Bert Vandecasteele

Month: September 2023

  • Gloomhaven: Playing with myself

    Gloomhaven: Playing with myself

    March 2020, lockdown. Like everyone in the entire world, I was stuck inside with a lot to do, but none of them truly social. Some people coped by getting a pet, others took a creative hobby – I did something different. I started impulsive-shopping for board games.

    When the boxes upon boxes of games came, I obviously had no one to play with. I figured it’d get better after lockdown, but I forgot one thing: I have a toddler and a baby, and my options for easy, spontaneous contacts were inexistent. Furthermore, kids cost energy: Rarely did we have the energy to play games in the evening, so we settled on one game: the excellent Arkham Horror Card Game. So Root, Everdell, Scythe, Eldritch Horror… just stood there, gathering dust.

    But then Gloomhaven came. A huge, sprawling tactical dungeon crawler with a legacy-style campaign mode (one in which the game board changes dynamically as you play) that came in a gargantuan box, it was nerd heaven. And it was cooperative. So I could just, you know, play two players by myself. But that would be weird, right? Totally weird.

    So I did it anyway. I built the game board, put the minis and standees on it and played the entire thing in complete silence for a three hour session. I alternated between character/player 1, a warrior that looked like a rock, and character/player 2, a crystallized-style mage, defeated the bandits and packed the thing away.

    Then, the next night, I did it again. And again, and again. I suddenly found myself shopping for brushes and paint to paint minis. I had Spotify recommend me a good playlist. I looked up guides on the internet, added another character – a rat with mind control powers! – to my party. As someone who spends most of his time on a computer, managing tokens and moving pieces on a game board felt fun, because for once, something was just happening in my mind.

    My party: Otcho the Berserker, John the Doomweaver, Delka the Cragheart, Kuu the Spellweaver and Tomo the Mindthief. I had to retire MVP Delka and replaced him with John, whom I decided to hate, that’s why I didn’t paint him. Fuck you John!

    And now, three years later, I defeated the titular Gloom – and finished the campaign. The warrior and the mage have long left the party and were replaced by a barbarian and a ranger, making this huge box feel like a living, breathing thing. I had a blast, and I’m kind of going to miss this game, with its fiddly mechanics, its supertiny tokens, its rules upon rules that just work together like clockwork…

    So it’s a good thing this game has a sequel. It comes in an even bigger box. It has even more weird rules. And it’s called Frosthaven. That’s right – Gloomhaven on ice. It’s the nerdiest shit, and I’m having a blast.

  • One Piece – huh, they actually did it

    One Piece – huh, they actually did it

    Here’s a little suggestion: Go watch One Piece on Netflix. It’s really, really good. And I can’t really wrap my head around the fact that they managed to pull it off.

    A little background: One Piece is originally a manga. And not just any manga, it’s one of the longest running manga series ever. I bought the first volume back in 2002, and by that time the series had been running for five years. This year, the piratey adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, Japan’s version of Guybrush Threepwood or Jack Sparrow turned 26! And it’s still good.

    The story: Happy-go-lucky Monkey D. Luffy wants to be King of the Pirates. The only problem is: A magical devil fruit robbed him of his swimming powers. Now Luffy doesn’t care, he’ll just be the kind of pirate that doesn’t fall in the ocean. And more importantly: The devil fruit granted him magical powers – by turning him into rubber. On his 1000 chapter and rising long journey, he goes from rags to riches, gathers a crew consisting of, amongst others, a samurai, a thief, a sniper, a cook, a woman who can summon hands everywhere, an antropomorphic racoon, a cyborg and fucking skeleton Jimi Hendrix. This series gets incredibly weird, and the adventures of the straw hat pirates get insane – but even after all these years, I’m still enthralled. The reason: Eiichiro Oda, the mangaka, is a storytelling genius, who can create stories as complex as Game of Thrones (but weird) and still never lose track of what the emotional core of the series is: Dreaming big.

    I have no idea why it took so long for someone to do a live action version of this story, seeing how it’s so insanely popular. But what I understand even less is that, in world in which Cowboy Bebop (a grounded rock-music-themed anime that is a pastiche of Sci-Fi and Film Noir) gets a show, One Piece is the one to actually be good. Yes, it’s silly, but it gets the emotions just right. It features shockingly little CG (for a show about a rubber man). And it has a stellar cast that’s just plain fun to watch.

    Will they adapt the entire run? Unlikely, seeing how that would take them at least ten years. Will this show stay good? Hard to say, but season two is a true trial featuring the first truly outlandish stuff in the story. But hey: I’m giddy. Because after 20 years of reading One Piece, I can finally write this post and convince everyone to partake in the magical journey I have been on all this time. So what are you waiting for?

  • Alone in the Dark – a retrospective, pt2

    Alone in the Dark – a retrospective, pt2

    Alone in the Dark is one of the most influential video game series of my childhood. And thank God the new game isn’t releasing in October after all, because I totally forgot about my retrospective. Here’s part two!

    Alone in the Dark 2 and 3 – late to the party

    The year was 1998. I was 13 years old, and this was a different world than the one in which I had been so scared of that damn library in the first game. This was the era of the Nintendo 64, I had played Super Mario 64 and had tried Ocarina of Time an hour in a brick and mortar game store. It cost 50 francs and it was well worth it. Games like Alone in the Dark – where the backgrounds were not full 3D but pre-rendered (i.e. “drawn”) – were super old to me, and I hadn’t heard of Final Fantasy VII to prove me wrong yet.

    But there I was, on a Sunday morning, with my dad, in another relic of the past: A hardware store that happened to also sell video games. While my dad was shopping for tools, I used to gawk at the rows and rows of games. And then I would springt across the aisles, find my dad in the screws section, and he would know he didn’t need screws but was screwed, because I would start nagging incessantly for some game.

    It didn’t always work, and only now as a parent myself I understand the delicate intricacies of “I haven’t had my coffee yet” or “God damn I just can’t be bothered today”. So when I saw Alone in the Dark 2, on CD-ROM, sitting on that shelf, my jaw dropped. There was a sequel?! I yanked the blue jewel case out of the shelf and read the back. Pirates! Mob bosses! This sounded awesome. I was just about to run to my dad when my pre-hormonal teenage mind was shook again. Because what I hadn’t noticed: behind the blue jewel case was a red one. Alone in the Dark motherfucking 3.

    I didn’t even so much as look at that jewel case. I just snatched it and ran to my dad, thinking how I would convince him to buy me not one, but two games. I don’t remember how I did it. I don’t think I did – I think it was the aforementioned coffee or the god damn. Who knows – but I got those games. They’re both pretty mediocre.

    And I played the shit out of them.

    Alone in the Dark 2 is a game in which you, guns blazing, have to rescue a kid from mobsters and pirates on Christmas day. It is the Die Hard of the series. The horror elements? Gone – rightfully, I think, because even two years after the release of the first game, it didn’t look scary at all anymore. The only problem is: Crazy pre-rendered backgrounds and weird perspectives are not really that great for aiming. It’s a frustrating affair.

    Alone in the Dark 3 is a western featuring zombies and even a cyborg. I sometimes like to pretend they based Wild Wild West with Will Smith on this thing. It is, in my opinion, the better game of the two, because it ditches most of the action and puts more emphasis on the puzzles. Only problem: Most of the puzzles stink. They’re super obtuse, especially when you’re thirteen and without internet.

    Still, these games hold a special place in my heart and I played them religiously. They’re the first games that made me look at walkthroughs on the internet. I still have the CD-ROMs, I bought the games on GOG and on Steam – and I even ordered a rare floppy version of the second game with a 1993 strategy guide that details how Infogrames’ “cinematic technology” is the way all games are going to be in the future. The floppy version is horrible, with poorly sampled MIDI music and parts of the game missing, I payed quite a bit of money for it, but I regret nothing.

    That’s nostalgia for ya.