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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Ever Buy a Gaming Product and Go: "What the F' Did I Waste My Money On?!?"

Don't you just hate that?

For me the worst was Monster Coliseum for Runequest 3 (Avalon Hill Runequest).  This pile of poo was so bad I actually went back to my game store and demanded my money back.  I don't remember much about it except that it was fairly expensive and totally useless, and that as a college student with a part time job I couldn't afford to squander away my hard earned gaming dollars.

Now I have a quandary.  I get access to reviewer copies of games (mostly in PDF) and for the most part, I only take reviewer copies of stuff I feel I'll actually enjoy.  I've gotten pretty good at this.  Once in a while I fail, and fail bad.

I failed bad the other night.  Bad as in "What the Fuck did I Get?"

Not even bad as in funny bad.  Not bad as in stupid bad.  Bad as in the publisher is pretty clueless as to the minimum qualities expected from a game publisher of any sort of amateur status.  Bad as in if I had downloaded this free, I'd still be upset with the quality.  Bad as in "they have HOW MANY products to their credit and they still can't get it right?" bad.  There might be something worthwhile behind the abysmal presentation, but I'm not wasting my time or patience to find it.

No, I won't mention the name of the product, or the publisher.  The saying you can't judge a book by it's cover certainly applies here.

If you track me down via email, I may tell you if your guess is right.
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6 comments:

  1. Justin S. DavisJanuary 20, 2012 at 1:21 AM

    I don't know anything about Monster Coliseum, but I'd love to hear why it was terrible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Simon ForsterJanuary 20, 2012 at 5:04 AM

    I felt the same way when I got 'The Secret Fire'. Very disappointed in it, and wish I hadn't bothered.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 賈尼January 20, 2012 at 8:47 AM

    I've bought the Monster Coliseum only because I'm a maniac collector of all things RuneQuest-y. I agree it's an incredible useless supplement — unless your idea of fun is Ben Hur.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 20, 2012 at 6:37 PM

    You won't tell us so we will stumble upon it and have the same bad experience and waste of money? Thanks for the "review."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Erik TenkarJanuary 20, 2012 at 6:46 PM

    @Anonymous via YDIS - never called it a review. You would have to dig really deep to stumble upon it. I don't generally point folks to crap.

    If I was to point out train wrecks, I'd direct folks back to "Your Dick is Small", but I'm not ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownSeptember 2, 2012 at 9:23 AM

    i used monster coliseum every game - pregenerating monster and keeping records for them one of biggest hastles of RQ GM - some ppl used for solo play or when captured by lunars - but the monster book was one of my GM standards - if i''d paid for it as a kid id probably be less impressed

    ReplyDelete

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