Fiasco is the latest game from Shab al-Hiri Roach creator Jason Morningstar, and having purchased it this morning I'm so enthused about it I decided to bump it to the head of the review queue right away, because it's pretty damn awesome. Eschewing the tightly specifc setting of Roach, Fiasco is a broad toolkit game that emulates crime-caper-gone-wrong movies, films like Fargo and A Simple Plan that are about regular folks caught up in a web of betrayals over some prize that all gets fucked up and eventually someone gets fed into a wood chipper. Here the focus is on the genre, not the setting, and Fiasco pinpoints the core concepts and embeds them into a co-operative-but-competitive GM-less game much like Roach, but significantly different.

Games begin by selecting a 'playset', a defined setting (like a small Midwest town) that brings with it a host of possible details and plot elements. A big dice pool is rolled, then players take turns marrying the numbers to the playset elements to create relationships between characters and then attaching places, objects and motivations to those relationships (rather than to individual characters, which I think is a very clever move). Afer this setup period, the game moves into two acts as players frame scenes putting characters into conflict, but there's a twist to this. When it's your turn, you choose to either establish a scene for your character, but the other players decide how it pans out - or you let them decide what the scene involves, but you decide on the resolution. Either way, dice are awarded (but not rolled) from the central pool until it hits a threshold, at which dice are rolled to either bring in a major twist (end of the first act) or determine your character's fate once everything goes to hell (end of the second act). Roll credits, hose down the wood chipper.

Mechanically and conceptually, there are a lot of very intriguing ideas in Fiasco. Game play is more or less diceless, but there's nonetheless a level of dice-connected strategy. When you decide on a scene's resolution, you award a positive (white) or negative (black) die from the pool, but those labels fall away when it comes time to actually roll them at the end of the acts. Instead, you just want high numbers on one colour and low numbers on another, and the best way to ensure that is to have all/most of the dice the same colour (so keep winning or keep losing). In the first act, you give the dice you win to another player, so you can parley your scene's outcome into hurting or helping (but probably hurting) another player. In the second act, you keep the dice you win, so it's in your interest to decide on the outcome of your scenes - but the other players will probably frame scenes that put your character in even more trouble. It's a lovely design, although it's so close to diceless that some groups may just ditch the dice and play from the gut.

I also want to give big props to the writing and design of Fiasco, which is clean and clear, but also has a strong and engaging voice that is enthusiastic without ever being patronising. There's a strong emphasis on examples of play, which really helps to explain the unusual concepts involved. In fact, the last chunk of the PDF (which is like 140 pages for just $10) is a massive blow-by-blow play recap, showing exactly how the game flows and the dice get matched to playset elements. I generally find 'actual play' recountings dull as ditchwater because they usually focus on the narrative, rather than the game, but Morningstar makes this extended example both interesting and informative. Another salute goes to the four sample playsets (small Midwest city, Wild West town, suburbia and Antarctic station(!)), which all have a strong mix of elements and plot hooks. That said, if none of those appeals, you have to create your own playset which might take an hour and bleed some of the suprises out of play; that's a labour intensive task just for a single-session game, so I suspect that some lazy players (mea culpa) might stop after those four and shelve the game from that point.

But even if they do, that's four strong single-session criminal fuckups for ten bucks, and that's definitely worth the money.

I really liked Fiasco, if you can't tell, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to recreate Blood Simple, or handcuff their best friend and throw them into a sewer for their share of the meth money. Buy it now and don't blame me when the cops break your knees.

Apropos of nothing, fuck Lotus Notes. Fuck it right in the fucking ear.

Oh, nausea and debilitating stomach pain, how I've missed you. And to think I was afraid you wouldn't be showing up in 2010.

I usually post something on my birthday, but today I'm drawing a blank.

I've told myself that this year will be a real dynamo of activity, self finding and finger pulling out, but so far anything I've suggested to people as possible modes of mental invigoration seems to have rather shocked them.

 I'm sorry that I can only raise a dutiful interest in further study or getting a drivers licence. I'm 37 years old and what I really want to do is grow wings.

Another top-secret publishing-type question:

I'm looking for Australian illustrators and artists with an atmospheric, polished style, preferably working in watercolours, gauche or similar (rather than linework only), who can commit to doing a dozen-odd images to a brief and deadline.

As well as contact details, I also need to see 2-3 samples (which can be online).

If you know anyone, and if you have links to portfolios, please let me know; email me privately if you like.

The change in Fallout 3 from third-person isometric view to a first-person perspective is surprisingly powerful, and brings a new level of tension and immediacy to the series. No longer do you get to watch detached from above like a god, measuring up your options at your leisure and taking in all available data. Now you're looking through the eyes of a person wading through radioactive waste in bad light and the first inkling you have that something is wrong is when a naked ghoul screams as it jumps in to bite your face off or a 9-foot-tall Super Mutant hits you in the balls with a sledgehammer. There's a powerful and often scary level of immersion in Fallout 3, and by the time you get a few hours into the game claustrophobia and acrophobia both start making inroads into your brain.

The price of that immersion, though, is a sense of fun. The game is engaging, but it's lost a lot of the colour and playfulness that marked the first two instalments. Everything is the colour of rust and dirt and year-old shit, every monster explodes in a shower of blood and organs when you blow its head off, every NPC says fuck and shit and other grown-up words because by God, post-apocalyptic computer games where you kill and eat radioactive crab-men are Serious Fucking Business. There's still humour, but it nestles uneasily alongside the dourness - and while that dourness ramps up the immersion (because life after the Bomb is unlikely to be all wine and roses), it left me wishing for a spot of colour among the brown, or a moment of unforced levity before returning to shooting Mad Max clones in the spine.

(And the immersion starts to wane after a bit, once you have enough bullets and health packs to make it through pretty much any fight. Except for the long, gruelling treks through subway tunnels, as you start running out of supplies...)

But still. Good game. Great Christmas present. Can't sleep, Feral Ghouls gonna eat my brain.

Chan Marshall, she of the long fringe and Cat Power fame, is following me around, on the psychic plane if no other. First, I spend an evening being rhapsodised at regarding her covers album and have to remind said rhapsodiser that I was the one that actually introduced her version of Satisfaction to him some years ago.

This gets me thinking about her intermittently all day- that hair, the difficult artistic temperament (though on me that just gets called drunk), the weird way that most of her fans are sort of annoying people. I go to sleep and there she is once more as one of several stars of my latest sex dream. Yes, folks, I do tend to prefer densely populated mental porn when my mind is headed to Hornyville. Apparently I'm like a man in that respect- most women when showing themselves a good time allegedly prefer to imagine being swept up on a black stallion and then doing terrible,wonderful things with just one handsome prince/ss at a time. Not me. As they say, three's a crowd and ten's an orgy! Whoo!

So after waking up feeling hot, bothered and kind of cross at myself for getting all dream-wicked with someone so painfully hip, I wander along to Polyester Books, and there she is AGAIN, breathlessly chattering on their retro-style televsion set about the genius of the Dirty Three. This has killed my unwilling crush howwever, as luckily for me she seems even less articulate than Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. That's like, quite a feat.

Uh, apart from that, I am doing a lot of worrying, and seem to have lost my nice brown cardigan. A minor woe, true, but i'd still do a little dance if it does turn up under the bed. Tickets for little dance are two dollars and fifteen cents, over 18s only.

(I totally meant to post this or something similar last night, but I got distracted by Fallout 3 during the day and didn't want to use the computer during last night's thunderstorm. I am weak.)

I'm not gonna get into a heavy dissection of 2009. It was a good year for me, with lots of good times and only a few bad ones. Minor regrets, mostly that I didn't write more.

And I'm also not going to pull apart the carcass of the 2000s and read the decade's past in its entrails. Others can do that, and with a better perspective than me. I might drop into deep introspection and recollection when I turn 40, but that's still... oh fuckchrist, just 15 months away. Wah. Anyway, the only thing I can really say about the 2000s is that I wish I'd written more.

2010, though... man, that's a science-fiction year. That's a year you'd see in a book title or dropped into the background of a story to show that this is the future, damnit. It ends in a zero, and we all know that means something. Possibly something about jetpacks, or nuclear mutants, or cyborg arms. Or nuclear jetpack mutant arms, which would surely make it hard to write.

Given that, no jetpack arms for me, please, because I need to write more this year. With no more school eating up my nights, and (hopefully) less need to take work home this year, I don't have much of an excuse not to work on Arcadia every day. That doesn't mean I will, because I'm a lazy fellow who gets easily distracted by beer and videogames, but that's not an excuse and will not go well in court if I am ever held in judgement for failure to finish the Great Australian Novel. Sure, that sounds unlikely, but in the Bizarro future of 2010 who knows how the legal system will warp, what with firewalls and climate change and the election of demon camel-men to the bar?

Ahem. Anyway, more writing. It's not a new year's resolution, because those are crap and never kept. Just a decision, and permission on your part to mock, revile and report me to the Dromedary Hell Police should I fail.

2009 was a pretty damn good year for me. Not 100% perfect, but nothing is except God and Pringles.

I'd write more, but it's so fucking hot I can smell my skin melting in front of the computer. Maybe tomorrow, when I'll be badly hungover but not being baked alive.

Cicadas. The sound of summer.

Or perhaps what I am hearing is the earth slowly frying, because lordacious it is hot. So hot that I am hiding inside, doing some desultory turfing of excess personal belongings and musing longingly on sleep.

I think today I may have dome some good PR work for dreadlocks. Normally I don't talk to brewheads on the tram, but when they start talking loudly about me, I- well, I get unpredictable. Which one day may prove to be a mistake, but for the moment I really enjoy bluff calling.
Boofhead 1 sat next to me, Boof 2 across from me. I was reading an incomprehensible book about British street gangs so paid them little mind until I heard this gem,courtesy of B1.

"Dreads. Fuck, man. You know, I heard that there was this guy, right, they cut off his dreads and deadset, they were full of spider eggs. Dirty as!" Clearly I was meant to get upset in some way, but I decided instead to shake a few of my dreads onto this fellers shoulder, unleashing the mythical swarm. His mate saw it and laughed.
"Dude, she heard ya. Ya just got spidered." My seatmate then had the grace to apologise for "being a dick", and after this we had a nice chat about locks- the cleanliness thereof, the comments people make and the urban legends of dreadlock spider infestation. We began to actually get along. True, they did ask me if I was selling "bikkies" but readily accepted that I was not, and we parted with gracious wishes for a good new year. I'm fairly sure I wasn't actually meant to hear the observations made about my height and my arse as I alighted the tram, but I'm aware that chivalry is not at well these days.

So yes, it could have got ugly, but it didn't. They were just silly. If they had been especially bad boys I could have simply conked them with my latest dread bead- the gnarliest, most Tolkienesque hair trinket you ever did see. Considering I have already left a slight bruise on my own cheek by accident, we could have had some real CBD violence going down today well before the 2 am lock out.

Quick note for Melbourne public transport users:

If you want to get a myki card - and let's face it, you're gonna have to at some point, like it or not - you should register for one at the myki website by January 17 so that you get it for free, rather than spend ten bucks for one and then have to add credit to it.

I got one yesterday. I'm not about to use it any time soon, not until the system actually works - especially since I mostly catch buses, and those have proved too complicated for the system because they, I dunno, move around so much - but at least this way it's free and I can leave it in a drawer until I'm forced to use it once metcards are phased out.

I've seen reviews of Sherlock Holmes that criticise it as being too much of an action film, rather than the intellectual puzzle-solving of the original Conan Doyle stories. But there are two things wrong with this point of view:

1 - Holmes was a very physical character in the original stories - strong, skilled in martial arts, a master of disguise and subterfuge. He was never afraid to get his hands dirty, and many stories end with a sudden fistfight or Watson plugging a bad guy with his service revolver. A movie that reconciles the two aspects of the character, and recognizes its pulp adventure aspects, is more true to the source material than not.

2 - Screw those critics, because the movie is goddamn awesome.

I saw this two hours ago and I'm still hyperactive. Guy Ritchie hasn't made a masterpiece of subtle plotting or anything, but he's made a strong action-adventure film with a great cast and pace to it. It's a modern vision of Holmes as an erratic, slightly Aspergersy genius who needs constant stimulus to stay engaged by life, and Robert Downey Jr is perfect for the role. Jude Law also makes a pretty good fist of Watson, again bringing out the physical aspects of the character, who - let us remember - is an ex-soldier who totes around a gun and swordcane at all times while helping a semi-sane polymath investigate case after fucked-up case. Rather than rework an existing story, or bore us with telling us things about the characters that we all already know, the movie kickstarts a plot around occult conspiracies and serial killings, with a bad guy who (in an inspired bit of casting) actually looks a lot like Basil Rathbone, whose hawk-nosed, elegant portrayal of Holmes has long been the assumed standard. Inverting that look for the villain, and then to give us a Holmes that is a scruffy, hyperactive rockstar... lovely stuff.

It's not deep, but it's cleverer than you might think, it keeps finding new and interesting ways to show off Holmes' physical and mental prowess, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. And it's got me fired up to both reread Doyle's novels and stories (which I haven't done for about 15 years) and to watch some of Guy Ritchie's post-Madonna movies. Oh, I know they'll suck, but I'm just gonna recast them with Downey in my head. That makes everything more fun.

So this is a ghost story right? Right?

Um, well...Hide and Seek has no idea what it wants to be, and furthermore leaves the keys under the mat for a sequel no one wants.

It did keep me on edge admittedly by not making a lick of sense, but not in the good, feverdream, Dario Argento way. More in the "okay, which character is going to make a stupefyingly dumb decision for the sake of the plot next? You sir? Go on, run up those stairs, not out the front door. Three cheers! Oh hang on, you just got killed. Whoops" kind of way. So, both convoluted and stupid. Not what you want in a lover or a movie.

The plot in a nutshell: after his wife's suicide, psychologist David Callaway moves his hollow eyed daughter out of NYC to a ludicrously picturesque town of 200 -ish people, all of whom are blazingly weird from the get go. The house our doc has settled on is the perfect place for two bereaved people to heal, being rambling, drafty, and full of creaky celllars and flickering lights. Plus it has the added advantage of taking them far away from pesky distractions like friends, or a police force consisting of more than one slowpoke sheriff. Conveniently, then, when everything goes all "Argh! Phew. Argh!" like it's supposed to, they have no one to turn to but all of the local rustic loonbags that like to hang around the place with glazed stares and their jaws hanging open. Grand.

Long before the twist ending heaves onto the horizon, we do start to wonder if good ol' dad has his headshrinker qualifications written out in crayon on a wall. Rather like the accusations of murder and mayhem that keep mysteriously appearing on the bathroom mirror. He's rendered more grumpy than scared by these events, and even when the cat is found drowned in the bath (complete with extra gross sludge effects) he decides that maybe even more time in freako-house is better than bringing his daughter back to the big bad city for a little actual grief therapy. I mean, a cat here, a cat there, an imaginary friend that pushes people out of windows, sure, but the air is so healthy!

Okay- so just what are we dealing with here in the final analysis? A ghost? A demon? An evil child who likes to get around in an evening dress in order to creep out Paw's new girlfriend? You know, I think you can already tell by about halfway in that I didn't really give a hoot. This is one of those movies that actors sign on for out of boredom or desperation. The Oscar nominations have dried up, there are fewer cute groupies and the bank balance has dipped into the six figures. And that's was just Dakota Fanning's reasoning, ho ho. Because if this was an actual considered career choice for DeNiro, then Martin Scorsese should defriend him on facebook.

"Good thing we were camping miles from nowhere. My farting was criminal." Lady at party number 3.

"A cleft chin is like a bum crack for your face. And that's a gift from god." Fellow at party number 1.

"Howard The Duck is one cool motherfucker duck." Same fellow.

"If the wrapping is on fire does that mean the pudding is on fire?" chap at party number 2.

"The moon has a moustache!" This was quite an exciting realisation for several of us at the second gathering.

So, I'm not quite in my right mind currently, possibly owing to the motley assortment of food I've ingested over the last 48 hours. I can't really gather my thoughts up neatly, (or at all) so I may as well steal some of the profounder observations of my friends and acquaintances. I'm positive they all made more sense in context- no, I'm actually not at all convinced of that.

Thusly, today my project is to eat something other than Grain Waves, cheesecake and bread with Jack Daniels vegan sauce on it so that I may once again cast a sane eye on my surroundings.