GINUINITI, or, Games which I Never Used to be Interested in, but am Now Interested in Thanks to the Internet

Rifts - When I was about 11 or 12 the only place I knew of to buy RPG stuff was the Virgin Megastore in Liverpool. (I'm showing my age there, probably: those were the days when not only were Virgin Megastores still around, they actually sold role playing games.) I used to spend a long time paging through various books on its shelves and imagining what it would be like to have more than three quid a week in pocket money. I liked the look of most games, but something about Rifts products always used to depress me. I'm not sure if it was the art or writing, but flicking through the books would fill me with this profound sense of apathy and alienation. Thanks to some posts at the RPG Corner, though, and I find I'm all turned around on the subject. Funny how sometimes you just need somebody who's "in the know" to explain what's good about something.




Tunnels & Trolls: This always struck me as the poorest of poor men's D&Ds: a straight up rip-off that didn't even try to hide the fact in a clever name. But again, thanks to somebody "in the know" I'm reconsidering that position. T&T looks cool.

Traveller and Twilight 2000: As kids a friend and I spent really a rather ridiculously long amount of time playing computer games based on these two, and failing utterly to find any enjoyment, or even sense, in them. The Traveller game in particular was like an exercise in refined torture; you could spend an AGE creating an entire gang of characters and customizing them in all sorts of interesting ways, but the instant the game begun you tended to either get attacked and wiped out by random bypassers, or accidentally walk into a lake and drown. The Twilight 2000 one meanwhile had such a horrible isometric interface that it was literally impossible to control anything your characters were doing; they would consequently run about in a manner reminiscent of people who've just been told a tsunami is coming, and be picked off one by one by mercilessly tough computer opponents. This ruined any interest I might have had in either as rpgs. However, discussion forums and in particular the Godzilla Gaming Podcast have made me reconsider. Computer games are never fair representations of the rpg they're based on. Just look at bloody Baldur's Gate.

Runequest: No.... hang on, thinking about it, I'm still not interested in Runequest.