kingandy | In the Silent Hours of the Beholder

I am pleased to note that my name has made it onto

delvy's game's website. Also pleased to see I've got Albrecht Genscher. He was probably one of my first choices for characters, though I was a little hesitant about claiming to have "charisma, good looks and charm". I'm not sure if that's modesty or self-doubt. People keep telling me I'm charismatic ("Everybody loves Andy") and I may be starting to believe it.

Over the weekend I bought a new game for my GameBoy Advance (SP!). Had to; I'd finished Zelda. Wandering around Toys-R-Us I noticed that they were selling many of their marginally older games for 9.99 apiece (GBA owners! Take note!) so I picked up Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder. It's a great lark, because I remember playing the PC version many years ago and now they've slapped slightly prettier visuals and the 3rd Ed ruleset on top. You can roll your characters' stats as many times as you like (I think they realised everybody would be doing this anyway, since it's the first thing you roll and you've usually got a specific character class in mind, and they don't let you shuffle the numbers. I mean, you don't even get to assign them. You get what's rolled and that's that) so I sat there for about 10 minutes rolling 4 characters (the standard starting party size), which means (taking racial modifiers into account) one or two of them have '20' stats. With Strength being used to determine both hit rolls and damage, this means my fighter is taking out almost everything he attacks with the first blow. (I'm still on Level 2, fighting Kobolds and Skeletons. The skeletons all die when my Cleric turns them, because the programmers couldn't be bothered implementing the Running In Fear turning event.)

GBA game paks are so cute. Aren't they? They're like old GB paks but half the size. It's a bit silly, really. One can fit the entire SNES Zelda game, plus the extra 2-4 player "Four Swords" game and three save-games onto something half the size of Tetris. It uses the same size port, two. And you can apparently run a four-player game off a single cartridge. Too cool. But anyway. I'm already worried about what to do when I finish EoB, so I'd love to find a game with a lot of lastability - entertaining, addictive and replayable. I plan to spend my weeknights in my old room at my Mum's house, glued to the thing. If anyone knows of such a beast, let me know.