The Horus Heresy book
I'm almost finished reading The Horus Heresy: Collected Visions, a compilation of the four volumes containing the history of how the warmaster Horus betrayed the Emperor and the Space Marines, and the battles that took place in the heresy era.
When I was a child, this story were a mere few pages explaining that the warmaster made a pact with Chaos, and converted four chapters of space marines, with vage details of what happened, except that the Emperor defeated Horus but resulted heavily injuried in the battle.
This (big) book extends the history, explaining and telling how was the conversion to chaos, how he defiled the emperor and converted the four chapters to embrace the chaos forces, and even the status and inner battles of the Cult Mechanicum at Mars.
The first two volumes are a bit slow, repeating some tales and advancing slow in the events. Then, the action speeds up and gets a better pace.
The book is full of illustrations, some of them quite good, some decent, and a few ones really bad. The bad ones are mostly sketches that seem to be full-page just to fill more pages of a single image instead of written content, but overall I enjoy reading it.
One point against the pictures is the inconsistency of some of them. Those who, like me, have played Warhammer 40.000 since the 2nd edition, probably know that until then, the Space Marines used the MKVI armor, and had Rhinos and Land Raiders. In the second edition, MKVII armor is the standard, and few years later Games Workshop remade the Rhinos and Land Raiders to "MKII" models, similar but with visual differences.
Some of the artists seem to have focused just on the newer armors and vehicles, just drawing them with the chaotic chapter colors, or placing just one or two different details, which gives a "historical" inconsistency with the technology at that era.
Same happens with Terminator armour and Dreadnoughs: Some of the pictures represent really different and ancient-looking armors, while some appear to be too similar to the current venerable dreadnoughs and termies.
Apart from the inconsistencies, overall the book is good. It is not too expensive so if you like to get a deep understanding of the events that led to the current Chaos Space Marines I recommend this book.
Been busy lately...
I've been quite busy lately, with my change of job, some "hardware work" on my house and having small holidays. But now that everything is getting normal again, I hope to be back posting frecuently.
This past weeks I've been reading a lot of comic books, some old ones I already had, some bought either in comic stores or in my small trip to Barcelona.
The three most interesting comic books I've read are this:
A world in which mouses live in a medieval society in hidden cities, guarded from cats and other dangers. A group of guardians, seeking trails of a traitor. A DnD-like adventure, with beautiful drawings.
It was a bit short but I liked it anyway.
Warhammer 40.000: Damnation Crusade
My first introduction to Warhammer 40k novels, in this case a graphic novel. It narrates some battles of the Dark Templars Space Marine Chapter against Orcs and Chaos (mostly, few other races appear).
Drawings are ok (but not incredible), but it reminded me of my childhood painting my Dark Angels miniatures. Narrative is "a-la-Warhammer 40k", super-humans blindly fighting for the Emperor with unbreakable faith and courage.
Comic book adaptation of the great novel. I was impressed of how exact text were. Drawings are in black&white but not bad, and help to transmit the fear and hopeless atmosphere of the story.
Recommended if you liked the novel.
Also, this weekend I took from my mother's house my old Gameboy and all the games I had with it. Among them, was one RPG I started but never finished, The Sword of Hope.
The game is a typical turn based, static screen RPG, with battles like Final Fantasy games. Story is typical, enemies are typical and battles are (typically) a bit too often and boring; You either die almost 100% sure or crush the enemies, depending on your level.
The interesting part is, being as limited as the original gameboy was, how developers put on the game a full RPG. I'm finishing it to see how big it is, but right now this are my thoughts:
- Combat is too simple: Attack or use spells (each level you gain more, usually more powerfull ones), or use healing items.
- Enemies are dumb: Sometimes they fight each other, sometimes they even hit themselves with spells, and there is few variety of them.
- Inventory is quite limited too: Just a maximum of 7 of each item (3 bits of data ;), just 255 gold (8 bits of data ;), you can only buy better armor (and I hope swords too later...), and you usually carry at most 2 or 3 special items.
- Level cap is 31 from what I've seen in the www, and you only have dex., stam. hits, mana and resistance points/variables.
Here are some screenshots:
As I said, the game is a bit limited, but excepting the tiring leveling up, fun to play.
Extra: Just released, the Wow Talent Calculator for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion
WoW journal entry #03172006 + Misc.
Not many news... I'm very busy studing some arcane scrolls so I don't have too much time for killing monsters.
I've battled again horde enemies (they appear to like this zone, I've identified at least three back again from the last encounter).
With an elven mate we managed to free an encampment from a tauren druid and an undead mage.
Later I found the same undead rogue that I battled multiple times, and I died, but I'm improving my skills disarming, slowing, and stunning for next encounters with rogues.
Finally, I went back to the encampment after finishing a quest (killing some big, nasty elder tigers) just to discover it was overrun with horde... I counted 2 warriors, 1 mage, one rogue, one warlock and at least one hunter, at least one of them high-level (I can't measure yet their level if they're too strong for me).
So... I went back to Ironforge, smelted some minerals, helped the local dwarven cloth store (by donating to them 60 silk cloth pieces), and take a ride to Wetlands to finish some quests (now that I'm more powerful).
The small town inside wetlands' stronghold
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