No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year: Collecting stuff in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a game I downloaded a couple of years ago for no reason other than I wanted the achievement points for it. This seems pathetic now; I already owned Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox. I played through the first few bits a year or so ago and had barely touched it since; it’s just been sitting on my Xbox 360 gathering E-dust. Until now…

The Lego series is a bit of a funny one. There are those who say that they’re not true games because they don’t have a fail state, or they’re too easy, or they’re just for “casual players.” Well, it’s true that you don’t fail for dying too many times. For that reason, it’s not usually hard to beat the ‘Campaign’ mode.[1] Such violence as appears in the game is in context and not graphic at all; the worst thing that happens in the game is that Lego pieces fall apart. And it’s also almost the only series of games I’ve played with my girlfriend (although we play Lego Harry Potter, rather than Star Wars,) so it’s absolutely true that the game appeals to casual players.

Well, I’ve got two answers to that:

Zooming through Mos Eisley with Jango Fett?
Don't mind if I do...

The first one is that the challenge in the Lego games is whatever you make of it, pun not intended. If you embrace the collect-em-up nature of the game – which, at their heart, is what the Lego games are – and find all the collectables, characters, gold and red bricks etc, the game is quite challenging, if only because it will take you ages. In my case, this is pretty much the only game I’ve got where I’ve got a hope of 100% completing it and seeing all the content, so that is what I am aiming for. Now, I know you can use Minikit detectors and Power Bricks to help you, but even then, you’ve still got to move your characters into the right places and use the right powers in the right order, etc. There is challenge here – if you can look past beating the story.

The second one is that none of those supposed criticisms are a bad thing. Today’s markets are not patient enough to sit through a whole game where they might have to start all over again if they die three times – I rarely find a campaign mode in a modern action game that would punish you for anything other than forgetting to save.

As for appealing to the casual market, well, why not? For some people – especially younger children – games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Space Marine are just not for them. Either they find the violence in such games objectionable, or they’re not mature enough to appreciate it. Take Gears of War, for example. One of the principle actions you can take is to instantly kill an enemy by attacking it with the chainsaw attached to your gun. Most people are capable of making the distinction between this graphic violence in a video game and real life, but my girlfriend doesn’t find it even the slightest bit entertaining, and a younger person would not necessarily appreciate the spectacle – the enemy is dead, either way.

And it’s not just the violence. Graphically, the games are great, if only because of the art style. They looked great in 2005 and are still looking great nearly 10 years later. Does the first Medal of Honor game still look as good as its last iteration? I think not. Also I follow someone’s Youtube channel who has a sister who is disabled. About a year and a half ago she made a video and blog post about how easy modes and casual games can open doors for more players, including her sister. Here’s the blog post: http://icklenellierose.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/accessible-gaming-gaming-with-disability.html

As it is, I’m actually quite enjoying Lego Star Wars right now because it’s one of the few games I’ve bought where it’s OK to just pick it up and have a play, rather than devoting hours to the story or campaign. I’m having a good amount of fun collecting everything, I’m about 60% of the way there now and I’m looking on course to get all the achievements in a game for the first time ever!

I’ll probably still be at it next week, so I’ll talk some more about it then…

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[1] A generic term probably mis-applied to Lego games.

No Game New Year: Down and Depressed with Deadlight

Deadlight is another Xbox Live Games with Gold download. Zombie Apocalypse games are nothing new, but I hadn’t played one in a 2D side-scrolling platform game before and I thought it would be interesting to see this take on it.

I set myself a different challenge this time: Get through the game without looking at any of the achievement trophies. This is because I’ve ruined games before by playing them and looking for the achievement points; they’re nice to get, and I won’t usually get rid of a game until I’ve got all that are possible, but they take away some enjoyment of the game if you’re too pedantic about it.

This is the title screen; even the music that
accompanies this is bleak and tragic...

The game puts you in control of Randall Wayne, who’s teamed up with a group of survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse in search of his missing family. At the start of the game you’re separated from the group, and you have to run, jump and fight your way through the horde of Zombies – in this game called Shadows – to reunite with your team and your family. That is, of course, if any have survived…

For those of us who remember the 80s and the 90s, side-scrolling platform games were the standard back then. They lost touch once 3d gaming came in; platforming was quite difficult to pull off accurately in 3d environments and not many games managed it. But they never went away either. In the early 00’s we had emulation. In the mid/late 00’s we had retro-gaming. And in the previous/current generation, they seem to be… not making a comeback; there has been a definite shift in what is considered to be mainstream, but they have a strong presence in the sub-triple-A market.

With this new surge of platform games, some elements have stayed the same across the generations, others have changed. What has remained is art style, in that every platform game worth its code has its own distinctive look and feel to it. And Deadlight is BLEAK. The backgrounds look worn down and hopeless, the character models are barely more than silhouettes and the soundtrack evokes misery and despair. The cut-scenes are graphic novel-style drawings and subtitles that remind me, more than anything else, of Watchmen. It makes you feel that, even if you do get to the end of the game, surviving is as good as it is going to get for your character and anybody fortunate enough last to the end.

See what I mean? Bleak.

What has changed from the old platform games is combat. The combat mechanics of platform games have never been complicated, but in new games, the emphasis seems to be taken away from the combat and put on the exploration and platforming. That works well for Deadlight, which boasts a very small number of enemy types; munching your way through zombie hordes gets old at the best of times and is presumably incredibly dull if you can only do it in two dimensions. In Deadlight, you have an axe, a pistol and a shotgun at the very most, and very limited ammunition for the latter two. You avoid combat as much as possible; aiming is quite tricky and you don’t swing the axe very fast. You can’t take many hits before you die, and you’ll find yourself blaming the clunky controls for the occasional plummet, or a missed shot that costs you the game. It creates a challenge where you have to think about what you’re doing in order to proceed; more satisfying than ‘kill everything in the room then go on to the next bit.’

Yet for all that, I can’t decide whether I enjoyed the game. It’s a great game, no doubt about that. It’s a well presented; if not entirely fresh take on an idea that’s becoming stale now. The art style carries it for the most part, and telling a single story that’s over in a few hours is a refreshing change of pace. But my word, it is depressing. Any sense of achievement you gain from completing the levels and objectives is subsequently crushed by the heavy atmosphere and the feeling that no matter what you do, you’re only delaying the inevitable…

I might go back to this later to look for all the achievement points, but for now I’ll move on to something more cheery.

No Game New Year: What Next?

So Norm posted on the NGNY Facebook page the other day about what’s going to happen when the next year starts. His post read: “As the year winds down, we prepare for another instance of No Game New Year! For those in this group, what are some rules you would like to see changed / modified / added?”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m looking on course to beat the challenge, and I think for those of us who didn’t, another go at it would be more than welcome. However, I don’t think I’ll be doing No Game New Year again for 2015.

Several of us have said that it’s changed the way we think about and play games, and while that’s absolutely true in my case, it’s not something I particularly want to keep up. Part of the appeal of NGNY for me is that it is not forever; it is a way to challenge myself on the way I spend my money and acquire new games. I’ve learned a lot from NGNY and it is certainly going to have an affect on how I handle it in the future, but I don’t want another year of not buying games.

For one thing, I’ve been quite interested in the Wii U. It looks like this is where all the consistently good console games are, and seems to be operating below the radar of the Triple-A market. It looks like good fun as well; far too many games take themselves too seriously and I’ve enjoyed games the most this year when they’ve actually been fun, not the gritty realism often mistaken for fun and tragically mis-applied in many cases.

There are a couple of Xbox 360 titles I could pick up as well, and now that I view enough youtube channels to be able to make an informed decision on what Steam games are good or not, I might branch out into PC, assuming my computer supports it. The likelihood is, then, that if NGNY continues into next year, I won’t participate in the challenge.

How Ever…

... but what will happen next year?

One of the major things that I’ve… realized from participating in No Game New Year is just how many of my games I’ve never beaten or even played. This is what many people call the Backlog. I’ve got backlogs in almost all my hobbies; songs I never learned on guitar, models from Games Workshop I’ve never built, board games I’ve never played, the list goes on. So the major challenge for me when playing games this year was getting through as many of them as I could, so that I can say that at least I’ve seen the story mode through to the end. Getting what I can out of the game, then moving on to another – with the option to come back to it, of course, if I’m in the mood.

This was made all the more special by the fact that I got to share that information on my blog with the NGNY guys, and while I think it’s only those guys who read them judging by my view count, it is great to know that people actually care what I’m putting out online!

So I might make that my challenge for next year. I’ll call it…

BACKLOG BEATDOWN.

The idea behind the challenge will be to beat as many of my games as I can, while still allowing for the possibility of new ones. I’ve seen some good ideas from some of the NGNY guys that might help with this; Andi for example suggested that you could only buy a game if you’ve beaten one previously. And if I can get enough people to do it, (All the NGNY guys are welcome!) it would create… a support network of gamers who comment on what they’ve cleared, ask for help if they need it (or if they’re playing Dark Souls, which basically amounts to the same thing,) and generally making getting through the ever-growing pile of games a lot easier.

I’ll have to think carefully about how I’m going to do this, but I’m definitely up for the challenge.

Who’s with me?

No Game New Year: Kicking More Ass with Dynasty Warriors 7

Dynasty Warriors is a series I’ve enjoyed since 2001. I’ve played several of the games and always enjoyed the power fantasy of having a huge unstoppable hero ploughing his/her way through countless enemies. The series has received criticism for being the same game seven times[1] and while it is absolutely true that the series iterates rather than innovates, Dynasty Warriors trades on doing a small number of things very well.

Lu Bu. He's really hard. Except when he isn't.

The game play is classic Dynasty Warriors: Slash your way through hordes of soldiers who haven’t got a hope of beating you, and then kill the enemy commanders whose prospects aren’t much better. This involves much hammering of the X button. Similarly, the plot is the story KOEI have been telling since the 80s, based around The Romance of the Three Kingdoms – rich, but nothing new. The background music, while pleasing to hear in a generation where it is not that common, is the same shreddy techno-metal with familiar themes that has always accompanied the franchise.

The main difference from the previous iterations[2] is in the way the Story mode works. In the past, you would pick a character, play through a number of battles while the plot unfolded around them and that would be it. You’d get endings, but as they weren’t substantially different from the cut-scenes between battles, it wasn’t much of a reward.

In Dynasty Warriors 7, you pick one of the Factions: Wei, Wu, Shu and later Jin, and play through the story using characters from that faction. You play as the character most relevant to that part of the story. In my play-through, I’m playing as Shu, and started as Guan Yu. I later got to play Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei. I didn’t get to play Zhao Yun – the poster boy for the series – until much later. The plot is filled by explanations over a map of China and the usual cut-scenes. This sounds like there is less content overall, but given that all the characters function similarly with only minor differences between them, it makes for a more streamlined game. You no longer have to play the game through twenty times to unlock all the characters and cut-scenes!

The character design is more camp, hammy and androgynous than ever before, but the only other difference is the way the characters develop. You increase your stats by defeating an officer then taking the items they drop, and you also get skill points for taking out officers. You then spend them on upgrades: extra hits to the combo, extra Musou attacks, extra speed etc. You also upgrade your weapons bought with gold.

Now, I’m not one to complain about similar game play across the different editions. As any Call of Duty player would say, if you’re going to buy a game that’s functionally identical to its previous iteration, you can’t complain that it’s functionally identical to its previous iteration. But, joyous experience though the power-fantasy-style game play is; it is starting to show its age now. The different characters and weapons differentiate things for a while, but you can still win most battles by hammering X. The strategy of the game was never comprehensive, but they’ve almost completely removed it from story mode; you travel from one place to another as directed, take everybody out and repeat until you beat the level. The fire, water and catapult attacks that you at least felt you had a hand in instigating in Dynasty Warriors 5 are set pieces in this game. You don’t affect it, you watch as it happens around you. You can’t avoid the set pieces in order to beat the level, as you could before. It feels like a game of Simon Says,[3] and as you rarely have an objective beyond ‘kill everything in sight,’ it makes the repetitive game play monotonous.

Oh, and turret sections? Really, KOEI? That’s how you were going to vary the game play? They function and are thankfully rare, but even for Dynasty Warriors are anachronistic and rubbish. I doubt anybody in third century China had access to a Ballista that could fire at a rate of most modern machine guns.

The game also has a Conquest mode. I haven’t tried this yet but I think it’s going to work like a light version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a game I’ve enjoyed on the PS2. I’ll give this a go eventually but I’m looking to finish story mode first.

I can’t be far from finishing the game now; the next battle is Wu Zhang Plains which approaches the end of the story. While there are still three other factions and an entirely different mode to beat, for the purpose of NGNY, I’ll probably put Dynasty Warriors 7 to bed when I beat the game with Shu.

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[1] At the time of writing we’re up to Dynasty Warriors 8, not counting the spinoffs and handheld games, and the first one doesn’t count because as I understand it it’s essentially a fighting game.

[2] I missed out on the 3^rd and 6^th games so I’m not entirely sure where these changes occurred.

[3] And I haven’t forgotten I levelled a similar criticism about Grand Theft Auto Five months ago.

No Game New Year: Street Fighter IV, Arcade Edition.

After the debacle with Final Fantasy VII, I was rather miffed that I wouldn’t get to see the game through to the end and therefore felt the need to kick something’s ass. Hence the choice for this week’s game:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition

Another free download from XBL Gold, Street Fighter is an intellectual property that few are unfamiliar with. Most of us have played an iteration of Street Fighter II back in the mid 90s. Some have even seen the films; Street Fighter: The Movie is probably my favourite film for “so bad it’s good.” But I haven’t played a full Street Fighter game since then.

Not managed to beat anyone playing as Fei Long yet...

I have heard that, out of the fighting games on the Xbox 360, Street Fighter IV was the most technical. Certainly the set combos are hard to do, which means I probably won’t do very well with the challenges in ‘Trial’ mode. I’ve mainly been playing Arcade mode, and of course online. I’ve been having good fun with both, in Arcade I particularly enjoy the cut-scenes at the start and end of the game depending on who you’re playing. Some of the characters aren’t too familiar to me and it’s good to get a bit of context with each one. While I don’t very often win Online, (I’m around 40% wins at this point,) I think I’m competent enough to offer a challenge to all but the most hardcore players.

That being said, I’ve noticed a couple of small but significant ways in which Street Fighter IV is different to the other fighting games I’ve played on the Xbox 360:[1]

Firstly, Street Fighter differentiates between fast and slow attacks more than any fighting game I’ve played. Normally, a character’s faster or slower moves would be a standard part of the move set, but Street Fighter actually has buttons for the different speeds of attack that offer a balance of speed and power. This can result in some technical situations where you have a split second to counter a slow move with a fast one; it’s risky, but it can be done – more so than with the other fighting games.

Secondly, the controls are difficult. The basic controls work OK, but the combination of directional waggles and buttons needed to do the Super and Ultra moves are really hard to do – and that’s if you can even remember them. Of course, there’s a reason for this: If you look at other fighting games for the 360 you’d find their control system optimised for its controller. Street Fighter, on the other hand, was very much designed for an arcade stick. Some of the moves, for example, require you to do a 360 degree rotation of the analogue stick – quite hard to do with just your thumb. And some of the moves require you to use all three punch or kick buttons. They’ve tried to get around this by mapping this function to the left bumper and left trigger. When you get a combination that requires you to make two complete rotations of the left analogue stick then pull the left trigger with the same hand, it’s nigh on impossible.

I’ve only played as four characters so far: Ryu; Ken, E. Honda and Ibuki. The first two are good all-round characters and stand a reasonable chance against anyone, but I’ve really been enjoying E. Honda. He was actually my favourite character from the earlier games and not much has changed! He’s easy to underestimate because he’s fat and slow, but his strong kicks have a surprising amount of reach and do a lot of damage. And if he gets in close, he can do a lot of damaging combos as well. Plus, his diving headbutt provides him with some much needed speed in the game. He’s got me my highest proportion of online wins so far! Ibuki, on the other hand, I haven’t been enjoying so much; she relies too much on speed in what is already a very quick game and doesn’t fit my play style at all.

Of course, this being a Capcom game, I’ll have to download a lot of DLC in order to complete the game fully and earn all the achievement points, which isn’t going to happen for a while. Now that I’ve completed the game with four characters, I’ll probably mark the game off as complete and move on to something else next week.

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[1] Which for the record are Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us.

Matt's Tactics: Cower and Camp

I had a 750pt game of Warhammer 40,000 in the Dudley store this afternoon with a young man called Sam. I played my Khorne Bezerker force against his Astra Militarum, or Imperial Guard as most of us know it. Here was my army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	110	748
	Power Weapon	15
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Ichor Blood	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5

Sam had a Vanquisher, two Sentinels, a unit of Rocket Launchers and two 10-man squads with a Command group. The scenario was Purge the Alien (1 victory point for each unit completely destroyed) and we rolled the diagonal deployment. The terrain was laid out quite densely for a 4x4 board, with buildings in every corner, but I was still going to have to run my Bezerkers at him before I did any damage, and running in to a gun line of Guard is a very dangerous game indeed…

Sam literally came out all guns blazing by firing the Vanquisher cannon at my Bezerkers who were taking cover behind the building. In but the first turn, he managed to wipe out five from the first squad, and – due to some rather fortunate scatter dice rolls – four from the second. That was over half my army and I hadn’t even made a move.

Hiding in the building was the best they could do? Really?

What I decided to do was move my remaining Berzerkers right in to the building where they were out of line of sight. There were now few enough of them that I managed to do this with all eight models that remained (My Chaos Lord was among them,) forcing Sam to move his models in order to wipe out my remaining troops. Curiously enough, Sam didn’t rise to the bait. I’m not sure what he thought I was going to do if he did, but not once during the remainder of the game – which would have lasted at least another four turns – did he attempt to take the fight to me.

On the third turn I bought on the Defiler. On the turn it arrived, I fired the Battle Cannon onto a unit of Guardsmen standing at the back of the board doing very little. I killed all but two of them, who promptly failed their leadership check and ran off the board, giving me two victory points – one for the squad, and a secondary one for first blood.

Sam directed his rocket launchers at my Defiler after that, immobilising it and eventually destroying it – but it was too late. With only one victory point, and no hope of getting another, the game was mine once I’d rolled for Random Game Length; I won 2-1.

Sam took the defeat well, fair play to him. And a win is a win, no matter how it comes about – but somehow I can’t help the feeling I didn’t really deserve this one. Khorne Bezerkers are supposed to be ferocious super-warriors who seek out battles and slaughter, and I won the battle by getting half of them killed and hiding the others out in a building like a bunch of frightened guinea-pigs. The shot with the Defiler was a gamble, and if it hadn’t worked I probably wouldn’t have won, but that literally was the only reason I did – by having the bigger gun and getting in the first kill.

The one positive thing I will say about it is that the Bezerkers at least did their job in being fearless. Had anybody else taken that many casualties in one turn, they would have needed a panic check – chances are they would have failed, run off the board and given the game to my opponent. So I guess it was a viable tactic, and one that probably wouldn’t have worked with any other unit. It’s just not what you envisage when you take Khorne Bezerkers to battle!

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!