Is Football Manager the Greatest RPG Ever? (tldr: YES!)
No two games of Football Manager are ever alike, and the “true ending” is largely up to you. If you like multiple overlapping systems with a depth and complexity that can’t easily be min-maxed, Football Manager’s got that in spades. Praise RNGesus!
Five Things: September 21, 2023
“On book bans, Google Fusion, car-free cities, cars as spyware, and a podcast recommendation.” Five things for September 21, 2023.
Five Things: August 31, 2023
“On Gen Z, hip hop, Netflix games, Football Manager, and my film nerd son.” Five things for August 23, 2023.
In Praise of Virtual “Work” (aka Football Manager)
Some people play games to relax, to escape the tedium and/or stress of their jobs, to challenge their reflexes — physical and mental. Football Manager is a bizarre combination of both, which really should not be appealing at all. It can be stressful and tedious, while also challenging your mental abilities because, at the end of the day, it’s a glorified spreadsheet with multiple pivot tables — and I love it so much, it’s taken me a week to stop playing it long enough to write this post about it!
Five Things: June 22, 2023
“I’m so worn down by it all right now.” Five things for June 22, 2023. That’s it! That’s the excerpt.
Five Things: May 11, 2023
“They simply must do better.” Five things for May 11, 2023. That’s it! That’s the excerpt.
Shadowrun Subverted? A First Look at Subversion RPG
Remember the “This is the world liberals want!” meme? Subversion is the game they’d be talking about, and I mean that as high praise. While it has the requisite cyberpunk trappings of economic dystopia and extreme power imbalances, it flips Shadowrun’s integration of fantasy on its head, imagining a world that a) always had magic and fantastic lineages (aka, races), and b) building upon Babylonian mythology as its foundation instead of the usual European inspirations. In Neo Babylon, magic has ruled for eons and technology is trying to level the playing field, disrupting the balance of power while crushing the underprivileged between them. In this world, the cops (Lawjacks) are implicitly a gang.
Into the Shadowrun Rabbit Hole: Character Creation
I’ve had an itch to write something in this ridiculous and ridiculously cool world since I finished Shadowrun Returns a couple of months ago, like I used to for D&D, and have started sketching out my first character’s backstory.
Five Things: March 2, 2023
“It’s basically Pop-Up Video 3.0.” Five things for March 2, 2023. That’s it! That’s the excerpt.
Five Things: February 2, 2023
“Accountability rolls downhill in Corporate America.” Five things for February 2, 2023. That’s it! That’s the excerpt.