Recently in Mike's Thoughts Category

I've recovered from the thyroid cancer surgery last Tuesday and have gone back to work at my full-time job.  I got through my first day without too much trouble and without too many stares at the mass of tape strips on my neck where the incision was made.

The doctors think they have removed all the cancer, and over the next few weeks I'll be having various appointments to sort out the details associated with getting my life back to normal.

To celebrate my return to something resembling normal, I'll be posting some news to the site.  Hope you enjoy it!

I've been trying to manage weekly updates of the news for Gamer Hotsheet for a while now.  I think I've managed to do a pretty decent job, with the possible exception of the last 2-3 weeks. There's a reason for that. Actually, there are a few reasons...

A couple of years ago, my mother was diagnosed with melanoma.  Unfortunately, she waited a long time before going to see her doctor about the pain she was having.  She put up a valiant fight and kept her spirits high, but on September 11 she lost the fight.  I spent much of the following week with my family, attending the funeral services in Pennsylvania and Ohio.  When I returned to my home, the power was out and remained out for several days.

As if this wasn't enough, I began having some pain where a hernia had been repaired back in March.  I had also been feeling like there was something stuck in my throat.  When I saw the surgeon about the hernia repair pain, I asked him to look at a lump I found in my neck.  They did an ultrasound and a biopsy on the lump.  The lab report came back last Wednesday.  It's thyroid cancer.  As they say, "when it rains, it pours"...

On October 7, I'll be undergoing surgery to remove my thyroid and any surrounding tissue that might be affected by the cancer.  In the weeks to follow, there will be doctor visits to follow up on the surgery, regulate the synthetic thyroid hormone I'll be taking, and other such things.  If and how these activities will affect my ability to update the site are anyone's guess.  If you're a regular reader of this site, I hope you'll keep all this in mind and not delete your Gamer Hotsheet bookmark if you don't see regular updates in October.  I'm told the recovery will be easy and it shouldn't cause me any trouble, but I wanted to warn you in case it does. 

Based on the statistics I'm getting from Google Adsense, my traffic and ad revenue have dropped substantially since last year.  I'm even debating the wisdom of continuing to invest the time and money on this site.  If you find it useful, an encouraging comment below or a little word of mouth to help with traffic growth would be much appreciated.

Thanks for listening.

I haven't been out here to post any news for a while.  Some of that was due to things being busy around the house.  Some of it was due to losing power when the remnants of Ike made their way through central Ohio last weekend.  But several days of the delay were for something immensely more important: my mother.

Two years ago, my mother was diagnosed with melanoma, or skin cancer.  The oncologist and surgeons thought they got all of it, and she spent a year on interferon to hopefully kill anything they might have missed. At the end of that year, she learned that the cancer had continued to grow within her.  She fought it for a long time, but a week ago today, my dad called me to tell me that she was back in the hospital again and the prognosis wasn't good.  He told me I should get there soon to see her. I had planned to leave last Friday after work.

Unfortunately, mom's health took a serious turn for the worse last Thursday.  My dad called me at work to tell me I needed to get there right away.  I called my brother in Cincinnati. He met me here in Columbus and we drove together to Pennsylvania to be by my mom's side.  Before we had even managed to get out of Ohio, she had passed away.

While I was in Pennsylvania with my family, my wife and stepchildren remained here in Ohio.  The remnants of Hurricane Ike passed through our area and left hundreds of thousands of people (including us) without electricity.  The electricity only came on around 10pm yesterday.  We lost pretty much everything in our refrigerator and freezer.

Last Sunday, a funeral service was held in Pennsylvania for the people who knew my mom there.  It was one of the most well-attended funeral services I've ever seen.  It was comforting to know so many people cared about my mom and dad.  A friend of mine even made it there.

Yesterday, a second service was held in southern Ohio.  This was at least as well-attended as the one in Pennsylvania.  After that service, mom was laid to rest at a cemetery near where we all grew up. 

Although we were fortunate to be aware of mom's cancer and to have almost two years to prepare for her death while hoping against hope for a recovery, my dad had it right when he said that you are never ready to lose a loved one - even if you had a hundred years to prepare.  He'll miss her the most. They met when they were 15 years old and had 45 years together before she passed away.  That's not a history you can just forget.

My mom was a wonderful woman.  She loved to quilt, and we have 5 beautiful examples of that in our home, all made before the cancer made her too weak to sew anymore.  She loved to help others, and often took people under her wing.  She enjoyed traveling, crossword puzzles, reading, baking, and candy-making.  She treated everyone any of us ever brought home like a friend or a member of the family.  She was amazing in so many ways. 

Although she and my dad lived 7-8 hours away from me, and I never saw either of them as often as I'd have liked, I will miss her.  It saddens me to think that I'll never hear her voice again, never see another beautiful quilt from her, never play another boardgame with her, or give her another hug.  I'm starting to pick up the pieces and move forward, but it's not an easy thing to do.

This article starts with an admission... I never got close enough to this game to actually play it.  This game was so darned popular at Gen Con Indy 2008 that I simply couldn't find a time when a seat was available to sit down and get a demo.  The tables were full any time Fantasy Flight Games had someone there who could run a demo.  That tells me they must be on to a winner with this title, because I managed a demo with some of the other "hot" titles this year, such as "Humans!!" from Twilight Creations.  (That took several attempts as well, as it was also quite popular.)

This article therefore is NOT a review.  I stood nearby, slightly jealous, watching others play the game for as long as my feet held out (plantar fasciitis is a tough adversary).  While I think I have a reasonably good feel for how it plays, I'm not going to try to convey that here except to say that all the elements you think of as integral to the current Battlestar Galactica series appear to be present in the prototype being demonstrated at Gen Con.

It is my understanding (i.e., subject to correction) that the game incorporates the major characters of the series.  It incorporates the fact that some of those characters could be Cylon agents working among the humans.  It encourages players to put the main characters in harm's way (e.g., loading Starbuck onto a Viper makes it more effective in combat).  It also puts the Galactica into specific situations that it has to fight its way out of, just as it would in the series.

It LOOKS like it will be a great game.  I wish I could say it "IS" a great game, but the darned thing was just too popular for me to get the chance to find out.  I talked with some of the people who played the demo, and periodically walked by to gauge their reactions.  People seemed to be having a genuinely good time with it and getting into it.  Had it been available for purchase, I might have bought it sight-unseen based solely on the popularity and reactions I saw.  Oh well... Maybe I'll get to play it next year...

Tomorrow will be my last day at my 9-5 job until next Monday.  I'll be leaving Wednesday morning for Indianapolis to take part in Gen Con Indy 2008.  In addition to covering new products, unfamiliar existing products, and other items of note, I also hope to be able to share with you a little of what it's like to be at Gen Con.  If you consider yourself a gamer, even a casual one, you should consider taking a couple of vacation days and heading to Gen Con Indy.  It's an incredible, if a little overwhelming at times, experience and a lot of fun.

My brother Matt will help me cover the convention, as in past years.  He gets interesting photos for me and pokes his nose into some of the booths that I walk by without noticing, so between the two of us you should have pretty good coverage of the goings-on at Gen Con here on The Gamer Hotsheet.

Assuming I can find some free (or at least inexpensive) WiFi or wired access in the area of the convention center, I'll be posting updates and photos here on the site for you to enjoy.

The Gamer Hotsheet has taken a step forward with the adoption of a new content management system, the open source version of Movable Type(tm).  It is our hope that this will provide for a faster and more reliable presence on the web, as well as the addition of some new features that will make the site more interesting and interactive.

For a short time, the archival content of The Gamer Hotsheet will remain available for viewing here.

It's hard to believe that Origins 2008 has come and gone already.  For those of you who have never heard of Origins, or those who've heard of it but never been there, this article will try to convey some sense of what Origins is all about, why people go there year after year, and why you might want to consider attending Origins 2009.

The Origins Game Fair is an annual event run by the non-profit Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA).  There are essentially two sides to the show, an exhibition of games and game-related products, and a nearly round-the-clock opportunity to play just about any kind of game you might be interested in.  Game players from around the world converge at Origins to play their favorite games, meet game designers, talk with game manufacturers, and pick up the latest releases.

Origins runs for 5 days, usually at the end of June, at the Greater Columbus (Ohio) Convention Center.  Some 4,000 tournaments are held during the convention, in addition to hundreds of casual and serious games.  Origins 2008 offered attendees the chance to play these and other card games:

Boardgames and "traditional" games played at Origins 2008 included these and many more:
Miniatures games are a big part of the fun at Origins.  This year's miniatures games included the following, among many more:

Origins also features a number of role-playing and live-action role-playing (RPG and LARP) games, including the following:
Origins also offers a number of educational and entertaining events for those who need a break from gaming or perhaps don't enjoy gaming at all:
Hopefully these long lists have given you some idea of the kinds of activities you might take part in as an attendee of Origins.  All I can tell you is that I've only scratched the surface above.  Origins manages to keep around 20,000 people entertained 24 hours a day for 5 days.

In the area near the Columbus Convention Center where Origins is held are a number of restaurants.  Some of my personal favorites include the Japanese Steak House, Barley's Brew Pub, and various stands in the nearby North Market.  Barley's Brew Pub, as one example, features an on-premises brewery and offers several micro-brew draft beers to enjoy.  The Columbus Convention Center itself offers a wide selection of restaurants, too.

Since you still might not have a picture of what a day at Origins can be like, I'll recount one of my days at Origins 2008.  I woke that morning around 9am, showered, and headed to the Convention Center with my brother.  We parked in the garage on Vine Street, practically across the street from the convention.  We entered the convention center, grabbed a morning beverage at the coffee shop, and headed to the exhibit hall or "dealer room" to look around.  We spent an hour or two looking around at what the various vendors had to offer, making mental note of where we'd seen the best deals.  I stopped at the "Paint and Take" area to pick up a free miniature and sat down to practice my painting skills while waiting on our first game to start.  We had lunch, and a couple of beers, at the Brew Pub across the street.  We walked around and looked at some of the setups in the miniatures room before heading off to our first game, a Mayfair Games card game called "Family Business".

When Family Business was over, we went to the Japanese Steak House across the street to have dinner.  After dinner, we went back to the convention center and arrived at the Red Shirt Games area to play "Injurius Games: Keep What You Kill".  This game ran until around midnight, whereupon we went home for the night.

During the course of my time at Origins, I had the opportunity to play in full or demo versions of all of the following games:
In addition to the games, I attended a "Miniatures Painting Basics" class taught by the very capable and talented Heather Blush.  Ms. Blush covered prepping and priming a miniature, applying a wash, applying a base coat, mixing colors, drybrushing, and more in an information-packed 90 minutes or so.

Matt and I had a great time at Origins 2008, as we do every year at Origins, and are already looking forward to next year.

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

When I originally envisioned The Gamer Hotsheet, I saw it as a daily gaming news site, covering pretty much any game you might see, buy, or play at Origins, Gen Con, or other national shows.  I kind of saw this site as a year-round exhibit hall, a place where manufacturers could post news about their new products, sales, and contests.

In the first few months, I had a lot more free time to devote to the site, and I could actually add articles pretty much every day.  Now, more than a year later, I've become far busier in my spare time and am simply not able to keep up a daily news schedule - especially since I've had little or no help.  A weekly schedule has been working for the last few weeks, so I'm going to try to maintain that, with updates more often as time permits (i.e., rarely but occasionally).

I've decided to make one important change to our gaming coverage, effective immediately.  We will no longer be covering news about new miniatures.  I don't think I can hope to do this as well as sites like The Miniatures Page already do it, and the time is better spent on other content that seems to generate more readership.  So, while I will cover miniatures GAMES here, and I'll let you know about any sales or deals on miniatures I run across, I won't be covering specific miniatures from this point on.

I plan to continue covering the World of Warcraft MMORPG, as we seem to get at least as many hits on that content as other news on the site.  Since I'm still playing WoW and still learning things on occasion, that should continue to be of value to a large number of readers.

I hope to add coverage of Pirates of the Burning Sea as I learn more about that MMO.

And, of course, I'll continue to cover Origins and Gen Con Indy as I have in the past. 

 

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

I took a break from Gamer Hotsheet starting around mid-December.  This was in part due to being very ill (some sort of flu bug) and in part due to a need to figure out a future direction for the site.

I started the site with the idea of, in essence, re-creating the dealer rooms at Origins and GenCon.   That is, I wanted you to be able to come here any day of the year and have a pretty good idea what new games your favorite company is putting out, what new miniatures are released, what RPG supplements you can pick up, etc.  That meant that I needed a way to identify when new things came out. 

I found a freeware program called "Page Update Watcher" that did a pretty good job of tracking changes to the news pages and product lists on about 600 game manufacturer and game news sites.  In around 5-10 minutes it could scan those sites and tell me where I might find news.  About 20% of the time, it was wrong.  The other 80% of the time it was right, but if the site's layout changed dramatically it would be unable to adapt automatically and would permanently report that site as "unchanged".  Unless I happened to be on the ball and notice, for instance, that I wasn't seeing anything new from a company, I effectively stopped reporting about them.  That wasn't good.

I invested pretty much the entire year's ad revenue in a new product, a shareware tool called "Check & Get" which does a far better job of monitoring web sites than Page Update Watcher is capable of.  As a result, I'm staring at another 86 potential articles to post on the site tonight.  Check & Get is helping me in another way, which is that it highlights the part of the page which changed since the last scan, making it easier than ever for me to determine if a particular change is really something newsworthy or not.

Since it appears that I'm going to be covering more news than I was in the past, I'm going to have to break the job down a little better.  Toward that end, I've broken the list of 600 game sites down by name, into five alphabetized chunks.  Each weeknight I'm going to try to cover just one chunk of sites.  That should make the task more manageable and allow me to keep this site pretty current without breaking my back writing 100 articles a night.

There are several of you who've submitted articles for the site in the past.  I expected the server software to notify me that articles had been submitted, but it wasn't doing that.  As a result, I didn't know to check in your articles.  Those of you who have submitted legitimate articles in the past have been upgraded to "publishers" on the site and are now allowed to make your articles go "live" when you're ready without my need to review and approve.

If any other readers would like to become regular contributors, email me and let me know and I'll set you up also.  The email address to use for this particular request is my first name (mike) followed by my last name (salsbury), followed by an at sign, then "gmail.com".  That address should reach me any weekday and should result in a pretty rapid response.

As always, thank you for your continued readership of this site, thank you for patronizing our advertisers when they offer products of interest to you, and, well, thanks for keeping the gaming hobby alive!

 

 

 

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

I've been asked by readers why this site is so heavily laden with articles about RPGs and miniatures. I'm sure some of you have wondered if those are my gaming interests and if that's why the coverage of other areas, such as wargames, is relatively light. The truth, sadly, isn't even as interesting as that.

To get the news I publish here, I rely on two sources: Google Alerts and manufacturers' web sites. Google Alerts sends me an email any time it detects news about wargames or board games. I also use another tool to scan about 400-500 game-related sites to find anything new, then filter manually through all that "potential news" to find what might be of interest to you. Because this is a hobby and not a full-time job, I can't spend lots of time each day scouring other offline sources, making calls, etc. Maybe someday the site will take off to a point where I can, but so far it hasn't.

I personally enjoy most facets of gaming. I like a good wargame. I like a good miniatures game. I like board games, card games, PC strategy games, and RPGs. Bottom line, I like a good game and I'm not too particular what "kind" of game it is. This site's "shotgun" coverage is a reflection of that wide-ranging interest. I don't intentionally sleight any facet of gaming here. Nor do I intentionally leave off any particular manufacturer. I try to treat the little "one-person shop" as well as the industry leaders in terms of coverage. Actually, I'll probably bend over backwards for the little guy, to help them make it big if I can.

But the sad truth, from my perspective on this side of the computer screen, is that the most active parts of the hobby gaming industry right now seem to be RPGs and miniatures. If I scan the Internet every day, I am almost always guaranteed to find that some foundry has released a new miniature, and some RPG publisher has put out a new supplement or title. It's rare, by comparison, that the wargame publishers put out anything new. But if they do, and I find out about it, I definitely cover it. I'm not saying that I think other parts of the industry are dying, or anything of the sort. I think it's simply that the amount of work required to produce a totally new tabletop wargame (with maps, counters, rules, etc.) is probably substantially more than to produce (for example) an RPG map in PDF form or a new miniature. I also think there are many more businesses actively producing miniatures and RPG items right now than wargames. As a result, we should expect to see (and do) more RPG and miniature releases than new wargame releases. Since I cover a sort of "survey" of the industry, you should expect to see (and do) more RPG and miniatures coverage here than wargame coverage... not because of any bias on my part.