Infinity First Game(s)

Hey folks. SinSynn here.

To tell ya the truth, I've got a bit of a hobby hangover right now. Yeah, I know that's not like an actual 'thing,' but I'm telling you- I've got one.

I spent every free moment I had this past week prepping for my first game of Infinity, y'see, and....uh...
Ok, well...there was that one night I stayed up 'til like two in the morning playing XCom on my XBox, but we won't discuss that...and don't you judge me- I was taking an 'Infinity break,' and I got hooked.

XCom on da XBox (yes I like saying that cuz iz funny to me) is a turn-based strategic game (actual title XCom: Enemy Unknown, but I like 'XCom on da XBox' better...probably cuz I'm dumb like that), and since I'm a big ol' fanboy of the XCom series from back in the day, well...I've already dumped a shameful amount of hours into the new one.
Sigh.
If someone could explain to me why an hour of my workday feels like three hours of actual time, and an hour of gaming feels like thirty-two friggin' seconds, then I am perfectly willing to listen. 
I'm sure there's some sort of Star Trek-ish plot involving Dilithium Crystals, the Space-Time Continuum, and a bad guy that's actually a giant floating head.

*It could be the work of an evil tentacle monster, but that's not really our style*

Anyway, so...yeah.
Infinity.
*grin*

I discussed my initial impression of the Infinity rulebook last week, and despite the fact that the pretty much all of the relevant, necessary information you actually need to play the game that's contained in the book is all outdated (things like...well, the rules, mainly), I very much enjoyed reading the fluff.

Is it oddly translated from time to time? Yes.

Occasionally some of the futuristic techie-speak really breaks down into nonsensical gibberish.
I find it charming, but then again I've sat through hundreds of hours of bootleg imported Anime with my stepson, a lot of which featured what is known as 'fansubs.'
Real Anime fans watch their Anime in Japanese with subtitles, y'see, so a lot of the Anime I was subjected to suffered from 'Japanese-direct-to-English' translation, which can be...very odd, to say the least.
You get used to it after a while, and eventually it becomes a given. Part of the experience, even. I still watch the occasional bootleg Anime, since sometimes that's the only way to see the uncut, unedited versions of them (Netflix tends to have the edited versions. Booooooo!), and I still smile at the awful translations.

*A zombie killing, fan-service Anime like Highschool of the Dead is MUCH better unedited, for example*

Like I mentioned in my rulebook piece, I am honestly predisposed to like this game. It simply contains too much stuff that I think is cool for me to approach it in any sort of unbiased fashion. I got all happy inside the second I opened that rulebook, and I grinned at the infrequent wacky sentences and phrases that appeared.
It's in my blood to do that at this point. I can't help it- watching bootleg Anime has tainted me.

I've held the models in my hands and just stared at them for long minutes, slowly spinning them around and around just admiring the detail. All of the design characteristics seem so familiar to me. There's some Ghost in the Shell, there's some Appleseed, there's even a TAG (which is Infinity-speak for 'big-ass robot') that looks like the Mech from Burst Angel.

*Jo from Burst Angel, one of my fave Anime characters ever. The mech is Django, and she's the pilot*

Many of the male models feature classic 'Rawr! I'm a badass' Anime poses, and many of the female models are all 'Tee-hee! I'm sassy,' but they're just so pretty to look at that what might have come off as cliche ends up amazing instead.
Yeah, sure- in boring old reality, a soldier wielding a gigantic sniper rifle in one hand and a humungous combat knife in the other might seem to be an inconvenient combination of weaponry, but in the world of Infinity it's da awesome.

Is it silly? Yes. Yes it is.

But to someone like me, who thinks that Cowboy Bebop is like, the coolest thing ever, it pretty much assures that all I'm capable of doing is gushing joy-filled Xenos excretions upon you when I'm trying to discuss Infinity here.
...
Yeah, I'm sorry 'bout that. Ummm...it'll come out in the wash, I swear.

So by the time that Saturday finally rolled around, I was practically bursting at the seams to actually play the friggin' game. Everything was set- I had my game board set up with a bunch of terrain fashioned from stuffs around the house, I had a big ol' handful of 20-sided dice, I had a couple of 'beginner's lists' that the (very friendly and helpful) folks on the Infinity forums advised me to use, I had the models I needed (I proxied a couple, but whatevs, right?), and at four in the afternoon, my buddy Nascar arrived and the mayhem began.

*Here's a pic from my phone. Nascar has a troopie on the roof, covering the approach of a flamethrower wielding guy and his buddy. Across the way, you can barely see the troops I moved onto the rooftop to counter this. Yes, the game board is set up on my bed. I gotta find a way to set it up properly, but fer now...*

We played until midnight. We totally fiended out. We basically played until the Crazy Lady I Live With shut us down. It was so much fun. We did take a break to eat, rapidly stuffing our faces with pizza and then getting back at it.
Sure, we struggled a bit with learning the rules, but we got to a point to where we had expanded from the original 'noob mode' lists and added some more advanced stuffs- snipers and camo troops, specifically.

...Ohmygawd the Speculo Killer is just entirely too evil, and having seen what a well placed sniper can do I know I need more vertical line-of-sight blocking terrain. Heh.

*Peek-A-Boo, I see you. After this game, we added a 'computer canned-air spray tower,' and a 'can of primer oil rig' in the middle of the table, along with a couple 'stack of videogame and CD case buildings and walkways.' Ghetto terrain FTW*

We played about eight or nine games- games of Infinity seem to develop into heated firefights pretty quickly, and we probably could've played more but for the fact that Nascar seems to have memory issues regarding rules that affect him in any sort of negative way, and will argue them until we have to pull out the rulebook and read the rules for concealment, again.
-_-

Something I found convenient was having a pair of smartphones and Internet Explorer on my Xbox all nearby or in hand for virtually immediate resolutions to issues we ran into. I had the weapons list up on my monitor, and we used the phones to hit up the Infinity Wiki, and Google questions when necessary. Being that the complete, updated ruleset is only available online at the moment, this was pretty important since I'd certainly like to learn to play the game correctly.
Learning new stuffs is hard fer me, and I know from experience that it's unfun finding out you've been doing something wrong, so...yay for technology, I guess, huh?

By the end of the night, we were whipping through the basic interactions that take place in the game, quoting weapon ranges and their associated distance modifiers and damage via memory (an impressive feat after five or so hours of hanging out for us, believe you me. Brain cells are being murdered at a frightening rate), and getting a hang of the sort of tactics needed to kill those pesky enemies.
We both agreed that the game is fun as hell, and we had a great night.

Funny lil' side story- the Ultimate Rival, Mister 'I'm not interested in Infinity. It's just not for me,' texted me shortly before Nascar arrived, saying, 'oh you didn't tell me there was Catholics in the game. I'm looking at Pan Oceania and some of the stuff is nice.'
...
Like, y'know, somehow I was supposed to know that's all I ever needed to say to convince him to try this game, and I wasted a dozen or so hours going about it in entirely the wrong way.
:P

So I replied carefully, saying yes, there are Catholics in the game. Templars, even.
I know he loves Templars, and yes, he's a practicing Catholic. Our opinions about religion are so vastly different, however, that we never, ever discuss it, so I never thought to mention the fact that there are 'Catholics' in the game.
Silly me, cuz that seems to have been the right bait for the hook.

He called in about halfway through the night, asking all kinds of questions. How's it going? Who's winning? What lists are you playing? What's it like? How does this/that/the other thing work?
He listened in for a lil' while as I described what was going on.

He called again later to tell me he had ordered a bunch of models.
The Ultimate Rival will be playing Infinity.
Lolz.

*I foresee some Pan-O in my future*

Until next time, folks- Exit with catchphrase!

- SinSynn