Salute 2009

OK first things first, I would like to welcome Mr Farrow my latest follower, thanks for joining. Last Saturday me, Peeler and mini Peeler all went to Salute. Great day out even if it did mean getting up early. I set off from my house at about 6:00 to meet up with Peeler at his place, from there we set off to Salute. We stopped off for breakfast at Macky D's to fuel us up for the journey ahead. The journey took us about 4 hours to get there. So we parked up then went off to browse around the show. Entry was pretty painless and we only had to queue for a couple of minutes. On entry we were given a goody bag which included a nice little Zulu diorama and a magazine. There were plenty of games on display as well as a number of participation games. The venue wasn't too crowded which made it easy to move around the place. They even had a radio controlled Tiger tank roaming around the venue.

There were some very impressive games on display including an escape from Colditz game. All in all it was a good day out with plenty to see and do.

Thank you very much Peeler for taking me. Here's some photos I took.

Going's on

Well no game as such last week but I did call round at Peeler's place last week for a chat and a game of Call of Duty, great fun on Nazi zombie mode. I think our inexperience showed though. Still at least we had a good laugh, I liked it so much that I went out and bought it for my PS3.
Anyway, looking ahead I've got a trip out to Salute this Saturday with Peeler so I'm really looking forward to that, I'm quite tempted to take Old Glory up on their offer of refunding the entrance fee when you spend over £60 at their trade stand.
I'll hopefully be taking my camera along to take some photos to put up on the blog but I will be setting off to meet Peeler pretty early so I'm not sure if my brain will be in gear to remember things like that.

Silent Hunter III gameplay

OK time for something a bit different. Following on from the post I put up about Silent Hunter III, I created this video of actual gameplay footage. If this proves popular then I will do the same for any future computer games I put on here. If you want to view a full screen version of this you'll find it here http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/310170.html

Going's on

Firstly, I would like to welcome my new follower Sajjad Ahmad Mughal. Well, my brother's now gone on his exchange trip to Sweden for the week so the house is a little quieter than usual. I guess I still have my day at Salute with Peeler to look forward to though so that should be a good day out. Also I've got a night out planned for April meeting up with my mate Doug to watch Wrestlemania.
The thing I'm looking forward to at my local gaming store is the Operation Bagration WWII campaign they're planning, so I'm frantically painting up Germans to use in the game. They're doing it to celebrate the release of the new campaign box set which I'm very tempted to get.







The set retails for £35 and includes the campaign board, miniature counters and a rulebook. Here's a bit more info on it from the publishers:

"Firestorm—Bagration gives you the tools to recreate the 1944 Soviet offensive in Byelorussia. On 22 June, more than 2,000,000 Soviet soldiers stormed the heavily fortified lines of the badly outnumbered German Army Group Centre. The German defences quickly crumbled under several sledgehammer blows. German armoured reserves rushed forward, desperately counterattacking to stem the on-rushing Red tide in the climactic Battle of Minsk.

Firestorm—Bagration
In Firestorm—Bagration, you command the Soviet or German forces fighting for Byelorussia in the critical months of June and July 1944.
Put yourself in command on the Eastern Front using your Flames Of War historical miniatures on the table­top. Each battle recreates a major engagement. The outcomes of your battles determine the fate of the campaign.

The General’s Wargame
The General’s Wargame is a fast-paced two-player Board game based on Firestorm—Bagration that uses all the contents of the box and takes 60 to 90 minutes to play.

Total War
Total War is designed to put big armies on big tables. Instead of a mere company, you can field your entire collection with thousands of points of Flames Of War troops arrayed across a large battlefield.

Partisans & Polizei
While the generals plan their campaigns, more personal battles are being fought. Vasiliy Kravchenko, a partisan leader, and his Polizei nemesis Dieter von Gaudron wage their own war in the fields and forests of Byelorussia.

River Crossings & No Retreat
Also included are new rules for crossing rivers, common yet formidable obstacles in Byelorussia. Use these rules to succeed in the new River Crossing Mission and the Crossing the Drut scenario, both found within. Then try holding the line in a second new mission, No Retreat.

As you can already get some sense this is something never done before and we are excited about what this could mean for the future."

I've been told by my mate at Space, Myth & Magic that depending on how well this set sells then Battlefront may design other sets for other campaigns.

Silent Hunter III

In my opinion the Silent Hunter series is the best submarine simulator available, and Silent Hunter III is no exception. I know there's a fourth game in the series but being of German ancestry I prefer the earlier games as they put you in charge of a German U-Boat rather than an American submarine.
Because Silent Hunter III has been around for a while it is rather cheap, also if you don't have a gaming store near you the game is now available on Steam. So if you go to the Steam website http://store.steampowered.com/, simply download the application then you can purchase games through their store and download them.
Silent Hunter III has a campaign and individual missions containing everything from the aftermath of the sinking of the Bismarck to sinking convoys.
The game also features a fully detailed control room as well as detailed lookout positions on the bridge and a free roaming camera feature for getting great screenshots.
You can also change the realism of the game, for example you can set dud torpedoes to on or off as well as a whole host of other things.
The campaign mode offers the player to upgrade many features on their submarine such as radar, deck guns and engines. When you start the campaign you select a U-boat to start with by purchasing it. Depending of the year which you start the campaign the selection of U-boats on offer will vary. So if you started in 1939 your choice would be much less than if you started in 1942.
The other feature I like about the game is that there's an action camara which comes up with a little window which displays things like when you fire a torpedoe you can track it's progress. If you click on this smaller picture the game jumps to whatever event is currently happening allowing you to see the action in full screen.
If there's one criticism I have about the game it's that there's no feature for linking it up to a sister game, only another Silent Hunter III gamer. In Silent Hunter II it featured an option to play against a fellow gamer playing Destroyer Command, in which one person took on the role of a U-Boat commander while the other person tried to track them down and sink them in their destroyer.
Other than that though it really is a good game, but if you really do want to battle it out with another person on the surface then Silent Hunter II is still just as good with only slight graphical differences.

LOTR Arwen

OK time for a change methinks. This is my GW Arwen figure. I painted this up so long ago I'd forgotten I had it until it came time for a major clearup of my room. I painted this up when I was practising my shading techniques. I only tend to do this on character figures as I think they require a bit of extra attention to make them stand out. When it comes to just basic troops, as there are often so many of them I usually just settle for a basic scheme.