Mos Def - Black on Both Sides
Album cover art drawings. All done with brushes and ink.
Critical Miss!
1970’s era Freddie Mercury
I feel very strongly that all Nerds need to get on-board with NFL football. It’s a Turn-Based Strategy Game, pretty much exactly like Heroclix. All teams operate with a salary-cap, which is like the points system in Clix. It’s not like the Yankees in baseball, who can just throw money at their team to make it unstoppable. The Yankees are like a Heroclix team comprised of Thanos, Kingdom-Come Green Lantern, Ultimates Thor, and Ultron* and they play against other teams made up on only S.H.E.I.L.D. Agents and The Blob. A 1000 point team vs. a 56 point team. Boring. Major League Baseball is the worst.
Football teams are put together using players who all have special abilities and they are arranged in strategic formations. They line up in carefully thought out positions, and they move to the spot where they are supposed to use their specific ability. It might as well be played on a grid. It’s turn-based. It’s not one of those games where play is continual. It keeps stopping, like in Clix, so each side can make their attempt to score using their strategy.
When a play or a call is questionable - all the referees and the people upstairs all pull out their gigantics rules manuals and take 20 minutes to determine what overrides what or which thing counteracts another thing. It’s not the same game, but it’s like stopping a Magic: The Gathering bout to argue about whether an Instant retroactively precedes an Interrupt. It’s world’s away from Fifa Soccer, where if the referee doesn’t see it, it doesn’t count. I’ll never watch another Fifa game again after that last World Cup, where the British scored, but the ball bounced out and since the ref didn’t see it, they didn’t get the point. You can’t have a game where everyone watching it sees the replay of the ball going in, over and over again, but it doesn’t count. That sort of thing never would have happened in the NFL. They’d have stopped the game for a half-hour to determine whether or not the ball crossed the plane.
A big difference between Clix and Football would be that instead of rolling a dice to see if a play works, we actually watch the players attempt to execute the plan. If they pull it off perfectly, that’s the equivalent of throwing a 12. If the other team blocks them, it’s like rolling some low number. If one of your players gets injured in a play, I guess that’s like rolling a Critical Hit. Either way, watching the plays actually happen would be like seeing all the little Clix figures shoot each other with laser-beams or batarangs every time you threw the dice. In this respect, Football is better than Heroclix.
Come on Nerds! Let’s steal football away from the Jocks! It’s exactly the kind of game we should all be into!!
* I haven’t actually played Clix in a few years, so these are some figures who were big deals back in the day. I am sure there are more powerful figures in the game today. Hopefully my analogy still makes sense.
(via samhumphries)
