Eagles Take Flight

The upstart Elmira Eagles have won the Stanley Cup -- well, in our Xbox game, anyway! After dropping the first game of the Cup Finals to the Vegas Golden Knights in an overtime heartbreaker, we reeled off four straight wins. The last game featured an amazing comeback in which we found ourselves in a two-goal hole just moments into the game, only to rally for the victory. In one frantic sequence midway through the game, the Nathaniel character (our goalie) made three spectacular point-blank saves on Vegas's top scorer to preserve our narrow lead. When the game ended, Matthew's character took the Conn Smythe trophy for playoff MVP after leading the league in scoring and penalty minutes!

Warhammer on TV!

Emperor be praised! Looks like there's going to be a 40k TV series (separate from the Angels of Death animated series). Click here for all the details!

Revisiting Historical Hockey

I have to admit that the Strat-O-Matic hockey game system left me cold -- and not in a good, hockey rink sort of way. I didn't think I'd have another opportunity to explore historical hockey gaming, but now that the boys and I are chugging through a playoff series on our Xbox with a fake team populated by current family members and long-dead Sutton ancestors, I'm wondering if I might be able to scratch my historical itch using the Xbox instead. Creating an entire league of old-timey teams seems like more effort than I want to expend, but I could certainly create one team of pre-NHL stars (Cyclone Taylor, Hobey Baker, and the like) and pit them against the players of today. I'll have to think more about that -- but in the meantime, the boys and I have a Cup to win!

Halfway to the Cup!

Our Xbox NHL team from little ol' Elmira has breezed through the first two rounds of playoffs, sweeping Philadelphia and then Washington. Now we're up against the Tampa Bay Lighting for the right to face either the Vegas Golden Knights (let's go, Knights!!!) or the Calgary Flames for the Stanley Cup. Matthew, our top center, leads the team and the league in goals and points, while I'm leading in plus/minus and hits, as befits my role as the team's bruising defenseman. Nathaniel is our goalie, but because the goalie controls are insanely difficult, we're leaving those duties to the CPU and Nathaniel is playing as other family members instead, primarily my brother-in-law. It's taken a bit of finagling, but all of our relatives have scored at least one goal except for family patriarch Richard Sutton -- in his defense, he's also 217 years old!

Family Hockey

I've taken a few days off of work, and between random day trips around the Sierras (among other things, we attended a rodeo and the boys panned for gold), we've been catching up on a seldom-seen corner of the Shattered Realm campaign world -- seventeenth-century historical fantasy. This swashbuckling adventure has put us behind yet again in our sci-fi setting, but I think it's a fun change of pace. Even that, however, has been put on the back burner as we've jumped headlong into a massive Xbox endeavor in NHL 19. We've created an entirely new NHL franchise for my hometown of Elmira, New York -- complete with team name, logos, color scheme, mascot, and all that good stuff. I've tried to honor Elmira's long sporting heritage with everything we're doing, but the players on the team are fictional; or, rather, they're real people but folks who will never play in the NHL -- namely, the boys, myself, and other relatives, including my new four-day-old nephew and an ancestor who's been dead for over a century! Matthew and Nathaniel are having a blast playing as themselves against NHL stars, and as soon as we master the game controls, we're sending our Elmira Eagles into the Stanley Cup playoffs!