Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Ramblings of a madman

Well, here we are. I've gone and started a gaming blog, because the 834 million others weren't quite enough.

What should you know about me? Well, I'm a hardcore gamer. I started with the NES way back in the 80's. When we got our first PC in the early 90's I moved to primarily gaming there. Fast forward to 2007 when my in-laws, my wife and I were looking to start a business. I did some research and found a video game franchise. We opened that in 2008...and closed it in 2008. It turns out that the video game business doesn't leave much of a profit margin for the retailers and while the franchise was making money by conning other people as stupid as we were that it was a good business plan to sell an xbox 360 with a negative profit because you'll make it up by selling games for 40 cents of profit...oh but you don't get the new releases the day they release...the publisher sent 90% of their run to Gamestop/Best Buy et. al. After a few months of staring at the walls 7 days a week and occasionally helping one of the 3 customers a day we got on average, I started to look for stuff to expand the business. I had played Dawn of War and knew a little about this "Warhammer" thing, but didn't really know what it was about. On a whim I called Games Workshop and we started carrying their product a few weeks later. Now here was a product line! Good mark-ups (enough for me to actually give a *gasp* discount), support from the company and enough knowledge to build up a good following in the store. Sadly it was too little too late for our fledgling business, but I came out of it a veritable Warhammer and 40K expert...plus with several armies I was able to assemble at cost so yay me.

For those of you who skipped that paragraph (and I don't blame you...it was too damn long but I needed to get my geek street cred out there) You can keep reading here as I've returned to the point. I started playing 40k in the last few months of 4th edition with an Ultramarines army. I then added a Necron force, a Chaos Space Marine army, a Tau pile of boxes yet to be assembled and an Ork army that is currently in the works. October of 2008 a couple of us decided to try Fantasy so with our first game scheduled for Halloween, I built up a Vampire Counts army and have an Empire army also in boxes waiting for me to get around to them after the Orks are done.

So we get to the real meat of this...why should you read this? Well, as I said I know my gaming pretty well, but so does everyone else. I am proud to be a cynical bastard which makes for some entertaining comments from time to time and I am over-opinionated which I believe is a requirement for a blog. I am a member of the Imperial Vox Cast's "1st Company" where I have been mentioned as being pretty funny, and that's without them seeing me so I'm pretty psyched about that. I've been thinking of starting a webcast, but the huge pain in the ass it would be combined with not having friends interested in doing so, means I will instead sit here and type my maniacal ramblings and hope I spell most of it right. If everything works out, you the reader will leave here with new ideas, insights and maybe something funny to mention at your next game...or filled with a deep loathing for some random dude in New Jersey, but either way I'm happy so let's rock.

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