Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🗡️ Gone Are The Dark Clouds That Had Me Blind... Over the weekend I decided to give  Final Fantasy VII  another chance. Specifically, I was trying out the demo for the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade , the updated version of the first part of the remake of a now thirty-year-old RPG that still looms enormous in the genre discourse. I'd actually put off starting it until I finished up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment , because I figured that once I started I was just going to want to buy the full game and start playing. So on Saturday I played all the way through the demo, and... And then I decided to play Octopath Traveler  instead. Yeah, I bounced off of FF7R:I  pretty hard. The updated graphics look nice, and the voice acting is solid, but it still didn't work for me. The world of Midgar has been reimagined to look more contemporary, which just makes the main cast stand out, as their character designs have not changed all that much asid...

🦸 I! Am! That! Hero! Heads up, this post is about tabletop gaming and programming. It's gonna get hella nerdy up in here. You have been warned. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition  is my favorite tabletop game, full-stop, no qualifiers. I routinely played it two or three nights a week, sometimes two or three times in a single night. It's a game with high replayability because there's a lot of variability in set up. It involves selecting five-to-seven decks of cards and some associated character cards, and there is a large pool to choose from. At present (in the latest edition of the game and its expansions) there are twenty-four hero decks, with three-to-four character variants each; twenty-four villain decks, with two character variants each; and sixteen environment decks. One villain plus one environment plus three-to-five heroes makes for a lot of options that need to be worked through any time you sit down to play. You can easily spend more time making deci...

🎲 It Just Takes a Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That... This last weekend was Geekway Mini, one of the board game conventions I attend every year in which I hang out with friends and play a bunch of new games. The main draw is the Play-and-Win event, in which you try out new games and get registered for a chance to win a copy. There were quite a few heavier games this year, and several popular games that were quite cozy. On the whole it was a very chill con. Anyway, here's what I played! Star Wars: Battle of Hoth I knew I was going to have to play this one because it's exactly the sort of thing my 14-year-old would love. I was a little wary because I don't really get into these kinds of dice-based tactical combat games and because IP-based games can be very hit-or-miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. There's a decent amount of depth of gameplay here, including 17 different scenarios and 4 different campaigns. The units are interesting and the gameplay is pretty ...

🎬 "Wasting my time in the waiting line..." The mid 90s to the mid 00s saw a huge boom in indie auteur filmmaking. Movies like Clerks , The Mariachi , and Sex, Lies, and Videotape  introduced the world to a host of new directorial voices with signature styles thanks to the growing ease of DIY filmmaking. Over the last few weeks, we've rewatched two films from that era that both take place in New Jersey, so it's time to revive an old label: "My Misspent Youth in Films" Garden State Directed by: Zach Braff Starring: Zach Braff, Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman Released: August 20, 2004 A quietly troubled young man returns home for his mother's funeral after being estranged from his family for a decade. What I Thought Then That guy from Scrubs  made a movie that turned out to be the voice of a generation. It was edgy, it was funny, it had an amazing soundtrack and some fantastically quotable lines. My 24-year-old cinephile ass ate it up! What I Think Now We...

💍 "I told you he was tricksy..." Asmodee and Office Dog are in the process of releasing a complete trilogy of trick-taking games based on the book  The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien. The first installment,  The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game , was released early this year to much acclaim, and a sequel based on The Two Towers  is scheduled to release in January—although there will be pre-launch release events this month—and you can bet your sweet bippy that I will be acquiring a copy as soon as possible. I adore the first game, and not just because it combines one of my favorite gameplay mechanics with one of my favorite IPs. It is, in fact, an excellent adaptation of the source material as well as being a very refined and inventive game engine that is heavily thematic. And if there's one thing that I love as much as trick-taking games and The Lord of the Rings , it's thematic storytelling! In fact, I would go so far as to say that this specific game...