Playtesting

Thursday, 23 April 1998

While I usually meet Kevin on Wednesdays to buy comics, this week we met today, on Thursday. Not much came out that I get -- just the latest JLA (#19). I also picked up a one-shot adaptation of Pagliacci with art by P. Craig Russell, called The Clowns. I'll at least take a look at anything Russell draws, even if I don't buy it.

This is the second issue of JLA written by Mark Waid, filling in for Grant Morrison. The plot of this two-parter is very Morrisonesque, involving quantum mechanics, synchronicity, alternate timelines, and a lot of clever deduction on the part of Batman. Waid includes a bit in this month's lettercol in which he overstates the importance of a physics discovery made at the U. of Geneva last year. Even as I write this, thousands of comics fans are leaping boldly to erroneous conclusions about the feasability of faster-than-light communication. Hey, it's not as if superhero comics are known for their scientific accuracy.

The other reason comics day was today is that Crossover Technologies was holding playtesting of a new game. It's a computer game, of course, and this was paper playtesting to see if the basic game mechanics work and what things need tweaking. That means that we had to do by hand a whole bunch of complicated tasks that will be handled invisibly and effortlessly by the computer in the actual game, which slowed things down tremendously, to the point that we only got two turns played before we called it quits for the night. Other than that, though, I liked it, even though I'm generally not attracted to games of this type. I left notes with my plans for the next two turns, so someone else can pick up playing where I left off.

There are things that I ought to know better than to try, and going into The Strand intending to find a particular book is one of them. The Strand isn't one of those places where you find what you're looking for, it's the sort of place where you wander around waiting for the Spirit of Books Pre-Owned to draw your attention to something that you hadn't known you'd been looking for, but now that you see it, well, you've just got to buy it, don't you? In my case, I'd been hoping to find a copy of the out-of-print An Introduction to Oil Painting from the DK Art School series, since I'd found a copy of An Introduction to Mixed Media there a week or two ago. Instead, I wound up with An Introduction to Drawing, which I probably don't really need (I need to spend less time reading and more time doing), but which provided a certain amount of inspiration anyway. I do want to find the oil painting book, since I never bothered to try oils when I was at SVA, and I think I might get drawn in that direction. I'll have to check some of the other used book shops in the area next week.