I kinda liked it better when we had threads per game, felt like it got more discussion going, but I guess this is the way we’re doing things now…
Today I played:
Excalibur (J.J. Guest, G.C. Baccaris)
Disclaimer: I spent a few hours throwing together the “here’s where the boxes go” part of the CSS for J.J. a few years back)
The story of a possibly-apocryphal (?) 70s science-fantasy TV show, as told through a fan-wiki.
Thoughts
If you’ve seen much of J.J.'s work you probably have a good idea of what to expect from this. Well-written, a little zany and off-beat, with lots of quirky little human touches to the characters.
I did have a little trouble getting into this: it didn’t feel like there was a great introductory article, and I had a hard time following the action in the first episode’s page. But that could be a stylistic “this is a wiki written by crazy fans who sometimes leave out “obvious” things because everybody knows that” choice?
And it could perhaps have been a little more densely cross-linked in places.
But it was a lot of fun and does a great job of capturing the feel of a fan wiki. I must have spent a good couple hours chasing around through this maze.
Journey to Ultimate Fightdown (Havilah “mwahahavilah” McGinnis)
Set up like an isometric click-to-move-your-character videogame like the original Diablo or some such. The “connection” goes out just before the dramatic final battle and the “actors” are left wandering around talking to each other while they wait.
Thoughts
Sort of the usual “minions complaining about their corporate overlords” schtick, but relatively light and fun, not too dark. Each character has one “inventory item” (the player character has three) and you can trade the items around and talk to everybody about everybody else, and there are funny ending bits based on who has what item. If you give a character the “Crown of Agency” then they take over being the player and go on a rant about their pet peeve in lieu of the final battle. How many of these combinations did you write endings for! This is nuts.
A little slow-paced what with waiting for your character to walk around and the dialogue being cut up into tiny pieces that reveal one line at a time, but snappy enough that it’s not too painful the first time through.
I did several quick playthroughs to check out various characters’ victory rants and then one long one to get the connection restored with the original player still in control and to try to match up a whole bunch of items with characters. It says “short” but this could easily eat up an enjoyable hour or two…it did for me.