While at Origins, visit the Giant Ball of — by which I mean, while at Origins I looked at Mystic Eye’s Giant Monster Rampage as well as Firefly’s Monster Island. Both are slim 8.5×11″ books with giant monster combat games in them, whose rules are more or less sourced out of an RPG tradition. GMR has something like nine character classes, while the Firefly guy told me that Monster Island’s monster-creation system was “basically Champions.” That’s a good way to turn me off, but whatever. GMR is written to be used with toys you already own, whereas MI comes with counters (and can be used with toys). These products are similar enough that I am hard pressed to come up with more differences than that, but GMR seemed like it threw more numbers around, generally speaking. This may be because GMR puts the monsters right into an urban setting whereas Monster Island (as you might guess from the title) starts with the back story. I didn’t get to play either one. Somebody come up with a meta-system by which we can make the two games fight each other!