Media - gaming - Page 3 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the battlefield at the beginning of the game. It's played on a roughly six-by-four foot play mat that's decorated like grass, and the terrain is almost fantasy-looking, there are some sections of hills and a bunch of various stone ruins. Closest to the camera are the orange-clad Space Marines, including two large walkers (the Dreadnaughts) and a gravtank with a big lasgun on its turret), and on the opposite side are the hordes of "Tyranids", which all look like a cross between crabs and the actual Tyranid models. There are a ton of small ones, and two HUGE ones that a towering over everything else.

A closeup photo of one of the large "Tyranid" units ( I don't remember what it was, but it's all chitin and huge claws and if it was actually alive and real size would scare the fuck out of you) towering over a squad of Space Marines.

Today started with me hopping on the Metro first thing after breakfast to go to Crows Nest to pick up my last two fully serviced and restrung guitars (the Ibanez JIVA10 and the Epiphone SG Standard), then I headed over to a friend's place for lunch (it was tuna mornay and it was gooooooood) and to hang out and watch a game of Warhammer 40,000! It was Space Marines versus "Tyranids", where the Tyranid miniatures were some custom 3D-printed alien crab things. They didn't end up doing the final turn because the Space Marines were already ahead 50-35 and it wasn't going to be possible to bridge that gap.

There was some hilarious dice rolling though, including a squad of 20 Termagaunts firing their Spinefist weapons at a squad of Space Marine Scouts, which involved rolling forty dice. 😂 (The Scouts ended up dead, unsurprisingly.)

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Posted on 8 November 2025, 18:38

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. Closest to the camera are my Corsair Voidscarred (think punk/pirate space elves) in elegant fuchsia-coloured armour, and facing them on the far side of the board are the pustulant warriors of the Death Guard. There are three Plague Marines in hulking green armour with tentacles coming out of them, and six Poxwalkers which are basically zombies but with open wounds and bone spikes and tentacles.

A close-up photo of Arendra Firewinter, my Starstorm Duellist, right as she was vaporising one of the Plague Marines. She has dark skin and a bald head with a white flowing topknot, is wearing got a dark-ish teal cape that looks like it's blowing in the wind, and she's holding two elegant-looking alien pistols, one of them aimed forward and the other held pointing upright like she's just finished shooting it. Through the hatchway in front of her is one of the hulking Plague Marines holding a huge boltgun and with a demon face in his shoulderpad. Just to the left of frame you can see the Poxwalker's foot that she killed right after the Plague Marine.

I FINALLY got around to playing some single-player Kill Team! I decided to use my Corsair Voidscarred since I love the miniatures so much even though I'm pretty bad at remembering everything they can do (which I guess just means I need to play more). My Death Guard were the non-player operatives (NPOs) and I went with a mix of the light "brawler" troop type so I could have an excuse to use my Poxwalker miniatures, and the heavy "marksman" type for the Plague Marines.

It didn't actually start off super-well, I was very excited to see my Shaderunner get stuck in because she can teleport through walls, but misjudged where I could move her and keep her safe before she attacked, and she ended up getting killed by one of the Plague Marines before she did anything. 😞 I think I also need to rethink my initial deployment strategy on Into The Dark because I always end up sitting with a hatchway closed because I don't want to open it and give the enemy free reign to shoot my quite-squishy operatives, and if I was to run out my operatives would be completely murderised.

Operative of the match goes to my Starstorm Duellist Arendra Firewinter who single-handedly accounted for two of the three Plague Marines and one of the Poxwalkers. One of the Plague Marines in particular got absolutely turned into slag, he was on ten wounds and got hit with three critical successes from Arendra's fusion pistol, which meant that the Devastating 3 rule went off and immediately inflicted three damage for each crit, with no save possible, before anything else even happed. And in the same activation thanks to the Pistol Barrage ability that lets her shoot twice, once per pistol, she then turned around and killed the Poxwalker that was standing behind her with her shuriken pistol!

Overall I only lost three miniatures, the aforementioned Shaderunner along with my Way Seeker and my leader, and the win condition for this scenario was to just completely wipe out the enemy.

As I'm writing this, I realised another difficulty I have with the Voidscarred in particular is that they're very close-combat-focused because I built them all as the specialists with no regular warriors. My Fate Dealer doesn't see much action especially on Into The Dark (she did nothing whatsoever this game), and although the Kurnite Hunter finished off the remaining Plague Marine in this particular game, I'm constantly wishing that he was a regular Warrior with a shuriken rifle.

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Posted on 7 September 2025, 16:45

A screenshot of the original Doom, looking pixellated by today's standards but otherwise okay. It's got the hand holding the pistol in the middle of the screen, a brown kind of military/sci-fi wall at the left with a VERY-obviously 2D sprite barrel of green goo, the section in front of the wall has some steps and that section is lit up, but in the distance it's all dark and hard to make out, but you can see some computer screens and what look like control panels up near the roof. No idea why they're up there because you couldn't use them!

A screenshot of Dark Forces, it's EXTREMELY pixellated, much more so than Doom because I've turned it back to the original software rendering. The character is holding one of the black blaster rifles that stormtroopers use, the floor in front of me is dark grey cobbles and there's a gap in the floor you can't see down, then past that on the other side are white walls that look like they've been in a war zone, with black blaster marks on them. The whole thing is quite dark because the power is off at this point. The sky has delightfully pixel-art-looking mountains with a purple sky that's either just after sunset or just before sunrise.

A screenshot of Doom 64, this is a fair bit less pixellated than the other two screenshots, but all the textures have that early 3D rendering "smooth" look to them. The view is looking into a hallway with rusted metal-looking walls and in the centre is a glowing orange floor panel. The whole scene is lit in orange/red light that's coming from that panel.

I've been thoroughly enjoying going back to my gaming roots recently, with the remasters of Doom, Dark Forces, and Doom 64 on the Xbox!

The first screenshot here is the original Doom, which we got a demo of with our Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, and my parents very much disapproved of the amount of gore in it. We also got the demo of Dark Forces on that same demo disc, which was just the first level, but I was so keen to get the full game that I begged my parents and promised I'd even delete Doom and not play it anymore if they got me the full game for Christmas. 😛

The second screenshot is very early on in the second level of Dark Forces, in all its software-rendered pixellated glory, and I can still remember sitting in my pyjamas on Christmas morning playing it with a sense of awe at all the new levels for me to explore. I think my favourite level was later in the game, Nar Shaddaa, the sheer vertical scale of it really grabbed my imagination.

And then lastly we have Doom 64, bought a handful of years after Dark Forces, and because it was on the Nintendo 64 and everything was 3D now, everything also had to have coloured lighting everywhere. It's hilarious how overdone it was looking back at it now, sort of like looking back at the pinstripes in early Mac OS X. Games now have lighting that makes sense contextually, you don't really notice it that much because it's realistic, but this was all "GONNA BE RED, LET'S HAVE SOME BLUE HERE, AND SOME GREEN THERE." 😂

And man, playing these I'd forgotten about the total lack of any sort of hand-holding you got when trying to figure out where you needed to go. There was an overhead map but absolutely none of these objective markers or UI indicators of direction. If you get lost, tough shit, you're going to have to wander until you figure it out!

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Posted on 19 August 2025, 21:54

In the office for Kill Team tonight, my Plague Marines versus the Ork Wrecka Krew, and despite a decent start it ended up completely falling over in a heap and we called it at the start of turn 3 when the score was 7-3 to the Orks and I was going to be completely unable to score anything more. 😞 I think I need to go back to my Angels of Death, I just cannot for the life of me keep everything they can do in my head and I'm constantly forgetting their rules. The Angels of Death are more self-contained, where each individual operative doesn't need to interact too much with the others.

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Posted on 7 July 2025, 17:53

A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like the inside of a set of buildings. There's four hero miniatures at the right (one heavily-armoured warrior woman with a sword, a vampire hunter with a long leather coat and a big hat, a steampunk dwarf, and a priest with a rich red robe and a big staff) plus two groups of hostile miniatures: two lithe vampires and three shambling zombies.

A photo of our four hero miniatures standing next to and being positively LOOMED over by the Vargskyr, which is a massive hunched over demon/bat hybrid thing twice the height of the heroes, with red skin and brown fur down its arms. It has blood around its mouth and dripping from its claws and there's a pile of skulls on its base. In the distance across several board sections there are a group of rat swarms and another group of bat swarms ready to overwhelm us.

We had @[email protected] over today to finally continue our Warhammer Quest adventure! This time it was the first half of the next Kill The Big Bad journey, it was pretty smooth sailing compared to some of our previous efforts and we managed to stay ahead of the suffocating gravetide without too much issue. Plus we even took down the mighty Vargskyr before got a chance to attack us when it showed up!

All four heroes are inspired and ready for the second half next time, which I expect is going to be quite nasty: the target is Gorslav the Gravekeeper and he'll be accompanied by all ten of the zombie miniatures that come in the Cursed City box, plus a batch of corpse rats and a batch of bat swarms. Gorslav has a number of nasty abilities and can bring zombies back after you've killed them, so it's going to be hectic.

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Posted on 21 June 2025, 21:01

A screenshot from Diablo II Resurrected in the "Legacy" graphics mode showing the software renderer in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. My Assassin is holding a sword and a small round shield and standing next to a shallow lake with a large tree beside it. It's all extremely pixelated by today's standards.

Another screenshot showing the exact same scene as the previous image, but this time it's using the new 16:9 widescreen high-resolution remastered graphics. It's still not a graphical tour de force of course, but it's a SIGNIFICANT upgrade from the original.

Tonight featured a bit of remastered retro gaming: I started with Star Wars: Dark Forces and then discovered that the Diablo II remaster was on sale for the princely sum of $23! So I picked that up and was delighted to note that it continues the grand tradition of remasters allowing you to flip back and forth between the new and original graphics. Check out this wonderfully pixelated art from 2000 versus the shiny new remastered graphics. And I realised after I'd taken these that that was at the gloriously spacious "800x600" resolution, there's an option to use the 640x480 resolution from the game when it first launched and you can see even less of your surroundings, haha.

The remaster also has a "Performance" or "Quality" toggle for the new graphics, and honestly I don't think I can tell the difference whatsoever except that "Quality" mode drops the framerate to 30fps. Though funnily enough I actually kept that on anyway because the original graphics only run at 30fps so it's much less jarring going from 60fps in the new graphics to 30fps when I switch back to old.

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Posted on 16 June 2025, 23:17

A screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 taken from behind and a reasonable way above the car. The car itself is a black 1991 Nissan Pulsar hatchback, that wonderful early 90s not-quite-completely-boxy shape where car designers realised they could round off some of the edges. The car is blasting along a dirt road in the rolling hills of a rural area with dust billowing out behind it, there are a handful of trees around and a bit of scrub and it all looks very dry. There's a wooden telegraph pole at the right with a single cable stretching behind the frame, and out beyond the trees. The overall light in the scene is warm and it looks like it's getting towards late afternoon.

Book-ending the weekend with Forza Horizon! This time I'm blasting around a lot of the dirt tracks to get the "Drive on every single road" achievement.

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Posted on 9 June 2025, 19:59

It's the Friday night of a three day weekend and I'm in Forza Horizon 5 blasting through the deserts of Mexico in a hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510 while listening to the game's synthwave radio station. 👌🏻

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Posted on 6 June 2025, 21:03

A photo of a sheep standing behind a waist-high chain link fence nomming on some grass.

In the office today for after-work Kill Team! On the way to the train station this morning the sheep were out having a good nom and I said hello and they all stared blankly at me haha.

The Kill Team game itself was Plague Marines versus Angels of Death, I've really struggled to figure out how the Plague Marines were meant to be played and had a REALLY frustrating game week before last where I conceded before the end of turn 2. This game was the complete opposite of that, the final score was 11-3 and I wiped out every single enemy operative and lost none in return!

I can't claim too much credit though because my friend who was playing against me had read the Plague Marines rules and gotten a sense of how they worked, and kept reminding me of stuff and making suggestions. He's generally played a lot more Kill Team than I have so has the concepts and tricks down a lot better too, and plus he deliberately took a fairly melee-focused roster which meant that with my Contagion strategic ploy he was always at -1 to hit, which it turns out is surprisingly powerful. He also had a couple of terrible rolls, like rolling five dice for one of his nasty melee warriors and four of them being failures. 😬

Still, I'm feeling a bit better about them, I just need to play them more, though I also need to figure out some method of organising myself so I don't keep doing things like forgetting strategic ploys that I've paid command points for.

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Posted on 5 May 2025, 20:20

A photo of a game of Warhammer Underworlds. There are two rectangular boards with hex tiles on them, the art on the boards looks like gnarled and corrupted roots like you're deep within a cursed forest. Closest to the camera are Domitan's Stormcoven, three warriors in armour who look like they're also mages because they all have staves and one of them looks like she's levitating. On the other side of the board are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour, one of whom is clearly part daemon because he's hunched over and has MASSIVE arms and huge horns sprouting from his head.

@yayKM and I played some 1v1 Warhammer Underworlds for the first time in ages! @yayKM went with her now-standard Gorechosen of Dromm, while I played Domitan's Stormcoven who I haven't actually played at all before despite getting the Wyrdhollow box nigh on two years ago now. 😬 The Stormcoven are shamefully unpainted and we had to call it after the second round (and it ended in a 8-8 draw!), but the Stormcoven's gameplay was really interesting with the inspiration being able to be switched around after activations, I'm looking forward to playing them more!

The miniatures themselves are fantastic too (you can see them close-up when I assembled and undercoated them) and normally I find the Stormcast Eternals very uninteresting (they're much like Space Marines in that respect 😛) but Games Workshop done a really good job with these three, in particular Leona Stratosi who looks like she's actually flying.

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Posted on 21 April 2025, 22:03