Space Hulk!!

Way back when, Games Workshop (current share price GAW:LSE, 776 GBX) produced a little game based on it's established Warhammer 40,000 range called Space Hulk. It was Aliens (as in the film), with Imperial Space Marines taking the place of U.S. Colonial Marines and genestealers taking the place of, er, aliens. The game was simple enough, and difficult enough, to be a challenge for a weekday evening's entertainment over beer and snacks.

It had a few extensions, and a few rule additions published in White Dwarf, GW's monthly magazine, a second edition and then quietly disappeared. Anyway, about two or three years ago a third edition came out, quite unexpectedly and to little fanfare from GW. It was very professionally done, with nice plastic models (these have been painted very well):

Anyhoo, I'm a fan. When the first game came out, I started collecting more of the models from the original line and painting them up, and then I got the third edition when it came out. I've even got the card game from Fantasy Flight:

Now there's a video game that copies the board game very well, and jolly good it is too.

It's turn based and the interface is very simple, like the board game, just point and click. (Here's a screen shot I made using the Steam interface: very handy!)

Notice the log window on the right which details the dice rolls. Lovely!

I've even been busy and made an icon for the desktop shortcut as they don't provide one yet (it's on Dropbox here).

Now it's obviously not everyone's cup of tea, but if you are a W40K fan and loved the original board game, as I did, I recommend it.

Foundry Miniatures

Normally a company like Foundry wouldn't raise much of a blip on the modelling radar. It is after all just a small company producing a range of historical metal soldiers. However, there are two things which make it unusual.

1. They have an amazing paint range, hundreds of different shades and colours, all matched such that you have the base shade, the dark shade and the highlight shade.
2. To go along with this is Kevin Dallimore's painting guides:
   
   
   
   one of the best in the market and very influential (have a look at how similar they are to GW's, which came along much later).

If you want the historical equivalent to GW, or you want materials which compliment or replace GW stuff, I can't recommend Foundry highly enough.

Sunday: Deathwatch!!!

Deathwatch

As you may know, I have an interest in role playing games. It stems from when I was at University and was a member of the games club where I first played Traveller (I'm not a big fan of D&D). Recently, Games Workshop have collaborated with Fantasy Flight Games and produced a W40K series of role playing games, the latest of which is Deathwatch (it's best to pronounce the name with as much Gothic melodrama as you can muster: I do). Fantasy Flight have quite a good marketing strategy for these games. They produce a cut-down introductory adventure which can be played without the core rule book and just a set of percentile dice (two D10's, one for tens, the other for units). The Deathwatch adventures are called Final Sanction and Oblivion's Edge and are available as free PDF's.

Jobs

I've been a little busy recently coding in Delphi (?!?). The week before last, an agent rang me up and asked me for a copy of my most recent CV. The agent normally recruits payroll administrators, but one of his clients had asked for a Delphi programmer and he'd seen an old CV of mine on Planet Recuit. I sent him my latest CV and heard nothing more. The following week he phoned me back and asked me if I could attend an interview in London (Finsbury) on Thursday 2^nd September. I'll be given a technical test but also, unusually, they wanted a sample of my existing work. The only Delphi work I've done at home in the recent past was to sort out problems at work: I'd e-mail a fragment of code to home from work and then e-mail the solution back, but I don't have anything standalone. So I've set about creating a little cryptographic application using the RC4 algorithm I mentioned previously. I've got a nice little front-end with big buttons and nice icons:



and I've used TDD for most of the class work. I'll also do a little documentation to explain how it works and the design ideas behind it.

Monday: W40K books

When I read books, I tend to go through phases of reading. I read very intensely for a few weeks and then read hardly anything at all for about a month or so, and so on. When an intense phase ends, it's usually because I get distracted by this machine (programming) or because the book I'm about a third of the way through starts getting a bit difficult. I think at the moment I'm entering an intense phase. This is helped by reading Warhammer 40,000 books (W40K), published by The Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop.

W40K books are pulp military science fiction, but this is no indicator of quality as there are some very good authors, specifically Gav Thorpe, Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett. I've just finished Thorpe's Path of the Warrior and I'm about a third of the way through Abnett's Ravenor omnibus, having read the Eisenhorn omnibus previously.

Mostly, the books are from the human perspective, but Path of the Warrior has an Eldar, an ancient humanoid race, as it's protagonist.

Gav Thorpe does a very decent job of conveying the "otherness" of the Eldar, but the book takes a bit to get going and there are too few battles in it for my taste. How the protagonist progresses from warrior to "exarch" (leader) after only two battles isn't sufficiently explained, plus the novel, which is meant to be part one of a series, concludes with the death and transformation of the character.

Ravenor is much more mainstream, part of Abnett's Inquisition series.

In W40K, human religion is based on a semi-dead God-Emperor, opposed by demons, aliens and heretics. The Inquisition is intended to oppose these forces, and the novels are a bit like a kind of baroque sci-fi spy/horror novel. Sort of advanced steampunk, but without the steam and with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. And they're great. The plots are a cut above the average W40K Space-Marines-kill-everything novel but there's enough shooty stuff so you don't get to miss it too much.

Thursday and Morning Shift at Oxfam

I usually do about an hour or so in the afternoon at the Oxfam Bookshop in Chelmsford on Mondays and Thursdays. However, yesterday, I got a text from Gill asking if I could come in earlier to do the morning shift as the woman who does the upstairs till, which is the music and DVD's, was on holiday. The up-side of this is that a) it's quiet first thing and b) you get to play your own tunes. I made up some CD's last night to play and I started off with Miles Davis (Kind of Blue) followed by Dave Brubek (Time Out). Cool Jazz is easy on the nerves and difficult to object to by the punters, especially if it's good. I followed this up with a dubstep remix of Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds and an old-school rave mix by Moby, which made things easier while I sorted through a load of DVD's which needed culling.

After my shift ended, I went shopping and ended up having a look in Games Workshop. I exchanged pleasantries with the assisstant on duty and left. As I went out of the shop, a thought struck me and I went back in.

"Back already", said the assistant.

"I know it's a funny question", I asked, "but how do you get to work for Games Workshop?".

"I'll just get you a form", he said and disappeared into the back of the shop.

"Fill it in", he said as he handed me the form, "Bring it back and we send it up to HQ (Nottingham) and they take it from there".

The form is just like any other (previous experience, qualifications, etc), but with the Imperial double-headed Eagle emblasoned on the front and it's got questions like "What's your favourite Warhammer/W40K army and why?". All job application forms should be like that.