Today, I got a phishing e-mail. I hope you have never been subject to such a shocking event for yourself, and apologize if the horror of my tale gave you a heart attack. Well, this one looked a bit more legit than most of them, and it was certainly audacious: A mail claiming to be from Yahoo and sent by a Yahoo user. It somehow passed my spam filter, so I decided I might as well tell Yahoo about it, so they might unleash their mighty rage upon the morally bankrupt offender. For sure, there would be an “abuse” e-mail account, to which I could forward the mail with an appropriate one-liner. ...

Just as a heads-up for those of you who do not keep an eye on the Humble Bundle page all the time: The new offer (valid for two weeks from now) is really worth its money. You can get the whole BioShock series, SpecOps: The Line, XCom Enemy Unknown and XCom Declassified, Mafia II and The Darkness II if you pay 20$ or more, and if you pay more than the average customer (which would mean about 6$ right now), you get everything minus XCom: EU and BioShock Infinite. ...

It doesn’t shy away from asking important questions . It is highly educational. It has well-written dialogs. And it’s as incomprehensible as Metal Gear Solid 2. You might have guessed it - it’s a Pokémon bootleg, one that’s usually known as Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal. And it is probably the most entertaining video game I ever encountered, thanks to its weird, dadaist charme. Some things are barely comprehensible, some are just plain wrong, there are about five hundred items called “POLE”, about 50% of the attacks are completely misnamed (“FLAME”? It’s Water Gun, what did you think!), but every second line in the game will make you laugh so hard it hurts. There are a couple of Let’s Plays of the thing, the most famous one was done by Delicious Cinnamon, who also have some other Pokémon bootleg games in their library. You should totally go watch it right now. ...

Violence – is there anything it can’t fix? Well, history would teach us that there is indeed, but nobody likes history and it never gets invited to any LAN parties. Broforce (subtitled “Freedom Simulator”) is a very ironic indie side scroller about solving problems the only way worth the effort: by making lots of stuff explode. The gameplay is highly focused on co-op, so the only component I really tried out was the campaign because everything else appears to need other players. Because the game is one of these Early Access things that are all the rage these days on Steam, nobody in my peer group seems to own it.

This is. My regular opponent and me sat down to play S13 Priority Target, and then we played it again with reversed sides. I lost twice, which confirms the ASL Scenario Archive’s claim of perfect balance. My opponent wrote AARs for both games, which are pretty good and are really detailed in their analysis of how I managed to screw up so much.

I just finished playing S28 Out of Luck, which you can get for free at MMP’s wobsite. I lost so badly that not even blaming it on the dice makes it any better. Was it the scenario’s fault? Probably not. As most of the times, I completely screwed up my setup, leaving a large blind spot on the hard-to-defend hills in the northwest corner and concentrating on the open ground in the northeast and the city in the southwest, near the exits. My opponent, of course, used this weak spot to utterly destroy me. I didn’t even need bad luck to lose. ...

This question gets asked a lot on the various ASL-related fora: “I want to get into ASL, where do I start?”. Let me offer my personal viewpoint, speaking as a guy who is just starting to play real ASL. So you think this ASL thing could be interesting for you. But there are so many ASL products out there, where is the right place to start? Well, with the Starter Kits, obviously! But by now, even the product range of these things can be a bit confusing. ...

So my regular Starter Kit opponent and me sat down to play our first match of 2014, “Converging Assaults” (Starter Kit Expansion Pack #1, S48), which was probably the weirdest match I’ve ever played. What’s it about? US troops advance into a city in Sicily from the West and meet Italian troops advancing from the West. A firefight ensues. For added fun, some Italian tanks are added into the mix and fall into the back of the US infantry. ...

Stating their favourite scenarios of the year is a thing people are doing, which is why I do it now as well. As mentioned before, I only played Starter Kit so far, so the list will obviously only contain Starter Kit scenarios. S1 “Retaking Vierville”: My first scenario played ever, with Patrick Ireland, who showed me the ropes when I started. I have since played it once or twice with other players, and even though it is as simple as ASL will ever get, it still manages to be just a bit different every time you play it. Also, nostalgia. YMMV, of course. S49 “Cooks, Clerks and Bazookas”: Played that one two times on different sides. I’m not really sure why I like it, but… well, I like it. It covers everything there is in the Starter Kits, is neither too big nor too claustrophobic and can be played really quickly. By the way, you can read an AAR I wrote over at BoardGameGeek. [caption id=“attachment_12” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] Cooks, Clerks and Bazookas, with exploding stuff.[/caption] ...

Now I’ve created this blog, I might as well talk a bit about why I did it and why you should care. Short version: I like ASL, and if you stumbled upon my blog, you probably do so as well. Long version: About a year ago, probably a bit longer, I searched for a replacement of BattleTech because I got kind of bored of our weekly gatherings here at Dresden, Germany. At that point, I had been playing BT for about two years, and I liked the feeling of having a game that’s so complex you can play it for such a long time and still be interesting and at times surprising. But the way we played it, it slowly started to get monotonous for me, as we always played Tech-Level One, and always with ‘Mechs only. In ASL terms, think playing “The Guards Counterattack” over and over again. ...