Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/06/07/classic-battletech-and-other-mech-games-whats-the-best/

I am so totally into mechs and mech-based RPGs; I’m not even averse to mech combat games and I’m currently trying to decide which is the best. Judging by these forum posts I’m not the only one on the same quest.

Classic BattleTech and other mech games – Page 2 – RPGnet Forums

Battletech is of course one of the first giant mech combat games to come to mind – and it has a very elegant robot combat system – but it does take an awful long time to design each mech, and I was hoping to find something a little less math intensive.

Following some of the suggestions in the posts I found something new to me called Jovian Chronicles, a sci-fi mech game and RPG, but it seems to be stuck in our solar system. I like things a bit more space opera so I’m putting that on the back burner while I keep looking for that perfect system. There is another game published by the same company called Heavy Gear which sounds like an interesting mech game. Again it doesn’t sound space opera enough for me as the background material for the game seems to be limited to a single planet. I kept searching and found that a lot of people (well at least one) were talking about Mekton Zeta.

And there is a free download of the rules called Mekton Alpha which does a great job of letting you know what the flavour of the game will be. And I think I like it. I kept searching though, and this site mentioned Dirt Side II. Apparently these rules can be used for any bit of science fiction technology, and it does include rules for combat walkers; nice. I’m not certain I’ve found the perfect rules system yet though, so I’ll keep looking.

I’m also reading The Temporal Void by Peter F Hamilton, I’m a big fan of his work and I’ve raved about his books before in this blog. This is the same hard-core SF as ever, set in the same intricately imagined sci-fi universe. There is a lot more sex in this one than usual and I was worried that Hamilton was entering some kind of dirty old man phase of his writing career but there does turn out to be a reason for it all as you keep reading. It’s to do with DNA.