SMBC Comics Forum

You know what series of novels based on something game-related isn't overrated? The Magic: the Gathering series. I might be biased though.

I own one of them... But I never read it. From what I know the story seemed kind of neat.

The hardest part would be keeping the cannon when writing the stories. People will be all up in arms if you told them that the earth mage grew up in a water city or some crap like that that isn't in the Magic manual or something like that.

Even though the cards came first, just think of the cards being based off of the books. Like characters in the books are sometimes featured as cards, when in reality the characters in the cards are written into the book. They've been very faithful to each other.

mountainmage wrote:Even though the cards came first, just think of the cards being based off of the books. Like characters in the books are sometimes featured as cards, when in reality the characters in the cards are written into the book. They've been very faithful to each other.

Is that true? How 'bout the very early sets, like Alpha and Beta?

I do hate how the cards look now these days, except for "Old Fogey".

The early sets did not have books based off of them. When magic books first started coming out, they had no relationship with the cards. It wasn't until Urza's Saga that the two had any connection (to this date the Brother's War pentalogy [containing the 4 main books and the prequel: The Thran] is one of my favorite storylines).

Also, I don't mind how cards look like now, even though they are radically different from their predecessors. The only thing I regret is the transition to pretty much purely digital artwork for the cards. Don't get me wrong, I love the artwork of many of the newer cards, but all the artwork seems to mesh together now that everyone is using the same medium. When everything was drawn on a non-digital canvas, the range of various art styles was much greater.

I remember back when kids used to play with cards and collect sports cards. That doesn't really happen much these days.

I have a sports card collection, but it's inherited and I'd much rather collect magic cards.

I mostly meant just collecting cards in general. Even Magic cards.

Frostbite wrote:I remember back when kids used to play with cards and collect sports cards. That doesn't really happen much these days.

I remember when all kids played with were pogs.

I have a pog collection too.

We went through phases in later grade school. Pogs, marbles, Star Trek cards (same general idea as Magic), among others.

There are 2 MtG books that I absolutely adore. There would probably more, but I really love the ones that were written before they started paralelling the card sets that they came from. One of the books in the Ice Age set was fantastic, and The Brother's War was absolutely amazing. Reset button ftw

On the halo stuff: You halo fan(s?) might find this to be an interesting read, as it's the FPS game that Bungi made before the Halo series, and very closely related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy
http://bungie.wikia.com/wiki/Marathon

I'm a huge fan of the Marathon games. Or at least, back when I played them. This is mostly cause I grew up with them as the mainstay of my childhood gaming (along with Escape Velocity!), as for the first few years of my household's computer presence was entirely Mac's. Marathon came out right about the same time as Doom did for the PC. It was amazingly more advanced, but due to it's residence on a non-gaming platform, it never got the widespread publicity that Doom did. Instead of "shoot bad guys, open doors" the Marathon games were a storytelling, with a FPS as the method of delivery. It also had a lot of new features that were never seen in the Doom games:
• the ability to look up and down
• dual wielding weapons!
• 2nd triggers on weapons
• full multiplayer support
• voice chat in multiplayer (I kid you not! lol)
plus some other features that I'm a tad tired to remember... plus it was like 10 years ago, lol.

The marathon universe is actually very closely linked with the Halo universe (I don't think Bungi ever came out and said they're the same universe) but there are a lot of similarities.

Here are some of the weapon names from marathon:
MA-75B Assault Rifle/Grenade Launcher
SPNKR-X17 SSM Launcher

And lastly, here's a quote from the bungipedia's marathon page, "As the player relaxes in triumph, he learns that the Pfhor's invasion of Tau Ceti was a failure; ten "Mjolnir cyborgs" had been smuggled on to the Marathon when it was launched..." (http://bungie.wikia.com/wiki/Marathon)

yarr. I'm an old-school bungi nerd The halo fanbase pisses me off, for the most part.

Phoenix wrote:The Brother's War was absolutely amazing. Reset button ftw

Heartily agree. Also, are you referring to the mana cylix? Reset button is a funny name for it, but it's pretty clever.

Phoenix wrote:old-school bungi nerd

So old-school that you don't have time for the 'e' at the end, eh?