That's a lot to be excited for, secondwhiteline! Nice!

Today I was pretty excited to get an Imaginext Batcave playset in the mail today! It's pretty nice, and I'm pretty stoked to fit my various 3.75" figures in there and use it as a diorama background setting. Plus, it's got quite a few nifty little gadgets that will be fun to work with.



I posted other photos of it in the Infinite Heroes thread.

secondwhiteline, I actually didn't much like 4th E much either. I thought it played a lot like HeroQuest or Descent which isn't necessarily a bad thing but if I wanted to play those types of games, I would just play those games because they were a lot better at doing it in my opinion. There's no shortage of them. 3.5 E was the standard for me when it came to D&D rulesets. I wasn't even aware that a new one was coming out so I'll definitely have to look into that. Not that I'll ever actually get to play but I like flipping through the books and thinking about what fun could be had.

That's a nice shot of the Batcave there. Thanks for sharing your haul, Illiasc!

Yeah, agreed. I love HeroQuest, and I've really enjoyed Descent when I've played it. And the same with the D&D board games that came out during 4E. Those kinds of rule sets make for awesome dungeon crawling board games, because you're really just in it for fighting and loot, and the complexity is restricted a bit because it's gotta fit into a board game. For us, 4E needed so many alterations to be playable in a reasonable timeframe. It just stopped being worth it.

Hey you play the Ravenloft boardgame edition based on 4th E? I thought about picking one up when I was browsing a Barnes & Noble but I don't know if it's worth it...

I own it, actually! I'd say it's worth it, it's a lot of fun. It might be the best of the three, actually (the other two being Wrath of Ashardalon and The Legend of Drizzle). Especially for those of us who have no interest in D&D's favorite cash drow.

I never really got into 4E. I got to play a couple of games but the game disbanded. How do the boardgames editions play? Is it actually the original complete Ravenloft campaign in boardgame form?

I saw the adventure book and it looks pretty thin so I imagine it's a very condensed version or completely different from that campaign. I have the 3rd E version which I got just for perusing since I don't know anybody who plays and it is significantly smaller than that if that helps at all but secondwhiteline here owns it so he probably knows better than I would.

Honestly, I've never played the original Ravenloft campaign, so I can't tell you much there. The rules system of the board games feels like a much more streamlined version of the 4E rules, with some additional stuff to make it a board game rather than just a condensed version of the RPG (the big one involves turning over new tiles to find items/random encounters/etc).

I took a look at my copy of the 3rd Edition they came out with for Ravenloft. It's pretty comprehensive. It's for 6th level parties and up though. Heh.

Hudson Horror Show X was this past Saturday in Poughkeepsie, and was as amazing as ever!

Five films this time, all on 35mm. There were two secret films going in (which were apparently going to be Spookies and New Year's Evil), but some issues with the owner of the prints meant they had to scramble last minute for replacements. What they ended up with might have been even better.

The first film, sponsored by the great people at Vinegar Syndrome, was the impossibly ridiculous Night Train to Terror! An anthology film made from cut-down, unreleased features with a bridging tale, this movie is whiplash. Nowhere else can you get an 80s pop band playing a really awful, catchy song all night on a train while God and Satan argue over souls.

Vinegar Syndrome also had a booth at the show, where I bought their Blus of Night Train and Christmas Evil! They're releasing one of my favorite slashers ever, Madman, in late spring, and told me it's a 4K restoration of the negative. I can't wait for that.




The second film must remain buried. All I can tell you is that it's an early 80s slasher great that heartbreakingly never got the sequel the ending promises (we did get shafted with a remake, though). The print was in rough shape, but that added to the awesome, run-down, claustrophobic atmosphere of this one. Prints of this are rare, you'd practically have to mine for one.

The third film was the legendary Hong Kong action flick, John Woo's Hard-Boiled! This one's got possibly the best extended sequence in action history with the third act in the hospital, and killer performances from everyone, especially incomparable leads Chow-Yun Fat and Tony Leung. Even my girlfriend, who's not a big action film fan, came out of this one loving it.




A great match for Hard-Boiled, the fourth film was manliness personified, John Carpenter's classic paranoia sci-fi/action flick, They Live! I've been waiting for this one - I had my Scream Factory release signed by Piper himself at a wrestling show a couple summers ago. The satire of this one sadly and surprisingly isn't dated, and Roddy Piper and Keith David give great, tough, funny, and even vulnerable performances. It's one of the most influential cult films ever, so if you haven't seen this one, you're missing out on a definitive movie.




The final film of the night was another collection of tales, the classic George Romero anthology Creepshow! Built by a triumvirate of horror greats at the absolute top of their game - Romero directing, Stephen King writing, and Tom Savini on makeup effects - and bolstered by a killer cast that includes Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, and Hal Holbrook, this one might be the best anthology film ever made.