is that the forums are getting shorter. I've been merging some forums and getting rid of others in a quest to make the forums shorter. I don't think I've been too successful so far, but I guess I'll get there eventually. There's only so much that can be eliminated anyways.