2024-02-26T15:23:49Z
Me: Mom! I wanna get some Battletech RPG!
Mom: No. We have Battletech RPG at home.
At home: Lancer.
That’s not being fair. Battletech’s big stompy mech design is firmly big, stompy, robot-looking robots. But there is a wealth of history and background and lore that is shockingly wide and deep, and since the Combat Rules are a humble 150 pages, that leaves lots of room for the actual RPG stuff! Theoretically! I haven’t played it yet, but I own it…
I’m enjoying the reviews, but I’ll be honest, I find the faux-80s to be a bit more distracting than really hilarious. Quinns is still razor sharp, but some of the gags aren’t hitting quite as hard as he used to? Maybe it’s just me being picky.
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Yeah… I mean, if I want a boardgamey mech experience, BattleTech the boardgame is right there. Now to be fair BT offers a setting with a lot of very standardised things; you aren’t suddenly going to find that this enemy has razor whips or a black hole launcher or something. But in a setting where you’re not the only’Mech pilots but soldiers and mercenaries like thousands of others, maybe that’s a good thing?
You make jokes about the 80s, kid. You weren’t there. [shakes head sadly] You weren’t there.
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Speaking as someone who was there in the 80s, Battletech was not great. Our group never got into the theme more than a few skirmish battles and soon moved into other genres.
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Sounds as though this is more complex, though!
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You flatter me, sir, but I was indeed there for the 80s.
Strictly speaking I was there for all of them (I was born in '79), but I was a conscious, self-aware human being that consumed television for the last half. I had an IBM XT (my dad worked in R&D) and a hercules monochrome monitor that included a file to try and convince games that required colour graphics to work. It sometimes did (Defender of the Crown!), and sometimes it did not (anything by Sierra). So I’m pretty down with the 80s vibe. I get it.
I just don’t think it’s that funny? But that might just be me.
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Where Quinns is moaning whilst the designer is talking about his game I thought it was a little offensive TBH.
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I nearly said after the first one “He has to drop the 1989 setting, obviously, that doesn’t work at all, but otherwise it was great to have normal Quinns at a table talking about something passionately”. I also really don’t think the “bored on the phone” gag is gonna work.
But I do now want to play both the RPGs he reviewed.
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I like the 80s setting, it carries a bit of Cool Ghosts feeling to it.
The phone bits are very much a hat on a hat though. Feels like they’re shoe horned in to provide a higher laugh per minute count without considering the rest of the jokes hold together in a review just fine. Gives the impression of lack of confidence to chase laughs over quality, which is weird considering how long Quinns has been in the game.
It’s also weird that Quinns’ comments are tonally presented as reinforcing the designer’s comments whilst the words seem to contradict/criticise the designer’s comments. Ends up quite confusing as a viewer that I need to rewind in my head to process what Quinns is actually intending - like citing a quote that states the opposite of the author’s preceding statement. An interesting quirk I’ve not experienced in a review before.
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“I’m actually a bit of a computer wiz”.
Bonus points for a Brazil reference, every time.
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I laughed, I cried… he said he was there, born in 1979, and he said he was there.
Oh boy!
Nah, barely there, as in really not there. You needed to be a teen or older to know the 80s.
Still, thanks for the laugh.
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I was originally thinking of Quinns himself; I have no idea how old he is but I’d guess he was born some time in the 1980s.
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Think Quinns is an '85 baby (?). Definitely in the 85-87 range.
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Having gone away and listened/watched the review I have opinions.
Mostly this is not for me, but for different reasons than Quinn’s. There again I like mech based wargames even though I haven’t played a game of BattleTech for more years than I can remember.
I loved BattleTech in the day, but boy is it clunky for anything other than a small skirmish with mechs. Combined arms takes a lot of work to run. And it takes a lot of time.
Heavy Gear has its charms, but it gave me a headache the last time I played it, but the new version 3.1 is meant to be pretty smooth.
There again, what I want from a mech game is probably not what most people want, as I want a plausible mech wargame: starting from a near future setting with the possibility of taking the technology into Clarke tech with aliens.
I know, I know, trying to square the circle. Grumpy old fart just grumbling about stuff.
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So basically Warstrider the game? (Joking, but serious.)
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You can tell Marx isn’t really from the 80s because he isn’t making the same jokes about people not really being from the 80s. 
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The whole “kid of the XXs” things confuses me. Like I was born in the late 80s, so I guess I’m a kid of the 90s, but then I became a teenager in the 00s so that’s my predominant cultural experience outside of 90s Saturday morning cartoons (which were predominantly 80s reruns anyway!).
Time is stupid
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And besides, if you have ever had the “Which class were you in when you found out about 9/11?” conversation, you have to be a kid of the 00s, right?
(Science for me, although we knew something was up in IT when the teacher was watching the TV in the side room and then left to tell the other teachers)
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So, do you play it and run a game for me at some point in the future? Just asking, no obligation.
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I have no idea whether anyone’s ever tried; I was thinking of the novel series by William H. Keith.
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