The first half of 2022 was not too bad on the miniature painting front, but I fell far short of the 4 armies I was hoping to complete before the summer months.

After the weather cooled, I just couldn't get back into the habit, and until recently I had not picked up a brush since June.

However, I found myself with a run of six days with no work during December. Though I probably should have been thinking about getting Christmas sorted, I instead decided to dive back in at the deep end and have a massive painting week.

Rather than continue working on the things I'd already started, I had the bright idea to try and paint my entire 6mm android army within the six day period. Difficult, at my painting speed, but as they are mostly metallic, I thought it might be possible.

Of course, I was wrong.

It's not like I didn't try either. On two of the days, I painted for 10 hours straight, and there was also an 8 hour shift, two 6 hours and a 4. I just don't paint fast enough to get shit done.

I didn't help my cause when I realised too late that I had not fully cleaned the mold lines when I assembled the army back in 2009. Oh well. Too late to worry about that at this point, so I just soldiered on. They're an unoffical army anyway, so getting them done in a quick and cheap way would be fine by me.

I threw further wrenches into the gears when I decided the walkers needed proper bases, so I glued them onto some cheap 25mm bases I'd got, and plugged the gaps using thinned down filler. They do look a lot better, and more closely match the Ork Stompers in size now, which are their most direct comparison.

After the six days were up, I'd made some progress, but I was a long way off. Half of the infantry and all of the walkers were base painted and washed, awaiting highlights. The other half of the infantry was mostly base painted, just needing a few more details on the weapons and things. But I had not started the three big models at all.

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Over the last few years, I've put together quite a lot of tabletop games by printing off and assembling them myself. In nearly every case, I've taken the official print'n'play version of the game, and heavily modified it in my own way, to either make it easier on my printer ink, or make cards fit my available card sleeves, for example.

This next game was going to need more modification and work than probably all of the others combined. The game is called The Shipwreck Arcana, a co-operative game where players must work together to divine their fates and escape their doom! Sounds a lot more interesting than it actually is, considering the game is mainly just "guess which number I'm holding". I'd have much preferred to have bought it, but I've had my eyes on it for months, and it has just not been available here.

The game consists of cards and wooden tokens. The cards were no problem. I took the print'n'play version of the game, removed a lot of black parts from the cards to save ink, printed them out, and slid them into some new tarot card size sleeves I bought.

But there's no way of downloading and printing the wooden tokens. Not without a real fancy printer, that is. So I had to go about making them myself.

I bought some laser cut wooden squares, with the extras going into my Super Dungeon Explore box to be integrated into that game later. Then there was a lot of painting, creating templates for the numbers, more painting, and finally sealing to get them done.

So the game is now ready and just waiting its turn at the table. I hope the enjoyment we get is worth all the effort.

Just recently, a fun-looking side-scroller came out set in the Warhammer 40K universe called Shootas, Blood & Teef. It reminded me of a game I already owned called Guns, Gore & Cannoli, and upon further research I discovered they are by the same studio.

It made sense for Scoob and I to give the first game a try before trying out its newer, sillier and Orkier big brother.

In this game, you play as gangsters who are going through a city which has been infected by a zombie plague. Along the way, you also have to fight against other gangsters and even the army, who are trying to stop anyone from leaving the city. A variety of more powerful weapons can be found as you progress, allowing you to mow down, incinerate, and explode enemies faster.

At first, we were both using controllers, but I was frustrated with the default binds, and wanted to change them to something more typical of an action platformer. So off I popped to the menu to rebind the buttons, when I found I could not. More confusion arose when we discovered we could rebind Scoob's player 2 controller.

So I re-started the game with just 1 controller plugged in, and saw I could now rebind. So I rebound, then restarted the game with 2 controllers plugged in, only to find both controllers had been rebound to the new buttons. No problem, I thought, as we knew we could rebind player 2's controller. So that's exactly what I did, and put it back to default, only to soon find this had also returned player 1's buttons to default.

So for some stupid fucking reason, this game will simply not let you use different button configurations on your controllers. Really pissed me off.

Scoob then volunteered to use the keyboard, so that we could continue without me getting really annoyed.

The rebinds weren't the only issue we had with this game's controls, as we also suffered from a little bit of input lag. Looking back now, I'm wondering if vsync was on and causing issues, but I didn't think to check while playing. Anyway, it wasn't a huge deal, just a slight annoyance.

There was one other main problem I had, which was that it's impossible to aim up or down in this game, so all the shots always go horizontal. I think this is fairly typical for this kind of game, but it probably shouldn't happen these days, especially when there's a lot of verticality in the game, like jumping up and down onto other levels, and going up and down a lot of stairs. It's pretty annoying when you're stuck on some stairs, and a blob of enemies is running up them right towards you, and you can't shoot them until they're at point blank range.

I guess it says quite a lot that even with these annoyances, the game was still quite fun to play, with the only other little bugbear being the fairly long reload times on the weapons. The premise and plot were also entertaining. I mean, who wouldn't want to see ridiculously over the top mobsters going up against zombies? They should make a film of that.

And the game didn't take all that long, despite having to replay several sections a bunch of times near the end of the game as the difficulty increased. I'd say it was fun and worth it for what it was, but with a bit more care and attention, the game could have been pretty damn awesome.

Recently played through an absolute brain-bender of a puzzle game called Patrick's Parabox.

Initially I was a bit cheesed off. I'd had my eye on this for ages on itch.io, where it seems to be DRM free. I was just waiting for it to go on sale. Then one day, I saw it on sale on Steam. I could find no information about its DRM status on that platform, but thinking a little indie game like this would surely be DRM free there as well, I took the plunge. It didn't take long to find out I had been incredibly mistaken, when I tried to back it up and play it on my main, Steam-less, machine.

Lesson learned.

So after I sighed my frustrations out, I got down to playing. So, what's it all about?

In this game, you play as a little square, and you have the task of pushing other squares around until the necessary spaces on the level have the correct kind of square on them. Sounds pretty easy, right?

Well think again.

Things start to get really weird really quickly, when you start pushing squares into, through, and out of one another, including into and out of themselves in seemingly infinite loops.

The game progresses through a bunch of different stages, where each stage contains a bunch of puzzles and side puzzles that all center around a similar theme or mechanic. As you would imagine, at the start of the game, these mechanics are quite simple, requiring only a little bit of thought. But as the game continues, some of these newly introduced mechanics and ideas started to blow my brain.

Each stage only requires you to beat a certain amount of puzzles in order to advance to the next, but early on in the game I planned on clearing all of the puzzles. However, a few puzzles started to creep in here and there which I simply couldn't wrap my head around. And before long, especially nearer the end of the game, I was finding it hard to beat enough puzzles to get to the next stage.

The last stage, called Multi Infinite, warped my brain so much that I put the game down for a week just to reset, before going back and managing to beat it. Phew.

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I continued my adventures through the weird and twisted landscapes of DARQ, by playing through the two DLCs.

Both DLCs use a new mechanic, in that you can control your head separately to your body, by rolling it around through small gaps and such. The difference is that, in the second DLC, called The Crypt, this mechanic was overdone to the point of frustration. The amount of times I had to switch back and forth between my body and head to try things in a slightly different way or slightly different order had me ready to throw my computer out of the window.

The first DLC, The Tower, was a lot more enjoyable. The puzzles just seemed to make more logical sense to me, and there was less frustration.

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I remember watching the old Karate Kid movies as a kid, and I guess I enjoyed them as much as anyone else did back then. But I've never really thought back on them with any kind of fondness like I do for films like The Goonies or Gremlins, for example.

So who would have thought that the Cobra Kai series would end up being one of my favourite things over these past few years?

A little while back, a beat 'em up game based on the series was released. It only seemed right that I grab Scoob and bring him along for some merciless beat downs on our opponents.

For the most part, the game is just like any other beat 'em up, where you travel from left to right wailing on opponents with a variety of different skills. But there's a strange thing about this game. Well, at least for a game that is supposedly based in "reality", anyway. And this is that the characters can unleash all kinds of strange attacks, like explosions and ice spikes and so forth. This is explained away by the whole plot being a flashback, with two of the kids from the show re-telling events to their school headteacher, and dramatically overexaggerating.

Now, we like beat 'em ups, and for the most part enjoyed this one as well. But all of these wild explosions and effects happening all over the screen often made it difficult to see exactly what was going on, and this brought the enjoyment down for us. It was just chaos all over the screen. There were also a lot of issues with the camera, like enemies being off screen and able to hit us, while we couldn't move the camera to see them and hit them back.

Add in the fact that the game felt like it took a lot longer to play through than most other games of this type, and because of this we've gotten a bit of burnout.

This means that, while we completed the Cobra Kai campaign, we still need to play through the Miyagi-Do campaign to fully complete the game. However, I simply don't know at the moment, whether we, or just I, will return to it at a later date.

We got the new Epic rules back to the tabletop recently in a good weekend of dice rollin' action. Up first Gareth took control of the Imperials against Scoob, who was using the android army I put together from Dark Realm Miniatures many years ago. This was the first time these two armies had been used in these new rules, and it came right down to the wire.

After a few hours of exchanging laser blasts and missiles, and the clashing of blades on armour, the androids won the day by just 43 pts. In a 6000pt game, 43pts is basically nothing.

The day after, it was my turn to take control of the Imperial forces, as Scoob brought the Nidz into the game for the first time, leaving only the Eldar and Squats in need of introduction.

In another 6000pt game, volleys of battlecannon and lascannon fire tore into the Nidz. They pulled it back somewhat once they got closer in, but I managed a 3452-2884 win. It definitely seemed like the Nidz psychic powers need buffing, and some of their units need a little combat boost, so I'll make that happen for their next Epic-S adventure.

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It's been a long time since I last painted any Blood Bowl models. This is especially true for the star players, as they rarely get used in games.

Still, I've painted a few such models in the past, but for some reason, images of them haven't existed on my site since way back in 2012 or something.

So I took some new photos. And now they exist again.

Sweet.