Moments in Magic: How I Finally Learned How to Play Momir Basic

Since this past August, I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering Arena in their closed beta both on my own and streaming on my Twitch channel at geekingoutabout. I’m not that great of a player, so when I finally won my first game of Momir Basic, I thought it was good enough to create a video about it.

Learning how to play Momir Basic on MTG Arena lead to many nice moments.

If you’re interested in learning more about this newest iteration of Magic, you can read this article I wrote for Twin Cities Geek and download the game for yourself at the Arena website.

Trisha’s Take: Unavowed

 

The four main characters of Unavowed: a male medium, a female swordswoman, a male mage, and a female police detective.
Are you strong enough, smart enough, or powerful enough to join the Unavowed? © Wadjet Eye Games

Unavowed

Created, Designed, and Published by Wadjet Eye Games
Written by Dave Gilbert
Starring (from left to right): Logan Cunningham, Sandra Espinoza, Frank Todaro, Arielle Siegel, SungWon Cho (not pictured), and more
Art by Ben Chandler and Ivan Ulyanov
Music by Thomas Regin
Rating: Mature adolescents and above (adult language, gun violence, supernatural elements)

Official Blurb: For one year, crime-torn New York City has been at the mercy of someone hell-bent on destruction and chaos. Waking up on a stormy rooftop, you learn that this someone was you. At least, the heinous acts were carried out by your body, possessed by an angry demon that’s now loose in the city that never sleeps. The only force that can stop it is the Unavowed, a centuries old supernatural crime-fighting troupe that takes down evil in the shadows—and you are their newest member.

Pros: Voice acting is top-notch and all of the diverse characters have depth and are more than just stereotypes.

Cons: Some of the puzzles require a pixel hunt, and that can really take you out of the story.


Continue reading “Trisha’s Take: Unavowed

Geekly Speaking About… Dave Gilbert and Unavowed

Dave Gilbert talks about just one of the many supernatural characters you’ll meet in Unavowed from Wadjet Eye Games © Geeking Out About

About four years ago, I worked as an administrative assistant for an indie video game publisher named Games Omniverse. Part of my job was to not only update all of the game design documents on the company’s internal wiki, but to write some articles for the company blog about games, specifically adventure games.

Writing those articles rekindled my love for adventure gaming, so when I was offered a review copy of Unavowed, the latest from Wadjet Eye Games, I jumped at the chance to not only review it, but to get an interview with its creator Dave Gilbert. All the show notes are under the jump.

Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… Dave Gilbert and Unavowed

Trisha’s Take: The Loading Ready Run Pre-Pre-Releases

Loading Ready Run co-founder Graham Stark sets sail for the shores of Ixalan. ©  Bionic Trousers Media/Wizards of the Coast

I’ve been watching the Rivals of Ixalan Pre-Pre-Release replay first on Twitch and later on YouTube over and over and I think that this is the best kind of marketing event for Magic: the Gathering that Wizards of the Coast ever fell backwards into. Why?

1. The people at Loading Ready Run who are hosting and producing these events have at least a decade of experience in being funny and entertaining while being professional. (Special kudos to James Turner, whose idea this all was, I think.)

2. Their online chat mods do not tolerate trolls. At all.

3. Their online chat community also does not tolerate trolls. At all.

4. The focus on the event is having fun and learning what the cards do, as all non-moneyed competitive events should do. (Note: Winning packs as prizes doesn’t count as money. No matter how much you try, you cannot buy groceries with packs of Magic cards.)

5. The guests they invite can be a diverse bunch of folks who are also entertaining, engaging, and friendly. Two of my favorites have been former Magic pro and current Wizards employee Melissa DeTora and Jimmy Wong from the Command Zone podcast. (Special hat-tip to Reuben Bresler of the Magic Mics podcast, whose Facebook post recap inspired this post.)

It’s these last two parts that are perhaps the most important key to drawing new players into the game or convincing lapsed players that they should head back into their Local Gaming Store to attend the set’s actual pre-release and perhaps start playing Magic again. I know that’s how I felt back when LRR debuted this show starting with the Shadows of Innistrad Pre-Pre-Release. I went to my LGS the following Saturday and went 0-4 in back-to-back events. By watching the show, I could not only see some of the cards that were released in the visual spoiler, but I could get a sense of how to actually play with them in a live situation.

You have no idea how hard it was for me not to quip about “throwing away my shot” during my matches. © Geeking Out About

Perhaps the biggest barrier for someone who’s on the fence on whether or not they’ll want to spend their money on a new game they haven’t seen is wanting to actually see what it’s like; the PPRs are perfect for that kind of demonstration, more so than Wizards‘ own Magic tournament streams. Because it’s partially produced by the company, there’s some sort of quality control. However, because LRR was first and foremost a sketch comedy troupe, it’s going to be entertaining. Best of all, because they actually play the game themselves, the way they speak and interact with the game is completely natural and not something that you’d get from any mainstream video content producer or marketing company.

It’s a bit too late for me now to attend the Rivals prerelease because it’s happening this weekend. However, with the return to the game’s initial starting plane Dominaria this April, I may decide to dust off my card sleeves and see if I can actually win a round this time.

After all, practice does make perfect.

You Had to Be There: Gran Prix Minneapolis 2016 Day Two

It’s been said that being at a Magic the Gathering Grand Prix is very much like attending an anime or comic book convention, and I find that Day Two of this event is not different. After having sold some of my extra cards for $15 and signing up for another “small” draft, walking around the play area, I saw many of the same faces I’d seen yesterday. There’s a comforting familiarity in seeing people you recognize at such a big event like this, even if it’s only someone you saw in passing or someone you saw while sitting on the #GPMinn Twitter hashtag.

The players are gathering at their tables. The Super Sunday registration has closed. The pager which will call me to a draft table is waiting for a signal.

Welcome to Day Two of GP Minneapolis.

11:15 am: I drafted a red-black Zombie Vampires deck, but only the Vampires really wanted to come out to play. I ran only 14 creatures because I really wanted to keep things tight (and that’s all I could find in the draft), but instead of filling the rest with spells, I probably should have just put more land in because I don’t think I ever got beyond 5 mana once. I even had to mulligan down to 4 in G1 and though the second game felt a little better and a more even match, I ended up losing that one, too. At least I was able to hate-draft a Westphale Abbey.

12:06 pm: Round 12 resulted in a loss for Meghan Wolff (8-3-1) from Magic the Amateuring, and I was able to get a little bit of time before her next round for a brief interview; hopefully, I’ll be able to edit it soon and get it up on the website. Our conversation focused a lot on her role as a recently elevated ambassador to the game after their invitation to the 2015 Community Cup where she gave a fantastic speech defending their Avarice Amulet Ironroot Chef brew which charmed not only the live Twitch audience, but the flavor judges as well. Her main takeaways for anyone who also wants to contribute to the community is to find an angle or niche which you feel is underrepresented and to find a co-host (or more) with whom you have a lot of chemistry but also who will help creating content be less of a chore for you. Another thing she mentioned is that being a competitor on Day 2 is manifesting a little bit of Impostor Syndrome; however, judging from the reaction of a mother and her two girls who had also come up to say hello before the next round, Wolff is definitely the real deal.

1:39 pm: South Dakota player Brooke Schieffer had just turned around to see that time for Round 13 was drawing to a close, so she did the only thing that she could do at that point: she played her Great Aurora. This move effectively reset the game and put herself onto a huge mana advantage with 21 cards to draw to her opponent’s 17. In the interview I had with her (which will hopefully go up later), Schieffer said that she had always wanted to build a deck around the card, and after Tireless Tracker and some other cards came out in later sets, she realized she could find a way to make a RG Ramping Humans deck work. She runs Chandra, Nissa, and the new Arlinn Kord in her deck and during the round, I saw all three come out to play. A casual player since Shadowmoor, Schieffer only started getting serious with Standard decks, but stressed that she is not a fan of net-decking–and with her now 9-3-1 record, that strategy seems to be working pretty well for her today.

2:34 pm: Ben Wood, whom I met yesterday, is 4-1 for today, 11-3 overall and playing a 4-color Rites deck. Though he doesn’t play the card a lot, he managed to bring out Ulamog to exile a bunch of his opponents’ cards.


After picking up a “Good Luck, High Five!” bracelet from Wolff and Maria Bartholdi (who was sadly defeated by her co-host during Round 14), I realized that my Day Two was slowly coming to an end because I have to leave in a bit to drive a friend back to the airport. As I sit in the middle of a hall where the number of attendees playing in the Main Event is decreasing, I can’t help but think of the amazing people I’ve met today and yesterday. No doubt, there are also a few non-great people here whose saltiness I’ve either overheard or read on Twitter. But for the most part, everyone at this Gran Prix has been nice, friendly, sporting, and welcoming.

I know I’m a casual player, and until something in my financial situation changes, I’m likely to stay a casual player. But I’m glad to know that should I ever decide to get more serious as a player, there’s a great community waiting for me.

You Had to Be There: Grand Prix Minneapolis 2016 Day One

Shortly after sitting down outside the convention center to set up this blog entry, I turned around to see a friend whom I had first met at my very first Friday Night Magic event way back during the end of the Return to Ravnica block. He gave me a huge hug, and then proceeded to tell me about the bad beatdown he’d been given last night by Reid Duke.

To the left of me, a former Austrailian was sleeving up a Commander deck which he’d just bought. Like me, this was also his first Gran Prix (GP). After a wide-ranging conversation which included talking about dangerous creatures from Australia and the voting procedures of the Democratic Farm Labor party, the three of us aren’t in the event decided to sign up for a draft, and my friend headed off to play his Round 3 (he’s 2-0 right now).

Welcome to Magic the Gathering. Continue reading “You Had to Be There: Grand Prix Minneapolis 2016 Day One”

Geekly Speaking About… “Girl with a Heart Of”

Moody and atmospheric, and that's only a screenshot of "Girl with a Heart Of"

In the ongoing debate on whether or not video games can be art, one of the lynchpins is that art is supposed to have or reflect a statement about the world, pose questions about it, and elicit reactions to it. There are major releases like Heavy Rain which embody this type of marriage between video game, philosophy, and art, but that doesn’t mean that an indie developer can’t join in the fun as well.

Alexei Andreev of Bent Spoon Games is one such developer who over 11 months, starting last January conceptualized and released his very first game called Girl with a Heart Of. As noted in the press release, Andreev hopes that with his game, he can get people to think about what it means to be human and whether or not you can transcend it. It has a lofty goal, but we here at Geeking Out About wanted to see if he was able to achieve it. With review copies in hand, co-editor Jill Pullara and staff writer Jonathan Cherlin journeyed along with main character Raven to the city of Underfoot, and here’s what they had to say (with many spoilers) about the game:


Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… “Girl with a Heart Of””

Geekly Speaking About… “The Commander Shepard Challenge”

Does a Shepard by any other gender kick as much ass? We're about to find out...

If you’ve been listening to our “Geekly Speaking About…” podcasts, you’ve probably heard co-editor Jillian Pullara and me talking about Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series of games from Bioware. While she’s mostly played the PC game version and I rocked the Xbox 360 version, we both have a similar sensibility towards the main character in that we think she totally kicks ass. Lowell Greenblatt also loves playing Commander Shepard and thinks that he’s got a real compelling story to tell.

But the problem between us is that our Commander Shepards are different genders. And that got us to thinking: Could playing the character in the Bioware game as the opposite of your preferred gender change your perception of the game?

Reference links and show notes, after the jump:


Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… “The Commander Shepard Challenge””

Take-Two stock rises with release of L.A. Noire

For gamers who also play the stock market, Tuesday was a good day. After all, not only did L.A. Noire hit the market, but stock prices rose for studio Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive.

According to Conrad Zimmerman at Destructoid.com, the price of shares rose as high as 10% of their starting value on the NASDAQ, before finally settling on a price of $17.10 at the close of business yesterday, netting an overall 7.75% increase.

This is all due to the successful launch of Noire, which currently has a MetaCritic score of 92 for the Xbox 360 version. Even the picky French site GameKult.com had decent things to say about the gameplay differences between Noire and its other open sandbox gaming cousins:

Globalement moins drôles et plus répétitifs que les à-côtés d’un Grand Theft Auto ou d’un Red Dead Redemption, les délits de L.A. Noire ont tout de même l’avantage de faire découvrir certains coins un peu paumés de la ville et d’offrir des points d’expérience supplémentaires.

or:

Overall less funny and more repetitive than [the extra missions in] Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the crimes L.A. Noire still have the advantage of discovering some bewildering corners of the city and provide additional experience points.

L.A. Noire is available on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: PlayStation’s latest “game” gets rave reviews

The [Firmware] game features a robust moral choice system, where your actions really do affect the world. Do you accept the User Agreement, or don’t you? This was an agonizing decision, since you never know what could happen later. I remember that unbelievable moment in Firmware 2.0, where I accepted the User Agreement and the Kaz Hirai was harvested for delicious ADAM. Is that right? It’s been so long since I did anything but download Firmware on the PS3 that my memory is a little hazy.

—Jim Sterling at Destructoid makes the best of a necessary console update, in the wake of last month’s credit card security breach of the PlayStation Network.

UPDATE: And… apparently, the influx of PSN fans who updated their firmware and wanted to game crashed the network, forcing parts of it offline again. How is it that Sony didn’t anticipate that?