It's December already. Crikey how time flies.

2003 has been a funny year. I fulfilled a lifelong ambition - of becoming a published writer ("Adventures and Expeditions by GASLIGHT"). I also travelled overseas for the first time, visiting Origins and touring the east coast.

Unfortunately I also discovered what burn-out really is.

For the first half of last year I was into everything. I found myself agreeing to do all sorts of things, work on various projects. Eventually it got the point where I had to sit down and make a big list of what to do as a priority. And working on the various web-sites I maintain was shoved right down the bottom.

Sadly, that still wasn't enough.

So for the last three months, I've taken a complete break from all the things I'd been involved in. Road Rage, GASLIGHT and the various Two Hour Wargames I play were completely forgotten. I've been playing in a couple of D&D games, real dungeon bashing stuff, and it's been a refreshing change. I also started running a superhero RPG, something I've always had a guilty hankering for, and that's been going really well too. Right now I'm researching the early 17th century for a historical RPG campaign set in the reign of James I. On an entirely non-game related note, I'm also doing a bit of self-improvement.

There is a point, I am getting to it, I think.

Anyway, it took Freeserve (who host the RR website) cancelling my account after 90 days of non-use to remind me that I really ought to do something about the old stuff. So in the new year I'm going to start work on a new web-site incorporating all my existing web pages, and tidy up some of the loose ends. As for Road Rage the game... I'm finding it hard to find players locally, so I can't really do much work on it. So I'm going to tidy up the existing pages, delete some bits that aren't going to get finished and draw a line under it. Maybe at some point in the future I'll fall in with a crowd of ravening auto-combat enthusiasts, but until then I'd rather spend time working on games that I'm actually playing.

2004 is going to be a year of changes. Hopefully good ones.

 
Dickie, Chips, Siku, and Geoffrey. Sounds like a night out in the Gay Village I know, but it's all car related, honest.

This morning I received a CARE package from Jersey. Mr Rob LeVesconte very kindly sent me some Siku cars, which tend to be slightly larger than your typical Hot Wheels. For a scale comparison, I asked Vincent (Foundry Fatbum) and Julius (Copplestone Future Wars) to take a look



The detailing and build quality is very, very nice. They have without doubt the nicest wheels I've ever seen on a 3x scale car. They are slightly larger than other manufacturers in this "scale", but you could get away with using them together if you're not too fussy. I base my 28mm figures on thick slottabases to fit heightwise with 1:43 cars, but if I was basing on pennies or washers I think they'd be a reasonable match. One very nice feature is that the baseplate of each car includes some vehicle stats - engine size, vehicle length, top speed etc.

He also included some of the 1:50 California Highway Patrol cars he'd ordered from Die Cast Direct.


They're quite a bit larger than the Crown Vics that I've already got ("Fast Lane" brand from Toys R Us. But I'm not sure these are actually Crown Vics. The grille at the front is different - vertical grillework instead of horizontal slats - the trim down the side of the doors is different and it has wraparound indicator lights at the back. It might be an earlier model than I've seen, or it might be a Chevy Impala (like my holiday rental car, which I note has the wraparound rear lights) or it could just be some chinese sculptors idea of a "generic" US police car. Either way it's very nice, again just a little bit larger than other 3x scale cars.

Well I haven't been entirely idle myself. I've got a project in the pipeline to do a skirmish game in a tropical holiday island setting (by way of GTA: Vice City) and I've been looking for bits and pieces for it. My local Wilkinsons had a selection of Dickie die-casts, including a range of '50s US cars, all fins and air vents.


The picture shows a Caddy and an Olds 442 drop top. They're all convertibles in this range, but these are intended mainly as background and terrain rather than actual combat cars so the lack of drivers and occupants don't matter (although I'm working on an idea to do some vehicle passenger figures - but that's another story) The detailing is superb, and at something like £1.99 each these are an absolute bargain. They also had some modern cars there, but these were a little too tall for 28mm figs.

Also from Dickie, there were a small selection of busses and coaches.



These are cheap, pull back toys. The city bus comes in two liveries, as does the coach. There's also a double decker bus model in the range, again with two liveries, but it looks a bit underscale. The city bus looks bang on to me, while the coach is a little under, but looks OK. One annoying thing though, the coaches are left hand drive, while the buses are all right hand drive. Oh well, perhaps the island dictatorship bought a job lot of UK citybuses cheap.

Finally, long overdue.. and because Mr LeVesconte wanted to see it...(sigh).... Geoffrey, the Toys R Us cop car.


Look the picture on the Diecast Direct website wasn't clear - I thought the insignia was, you know, just like a generic police shield. I've got four of these buggers to rebadge now. The bonnet (that's "hood" to you Yanks) will be easy enough - mask the windscreen, tampo-strip the insignia and replace with an alternate. The doors are a different matter, as there's the contouring at the bottom which won't take my decal paper decals quite so well. I'm thinking of just replacing the colour stripe and leaving off the insignia - one of these days I'll get around to it.

Then again, last time I checked, DCD had some "real" police cars in that range at the same cheaper price, so I might just buy some of them instead.

 
Arggh is it really that long since the last update?

I've come back from a US vacation which saw me driving over 1300 miles over two weeks, and seeing many different sights on the road, ranging from the big city to the real-world Redneck Hell. I had a fantastic time, bought some die casts, and the highlight was winning a stock car race game being run at the HAWKS gaming club in Maryland. Proof that driving on the left does have its advantages!

One thing I picked up while over there was a copy of the original "Gone in 60 Seconds" from 1974. This was a b-movie... no scratch that, maybe if they tripled the budget it would have ranked that high. Made by a car crash fanatic called HB Hallicki, who financed, wrote, directed, and starred in the movie himself. The cast and crew were all friends and family, the cars were all from Hallicki's personal collection or borrowed (not all returned intact). and the climactic car chase featuring Eleanor lasts a whole forty minutes.

So it's pure 1970s kitsch, down to the bad hair and moustaches. But is it any good? Surprisingly yes. Most of the acting is appalling, but no worse than some other movies of the period. Plotwise, well it's generally simpler than the remake - the hero is stealing the cars simply because he's hired to, and he's very good at his job. There's no big villain, and the buld up to the big chase is just a series of car boost vignettes.

Once Eleanor hits the road, the stunt driving is spectacular, most of it done by Hallicki himself, and unlike most car chase movies is entirely real. No special effects were used, when Hallicki accidentally wrapped Eleanor around a lamppost shooting one scene, it was incorporated into the story and for the rest of the chase the crew levered out the damage just enough to allow the car to run. There's an interview with an extra on the disc who tells the story of how in one scene, Hallicki was supposed to throw Eleanor into a handbrake turn in front of a police roadblock where the extra was standing. When, in the movie, Eleanor ploughs into the police car at 50mph and the cop is scene frantically diving out of the way being missed by mere inches.... well that's real. Because it's all real, it's not as spectacular as the crashes we see in Hollywood today, but it's entertaining. If you ever get a chance to see it, or one of Hallicki's other films, I strongly recommend them.

Now then, if you're going to be running a car chase through city streets, what do you need? Some city buildings that's what. And Microtactix now have what you need in their Twilight Street card building range. They're a mix of the old Cheepsville range and some new models, all in glorious colour. Unlike Microtactix's Dirt Cheap Cityscape range, Twilight Street buildings are from the wrong side of the tracks, so you have seedy stores and bars and run down tenement buildings. There are two packs available, plus two free sample buildings. Scalewise, like the Cheepsville buildings, they're around true 25mm size, so at a pinch they work for 20mm figures with Hot Wheels or 28mm figures. If you've ever wanted to do any sort of gritty urban games, then I recommend you have a look at Twilight Street at www.microtactix.com

Anyway, expect some new stuff on the Road Rage site coming soon!

 
Went to Fantizan, ran a game, met a Road Rage reader, ate sandwiches, bought lead, came home.

Errrrrrm. That about sums up my weekend :-)

Oh heck I nearly forgot, while at the show I picked up a copy of "Highway FM" from Dropwing Games. It's another set of car-combat rules, designed to mesh into their existing "street violence" skirmish rules, "Street FM". I'm not honestly a fan of the latter - it uses an Action Point mechanic for movement which in my experience can make for a slow, micromanaged game, whereas I prefer something more fast & furious. "Highway" has some nice ideas, differentiating between fixed area games (primarily to fit in with "Street" battles) and free area games (road combat that runs over miles and miles of highway). But a lot of it will be familiar to readers of other car-combat games. Vehicles have all the usual stats (handling, acceleration, deceleration etc) but curiously there's only one example vehicle given, a regular road car. There are the usual control colls and collisions. The vehicle damage table is fairly brutal, and has a few quirks. For example as the table stands it's impossible to hit an occupant in the back seat of a car. There is also a cut down version of the "Street" Action Point mechanism included for handling pedestrians. The book rounds out with a fairly basic scenario - a battle between two gangs.

If you're getting the impression that I wasn't overly impressed with "Highway FM", you may be right. It's not that the book isn't nicely illustrated - there are several photos scattered through the book of blokes in cars with guns, that gives you the impression that the focus of this game is armed vehicle occupants rather than armed vehicles. A list of sample generic vehicle stats would have been nice for a start, and I'd have liked to see a couple of sections clarified a bit.

I'm trying desperately to come up with something nice to say about "Highway FM" in conclusion. The best I can manage is that the author is to be applauded for expanding "Street FM" in this direction by producing a standalone game that's compatible, and that if you like "Street FM" and the other "Dropwing" series of games you'll probably like "Highway FM". Personally I don't, but as they say, Your Mileage May Vary.

 
Watched a few more of the BMW Films. John Frankenheimer's "Ambush" is a gripping little road combat piece set at night. Ang Lee's "The Chosen" is almost surreal, with our hero evading his pursuers on an icy New York dockyard in an automotive ballet. "Ticker", directed by Joe Carnahan sees our hero carrying precious cargo and pursued by a helicopter, and is THE most exciting car chase/combat sequence I have ever seen. The last I watched "Beat The Devil" by Tony Scott was initially the most disappointing - there's barely any driving, it's shot in an annoying quick-cuts MTV style with trendy bullet-point subtitles, and seems to be little more than an excuse to have James Brown (yes the Godfather of Soul) renegotiate his contract with the Devil (another of Gary Oldman's low key performances), however there's a gag at the very end which makes the whole film worth it.

There are three more films I've yet to watch. One, directed by HK director Wong Kar Wai is no longer available on the BMW Films site, but I've tracked down a copy elsewhere on the net. The other two are by Guy Ritchie (featuring a mystery guest star, geez I wonder who that could be) and some bloke I've never heard of. But they're all downloading as I type this. Again Kudos to BMW for making these films, the short format lends itself to car chase action, with all the films except "Devil" getting straight to the action without excessive exposition. And since I'm never likely to be in the market for a Beemer, it's easy to overlook the advertising element of these films (which in all honesty isn't that excessive - the Beemers get banged up and dented by the action just like any other car would)

 
I'd heard bits and bobs about a new film currently doing the rounds called "The Transporter". The hero is a driver/courier for hire with a tricked out BMW, and it seemed very close to the "Boom & Vroom" RPG campaign concept I ran, so I tracked down a very iffy downloaded copy to see if it was worth seeing, and last night watched the first half of it.
On the surface it has a good pedigree - Directed by Hong Kong's Corey Yuen, from a screenplay by Luc Besson and starring Jason Statham from "Lock Stock" and "Snatch". That pretty much sums up the whole film in fact - it's a Hong Kong action movie, set in France with a British lead. As cinema, it misses the mark slightly on all three counts - Statham is a decent enough action star by western standards, but that makes him barely passable by HK standards, which means lots of short cuts in the fight scenes. And the nature of the film means his acting talents don't get too much of an outing, though he does manage to put across some dry Brit humour. It's not as stylish as a proper French film, and it's not as gloriously OTT as a proper HK film, falling somewhere in the middle. The car chases are likewise not up to Hollywood standards, though quite passable, and the tricked out Beemer is nice, if nothing flashy.
The plot? Oh you know the usual. Transporter gets hired to deliver package, which turns out to be a pretty girl. Employer betrays Transporter, tries to kill him, fails. Transporter wreaks bloody vengeance and rescues girl, Employer then starts hunting Transporter down etc etc etc..
So no Oscars on the horizon, but that said it's a highly enjoyable action movie that doesn't place too many demands on the viewer. As soon as this hits DVD at the £12 mark I'll be buying it.
Watching "The Transporter" got me thinking about another source of auto action I'd heard about, the BMW Films. Basically BMW hired a load of Hollywood talent to do short 5-10 minute car chase films for the internet in which BMW motors featured prominently. Yes, I hate product placement too, but I'd heard good things about these so I thought I'd check them out. A quick web search gave me the URL (www.bmwfilms.com). The movies are streamed in all the usual formats, or higher quality versions are available for download in Windows Media format (file sizes range from 60-100MB, so a broadband connection is a must). The Hollywood names include some biggies - John Frankenheimer, Tony & Ridley Scott, John Woo and Ang Lee to name but a few. There are nine films, all featuring Clive Owen as "The Driver", a wheelman for hire in the same vein as "The Transporter". So far I've watched one - The Hostage, directed by John Woo. Action movie fans know and revere the name of Woo - and the maestro delivers the goods in his usual style here. The main car chase sequence is well choreographed and beautifully shot, as The Driver puts the new model BMW Z4 through its paces. Obviously in such short films there's only limited scope for character and plot, but who cares? If "The Hostage" is anything to go by, these films are also a good source of scenario ideas. The BMW films are definitely worth checking out and if you don't have a broadband internet connection don't despair, BMW are planning on bringing out a DVD with the films on which can be yours for the cost of postage & packaging.

 
The backlash against "The Getaway" has begun.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2621519.stm