EDITORIAL: Mr. Black’s Year in Review
What do you mean it’s 2011?
Urg… Mr. Black here, dear readers, and excuse me for a moment, I need to set myself… The entire last week has been a bit of a blur. Last thing I remember was New Year’s Eve and… goats and thongs? Dark Eldar Wyches with champagne and cattle-prods? Right then, not even going to try to remember any of that, just going to focus on why there are silly string, empty bottles, and… I’m not really sure what animal these chunks are from…
Huh, and apparently it’s 2011 now, and has been for seven days now…Well, happy New Year I suppose.
Ahem, anyway, let’s get down to business, after all, the best way to move forward is to look backwards, I think that’s a proverb from, well, somewhere. So what happened with 2010? Let’s take a look back and see.
The Swarm Arrives– January
Ah this takes me back, always did love Tyranids, except I hated the 3rd Edition Codex and it’s “Nidzilla or die!” approach to the game, so this seemed like a great new start for me. New year, new army! I remember the weeks before the English codex’s release I had snagged a copy of the German one (sources non-disclosed) and was toying with the fun new units, mainly warriors. See, to me the Tyranid Warrior box is one of the best sets in the game: the unit is great, the models are decent, and most of all they are just big enough to have fun painting, but not too big to become a chore, likewise you get three, enough to experiment and have fun with but not so many painting them becomes stagnant… And no, I still haven’t gotten around to painting my Tyranid army. Only a year late, that’s not so bad… is it?
For Whom the Bell Tolls- March
Wow, been that long has it? I remember way, waaaay, back when Bigred posted his little “BoLS Wants YOU!” looking for more writers and what-not and caught my interest. At the time it had been a few years since I wrote for the short-lived (six issue) gaming magazine Undefeated, but I figured it would be something fun to do as well as something to re-awaken and maintain some writing skills (lolz, we see how well that worked out! … Aww, now I’ve made myself sad…), so I promptly wrote an application filled with lies, threats, and slander and soon enough I got a reply. Seems Bigred and his boys liked an old article I had written and posted over on the Privateer Press forums, aptly named “Complete Guide to Cryx, aka the Bastard’s Guide to Warmachine“- was basically a small tactical breakdown of each caster and unit filled with low-brow jokes involving Great Racks… How far I’ve come.
Also took the liberty of digging up my original BoLS post in which I (very poorly) talked about how much I loved the Exorcist tank in the Witch Hunters codex. The pictures got blurred due to GW Copyright issue (people complained), the content is rambling (people complained), and the laws of grammar and spelling were brutalized (people complained). Generally the whole general thing is a big mess that no one should read; so here it is: My Shame
Descent of Angels- April
This was an exhausting year for me as far as GW is concerned, bringing out two armies I enjoyed playing back-to-back. First we had Tyranids in January then a mere three months later Blood Angels jumped out of their .pdf and into a shiny new book of their very own! Hmm, I’m beginning to see where all my finances for the year went… Well, in any case this release brought about mixed feelings from me. I have this little problem where I can’t stand playing an army I see everyone else playing, guess I just have to be different, and I much enjoyed Blood Angels as, being the .pdf red-headed-stepchild that they were, I never saw anyone else playing them.
The codex release changed that.
Since then though I have gotten over it and merely chose a successor chapter that no one else (in my area) even considered: the Angels Sanguine. This was a fun painting challenge since, for those who don’t know, the colour scheme for them is split black and red. I always wanted to do an army like that and this was a fun opportunity… Now I just have to get around to actually finishing them. Damn… Am I seriously this much of a slack-ass? Moving on…
Toruk Rising- June
Hey hey! Forces of Warmachine: Cryx! This was an exciting time for me as, probably more than I let on (I hardly ever talk about that! Or Great Racks, right?), I’m a Privateer Press fanboy. Now, to get it out of the way, I love the company more than anything else, since I actually feel they go above-and-beyond to show their player-base their opinion matters and that they appreciate them. That being said when they released the new edition of their game (which I’ll be the first to admit drastically needed re-tooling) I was all over it, but I really didn’t get back into the swing of things until the FoW: Cryx book came out. I remember digging out my old models, some bought the first month of the game’s existence back in 2003, and… promptly stripping the models due to the horrendous paint job that I had given them, and, surprise surprise, I have yet to re-paint all of them.
Good memories though of getting back into the game: going back and seeing all the tweaks and fixes that Privateer had painstakingly worked on, old units I designated as unplayable crap (Necrosurgeon) now having a real and functional battlefield role, casters and powers which I thought overpowered or simply unenjoyable to play against now retooled and balanced (entirety of Cygnar), it was a great time for me and really rekindled my love of the game (and Skarre).
Ye Olde Worlde Returns(e)- July
Here we had the release of Warhammer Fantasy 8th edition and the dawning of my Witch Coven of Khaine army… Started a Skaven army when Island of Blood came out… That didn’t last. And yes that’s down the line but only mentioning Fantasy once. There are some problems I have with the edition, mainly focused around the loss of importance of cavalry as well as the sheer power of some magic spells (mainly Lore of Life), but overall it’s a nice solid edition that showed GW is actually capable of making serious revamps to their systems and doing it well. I have high hopes for Fantasy in 2011 and would love to see more of it.
Move Over Slaanesh- October
I didn’t want to do it, I really didn’t, but after reading over the codex and lamenting the loss of my old Emperor’s Children Combat Drug Orgy army my will broke and I picked up Dark Eldar. Is it bad I only got them because they reminded me of their immortal enemy, Slaanesh? There is some irony there I’m sure. Really this started as a trickling tide, with a box purchase here and there and the resolution that I would not open a box until the previous one was painted- and I’m proud to say that has mostly kept in tact. So yeah, I know it may seem like a bandwagon year for me as I jumped on the new armies, but in reality I already played two of them! I’m so totally not bandwagon!! Yeah… I’ll keep telling myself it’s that and not the hard to resist shinies that GW keeps throwing my way..
The Goat Must Die- December
(Hey hey, thought you could slip that past me did you? Sorry Mr. B, I don’t care how much it angers you or how “cool“ a story it is, I can’t allow something that graphic to be posted on my site, or any site for that matter.- Bigred)
And that, dear readers, pretty much sums up my gaming year. Was it awesome? Well we had two new edition releases, three cool new armies, and a bunch of awesome new plastic models for the existing ones, so all-in-all it was a blast! One thing I will say for the new year though: You spent 2010 getting your new toys so now spend 2011 painting it all up! And avoid the temptation to start a Daemonhunters army in March, remember that you sold off that Grey Knights army to get the Blood Angels and Dark Eldar!
~There you have it everyone, my year in review. Tell me, what were some of your favorite moments and releases from the long forgotten age of 2010? Was it as good for you as it was for me?
