Fri, 26 September 2014
It's been a good week for nerds, what with Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D starting its second season and Gotham premiering (and that's just on tv), so Andrew and Dan decided to bolster those good vibes in this new episode. Week in Geek: Andrew paints miniatures for Shadows of Brimstone. Dan (with his wife) finishes his second watching of the Buffy and Angel run-through. There Can Be Only One: In which Dan and Andrew puzzle over how the Highlander franchise has lasted so long and made so many bad (with a few very good) iterations of the premise. Discussion: Zombies. 'Nuff said. The Silent Hero: Continuing their coverage of geeky things that they feel deserve more attention, this week Andrew and Dan discuss their love for Squaresoft's (for it was not Square-Enix at the time) groundbreaking (and seemingly forgotten?) classic, Chrono Trigger. Question: What fiction (tv/movie/game/book/story/etc.) has your most favorite iteration or use of time travel? Answer in the comments to this episode's post at forall.libsyn.com. Or you may leave a comment after joining the offical For All Intents and Purposes pages at either Facebook or Google+ (do a search at each site to find it). You may also e-mail any comments or questions to forallpod@gmail.com. For all intents and purposes, that's an episode recap. Music: -"Princes of the Universe" by Queen -"Robo's Theme" and "Frog's Theme" by Yasunori Mitsuda
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Well, my real answer is Chrono Trigger, but since you already covered that at length, I'll pick something else for variety's sake. An iteration of time travel that I really love is the Time Spiral block of expansions for Magic: The Gathering (released in 2006), more for its ludological implications than anything else (all Magic: the Gathering story lines are more or less pulp garbage). As a set, Time Spiral/Planar Chaos/Future Sight revisited the first major magic plane of Dominaria, and incorporated stories, characters and, most importantly, mechanics from the game's past. Alongside new mechanics, they brought back 8 old mechanics from the game, along with a myriad of sub-themes and synergies, so you ended up drafting and playing this set that contained ideas and strategies spanning the history of Magic as a game to date. In competitive Magic, draft formats are supposed to be self-contained, so it was a fascinating set insofar as it was standalone, but also featured a bunch of wacky themes and ideas from the past, as well as (in Future Sight) ideas they were toying with releasing in future sets. For this reason, many "disaster draft" formats include Time Spiral/Future Sight packs in them, because the set has such an identity crisis in terms of mechanical cohesion that it can pair pretty well with basically any other set from the game's history. The set also featured "future-shifted" and "time-shifted" cards, the former being cards that might eventually exist/now exist years after Time Spiral in weird "future borders" and the latter being 10-year-old cards that were made legal again in Standard (the predominate constructed Magic format that spans the two most recent years of releases). From a game design perspective, it was a really interesting way for Magic R&D to revisit old touchstones while also making something interesting in the present AND designing for the future of the game (Magic eras exist in six-year cycles, so some cards from Future Sight are just now beginning to exist 8 years after its release). I admit to being mostly ignorant of a lot of games out there, but I've never heard of another game or expansion for a game constructed with that particular type of ludology in mind, so I think it's really cool insofar as it's just a really crazy and out-there concept that they managed to pull off without somehow killing the game (which likely could have happened, as it did not sell well thanks to being so nostalgia-driven and complex and just generally weird). Sorry for the novel.
