My Unfinished Games of 2016

Well we’ve come to the end of another year and once again I’ve bought more games than I’ve got a hope of playing through. I’ve not beaten anywhere near as many games as I was expecting, although I would attribute a change in my personal circumstances and an almost compulsive need to keep myself busy to at least some of that.

Of course, there are games out there that I have played and, for whatever reason, I haven’t beaten them. Maybe they’re too long, maybe they’re too hard, maybe they’re not supposed to be ‘beaten’ in the usual sense. Maybe in some cases they weren’t very good. As I write this I’m still trying to get through a couple of games in time for the New Year but I’m not going to force it, since that sucks a lot of the fun out of playing video games for me. Nonetheless, there are a few games that I’ve had a lot of fun with, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you about some of them:

Mordheim: City of the Damned

A battle in full swing...
 

I love this game. Mordheim was always my favourite of Games Workshop’s intellectual properties, and when I heard a video game was in production I really hoped it would be good (as Games Workshop have taken a somewhat cavalier approach to licensing their property for video game development, this isn’t a guarantee!) What we got was a game that grew on me as I was going along, to the point where I can look at my Steam screens and see that I’ve sunk 140 hours into the game. Not since XCOM: Enemy Unknown have I played a game so obsessively, and it certainly filled a strategy game-shaped hole left when XCOM 2 failed to engage me in the same way.

There’s plenty that I like about Mordheim. Firstly, the tutorial is kept separate from the main game. Far too many games these days introduce the mechanics as they’re going along; useful in itself but makes replaying the game far from a joy as you’re basically following a scripted sequence for anything up to the first hour. Mordheim shows you the game mechanics in the tutorial, but after that, you’re on your own. It’s up to you to learn your warband’s various strengths and weaknesses, what strategies work best with each faction, and what loots and rewards you need to be aiming for.

Developing your warband into a fighting force that can take on the game is a fulfilling experience when you know what you’re doing in terms of customisation. The skills and stats they build up along the way are always fun to apply, and even the injuries they pick up contribute to the organic story that you’re telling. Character development, when done well, can be a game’s greatest asset and this one is pretty good.

Finally, the game lets you go at your own pace. You have to collect enough Wyrdstone in a certain amount of time, and the game is over on the 4^th time you fail to do this (I’ve never had this happen to me, yet!) Other than that, it’s up to you. If a large percentage of your best fighters are injured, you can make the decision not to go on a mission while they recover – there’s no penalty other than wasted time. There are campaign missions which you have to do at some point, but if you want to raise the value of your warband so that you can beat it more easily – but risk more injuries in the process – that’s up to you.

Unfortunately the game is let down by two major flaws: Game breaking bugs and the Ironman saving system. There have been times when I’ve reached a certain point in the game – and put a significant number of hours into the relevant save file – to find that I’m unable to complete a mission because the game will not end it. Either the AI won’t take their turn, or one of your objectives doesn’t register. You have an option to abandon a mission if this happens but this comes with penalties that could potentially cripple your warband. And while the idea behind an Ironman save system – the game is constantly saving on one file so you can’t go back and load a previous save – is great for a game that relies on the consequences of the choices you make, it also means you can’t reload a save file if it is effected by a bug. Things came to a head when playing the 4^th campaign mission with the Sisters of Sigmar warband I’d spent weeks building up, and I couldn’t complete the objective without abandoning the mission. I quit out of the game and haven’t played it since. I probably will again at some point – but I have other games I could be playing for now.

Rogue Legacy

Dodge this, squire...

Since watching some TotalBiscuit videos I’ve been hearing the term ‘Rogue-like’ bandied around a lot, with Rogue Legacy being the crowning achievement in the genre. Now that I’ve played the thing, I’m starting to see why it’s so popular! The gameplay is excellent – tight controls, a charming art style and competent procedural level generation. Even better is the upgrade system, where you upgrade your skills and equipment after every run.

Because of course, that’s the whole point of Rogue-likes: You’ll never beat them all in one go but nor are you supposed to. Instead of that, you’re supposed to carry on until you die and then use what you picked up along the way to improve your chances of getting further next time. I have actually played a few games with so-called ‘Rogue-like’ elements and this one has been by far the best, for this reason: You’re always clear on how well you need to do for your next upgrade. You buy the upgrades for a certain amount of gold, and provided you know where to take your next upgrade, you always know how much you need to aim for. This might seem like a minor detail, but in actual fact it does a really good job of gauging the success of your run, rather than champing at the bit all the time.

It will be a long time, if ever, before I beat this game. And even if I do, I understand there’s quite a bit of post-game content to enjoy as well. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with it so far, so it made my honorary mentions list.

Super Mario Maker

Spiny's can go upside down? What devilry is this?

Well how do you beat a game that has ongoing and almost entirely user-developed content? The answer is that you don’t; you just have some fun with it. And fun I have had! It’s good to fight your way through different levels made by other people, it’s good to have a go at some dev-designed levels that don’t appear in the Super Mario games that these are based on, and designing your own levels and seeing how they challenge people is a rewarding experience.

You make your own fun with Super Mario Maker, and when I’m building levels I try to make a gimmick for each one; a puzzle or a challenge to overcome. Whether that’s building a set of pipes in the shape of a hill, sending several Bomber Bills flying at you, or creating levels that look like a chandelier, I want to make a level that challenges low-mid level players on the right level. I may never reach the giddy heights of designing a level where you don’t have to move; just let the platforms carry you. And I may never build a super-difficult level that only the most precise platforming can overcome. But I like to build what I would consider to be challenging levels.

I come back to this game sparingly as I tend to prefer games that have an ending that I can aim for, but for a bit of creative fun every now and then, you could do far worse than this.

 

Hand of Fate

I'll beat you in the end, dealer. Oh yes.

Not going to say too much about this one as I am expecting to beat it at some point; a very difficult game but enjoyable to play and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the end. It will be one of the few PC games I’ve seen through to the end!

Backlog Beatdown: Watching Her Story with Her Story

Her Story is a game that came to my attention last year; a lot of the Youtube pundits I follow were giving it an intriguing amount of coverage. Not much – there’s not much you can do with this game on Youtube without spoiling it, and that defeats the whole objective of the game – but enough for it to remain on my radar long enough to buy it.

You’ll have heard some questions about it. Is it a game? Is it not a game? Is it an interactive movie? Is it good? Is it worth it? My answer is that while it comes within the broadest definition of the word “game,” it’s certainly an experience, and one that is well worth the five pounds I paid for it.

The premise is that you are looking through a series of videos from seven police interviews with the same woman in 1994. The videos have all been edited into clips that last anything between a few seconds and a couple of minutes, for evidence purposes. You use a search function to find key words in the videos to unlock them, and piece together the story they tell.

But have they???

But it’s not that simple. The videos are old, saved on an antiquated computer with very limited functionality. You type in a word to search for the videos, but however many matches the computer finds, it will only display the first five results. You have to refine your search, and search for more clues in the videos available. You can try to arrange the videos in the right order, but it’s a massive faff. The game starts off with the keyword “murder,” and displays four videos taken from different stages in the interview process. It sets up the idea that a man named Simon has been murdered, he has some connection to the woman in the videos, and she denies murdering him and shows confidence that the police have “nothing.” (None of this is a spoiler, as it’s the first thing you see in the game and most of this are shown on the game’s trailer.)  This demonstrates that all is not as it seems, and does a good job of hooking you in, but it’s up to you to dig deeper. You’re not going to get much help from the game after those first few videos.

I like that idea. I enjoy games that keep the tutorial separate from the game. Far too many games hold your hand for anything up to the first few hours, which makes starting one a rigmarole. I prefer being shown the core mechanics of the game, and after that I’m on my own, which engages me straight away.

Here's an interesting idea: A UI that's awful
but actually adds to the experience of the game.

The game is presented brilliantly. Viva Seifert, the actress who plays the woman, does a fine job; not always with the emotion one might expect but that adds to the character the game eventually builds. The film footage was recorded onto VHS before being digitised into the game, which does a fine job of representing the time period. The screen shows the glare you might expect from early 90s monitor, which adds to the immersion although there is the option to turn this off. Also you never hear the detective’s questions, only the answers, further increasing your need to fish for context.

I’ve seen a lot of coverage on more experimental games like this. There’s a whole debate about it that could potentially run into a whole book. If you’re going to make an unconventional game, you need two things:

1.      A strong core gameplay loop,

2.      A satisfying payoff.

Her Story certainly has the former, although it would have worn thin had the game lasted for any more than a few hours. Whether the payoff is satisfying is up to you; if you are engaged with the story and are keen to hear more, then you’ll probably enjoy the game. Without wishing to spoil it, I’ll say that the game saves one last surprise for you right until the end – an ‘Aha!’ moment, if you will. Not everyone will enjoy it but that was never the point. If you want a break from the latest online multiplayer game and are looking for a different experience, you could do far worse than this.

As a post-script, I’ll add that while this is not a game that you ‘beat’ in the usual sense, I did find all the videos. However, through looking on the steam forums I found a way to beat the game without even trying. I won’t tell you what, but there is a way you can access all the videos in the right order from the start. It’s not a ‘cheat;’ it fits in with the mechanics of the game and I was astounded that it hadn’t previously occurred to me, but it’s not exactly fair play either. I’d found 75% of the videos before I did this, (I know because I got the achievement for it,) but there were some videos that I’d never have found without this method because it’s keyword was so obscure it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to try it. Despite this, there was only one major plot point I found using this method. If you figure it out, you’ll probably have to do the same, but try to make this a last resort, rather than a way to get through the game.

Backlog Beatdown: Racing in the Street with Street Racer

Street Racer is a game I’d been aware of when it came out in 1994 for the SNES, through the TV show Bad Influence. I played the Playstation port of it a few years later at my mate Matt’s house, and even though I didn’t think it represented the power the Playstation purported to have, I seem to remember having a decent amount of fun with it. I bought it a few weeks ago, again to have a light-hearted game I could pick up and play. Here’s how I got on:

You’d think with a name like Street Racer you’d be racing in streets, but in actual fact you’re rarely doing anything of the sort. It is, in essence, a go-kart racing game filled with wacky characters, colourful backgrounds and useful power-ups. Sounds familiar? Well, it was never going to shake off the inevitable comparisons to Super Mario Kart, but Street Racer does enough of its own thing to provide a different kind of challenge.

Hodja purports to have average stats,
but is a surprisingly difficult opponent.

The racing is decent enough. The tracks are short, but tightly designed with lots of corners and it’s surprisingly challenging to maintain concentration for ten laps. The power-ups consists of Stars (a bonus for collecting the most,) rockets for a ‘boost’ button, dynamite which can send you flying if you’re in possession of it when the timer runs out, and med-kits to heal yourself. My only complaint – and I’m not sure whether this is because I’m playing the game on the PS2, my disc is in quite poor condition or there’s a fault in the game’s code – is that you often get massive frame drops that slow the game right down.

 This being an early PS1 game, analogue controls are not supported here, but the rest of the controls are pretty well laid out, with the one puzzling exception that for some reason you have to press down to reverse. The shoulder buttons are where things get interesting; the top two buttons attack left or right, and the bottom two activate your special moves.

Yes, you have special moves. Each character, along with their base stats, have two of the following: A projectile attack, an attack on both sides, an area-of-effect attack that alters the handling of the rival cars, and a short flight that can carry you over obstacles but slows your car down considerably. Getting to know which character has what moves, and what you can expect if you play with or against them, is part of the learning curve of the game! Getting hit will slow you down, and if you run out of energy the effect is even worse.

The characters themselves are well-designed stereotypical caricatures that rarely happen in games these days (although they seem to be making a comeback now thanks to games like Overwatch and League of Legends.) Frank, for example, is a classic Frankenstein’s monster, Raph is an Italian racing boy, and Biff is an American baseball thug. Their stats are based on Acceleration, Top Speed, Handling and Grip. The latter two struck me as odd, as I thought they would be the same thing, but it made sense about half-way through my playthrough – Handling is how well your car steers, but if you steer for too long your car will spin out. How long this takes to happen depends on your grip.

Surf's fast, but can she handle those corners?

Maybe it’s to do with my playstyle, but I did notice something of an imbalance with the stats, as the faster characters tended to be a lot harder to handle because of the design of the tracks. Raph, for example, has the fastest car in the game and is great for straights, but as most of the tracks are made up almost entirely of heavy corners at which he is useless, he’s not an easy character to play. I tended to play as Frank, who has high acceleration so can get up and go out of the corners, and high grip so I wouldn’t spin out.

The game features three competitions: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The higher the competition, the higher the number and challenge of the tracks. The AI appears to be set up so that there is a pre-determined order everybody will place unless you do something about it, and whoever is in first place will be hard to catch, but somehow it still feels like a race as the AI cars attack each other and you in an effort to win. You get points for your position in the race, but you also get bonus points for hitting the most opponents, having the fastest lap, collecting the most stars etc.

The game also features a ‘Rumble’ mode where you compete to be the last car standing in a circular arena that everybody is trying to push everybody off using their attacks, special moves and dynamite. There is only one arena here and the championship lasts for ten rounds. You’d think it would get boring but actually there is a surprising amount of strategy as the league table takes shape. You won’t win every round, but you can help yourself by knocking out the front-runners first so that they will get the least points at the end. Biff was my go-to character for this one.

The reward for finishing both modes is the same cutscene of the pink rabbit that appears on the box art trying to cross the road and then getting in a car and looking in his wing mirror. Not sure what all that was about. Also, in certain versions of the game there is a ‘Football’ mode, where you play football with the characters in their cars. It wasn’t included in the Playstation version of the game but as I understand it, the mode wasn’t particularly well-handled. It’s certainly not going to impress anyone who plays Rocket League!

In fact, what sets this apart from the other versions of the game (not that I’ve played them!) is the CD-quality soundtrack that was the staple of a lot of early PS1 games. It was a gloriously innocent time of well-written music that complimented the level design but wasn’t necessarily ambient or atmospheric as it tends to be today.

While few would describe this game as excellent, and it will always pale in comparison to Super Mario Kart, I’ve had a lot of fun with Street Racer. It’s a nice little game that I’m glad I didn’t pay any substantial amount of money for, and it’s worth a look if you fancy doing something a little bit different with a racing game. It’s a laugh, but don’t expect a miracle.

Backlog Beatdown: Pegging Pegs with Peggle

The summer holidays were approaching but I still had a week of work to go before I could chill out and ‘relax’ with an 80+ hour RPG. What I needed was another pick-up-and-play game that I could beat. I’ve got Candy Crush Saga on my phone but that’s definitely going in to the long term. And I wanted to give a system that wasn’t the Playstation a go. Enter Peggle on my Xbox 360…

Peggle was released for free a few months ago on Xbox Live Arcade, and I downloaded it straight away knowing that I’d want a light game to play in the future. How very right I was, as I became addicted almost straight away and played the game more or less all the way through in one day. I needed a little more time than that to beat the last few levels but once I’d got there it was a nice sense of accomplishment. I even had a go on the multiplayer mode, beating someone in a duel though I struggle with the party mode (where four of you have to make the best shot on the same map.) It is what it is – light hearted fun. And that’s where I’m enjoying games the most these days.

This level was a pain in the bum. Those bricks at the bottom?
They're moving to give the illusion of a 'road.' Ha ha.

The premise of the game is astonishingly simple: You have a grid of pegs and 10 balls to fire at it from the top. The idea is to clear all the orange pegs or blocks – usually 25 in a level – to beat the level. After that it’s a score attack – you’re looking to get the best possible score by clearing as many pegs as possible. Other than the walls in the play area, everything you hit will give you points to one degree or another, and if you can get the purple peg, that will give you a bonus to your score. Also there’s a bucket running across the bottom of the screen; if your ball ends up in that you get a free ball.

Diversity in the game comes in the form of the ‘Peggle Masters;’ anthropomorphic creatures who have their own ways of breaking the rules of the game. One master, Bjorn Unicorn, shows you the angle at which your ball will bounce, whereas Claude the crab creates a set of pinball-style flippers with which you can control the ball. My favourite is Cat Tut, as his bonus is to create a ‘pyramid’ on the bucket at the bottom that can potentially catch the ball from a much wider angle, bouncing it back in to play or giving you an extra ball. Or some more points. Either is good with me.

I won’t pretend that some of the scores I racked up weren’t more by luck than judgement, but it’s always a nice feeling when you work out an impossible shot, or gain three free balls in one shot. It is what it is – a nice little game that is a lot of fun to play, has about the right amount of skill involved and doesn’t necessarily rely on guns and headshots.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Peggle. This is the kind of game that lost out on 6^th generation consoles (PS2, Xbox etc.) By then, everyone had mobile phones and this is the sort of game you would play on those devices. If one was released for console it would almost certainly be bypassed for another action game, or given the time period, extreme sports. It’s nice to see them make a comeback, of sorts, on tablets and phones, but it’s good to see them on XBLA as well as they really are great games when they’re handled well and are a lot of fun to play. There’s a whole load of achievements I’d suck all the fun out of the game by trying to collect, including some DLC that I may or may not buy in the future. For now, having got to the end of the adventure mode, I will happily say that I’ve beaten this game – the rest of the content is there if I need to kill five minutes at some point. There aren’t enough games like this around these days!

Backlog Beatdown: Delivering Sweet Chin Music with WWF War Zone

WWF War Zone is a game that I approached with some curiosity. I’d played the N64 version once and I was rubbish at it. But after that I bought a Playstation and got hooked on to the Smackdown series that later became the WW series that is released on a yearly basis even to this very day, and never looked back. Having a different development team brought a very different approach to 3D Wrestling games. War Zone’s controls were complex and fiddly, Smackdown’s were fast and arcade-y. War Zone was more strategic, Smackdown was more spectacular. Both developments created what were regarded at their time to be great games – but as I went down the Smackdown route originally, I was very interested to see what Acclaim’s development brought to the table.

Unless they are deliberately designed to be otherwise, Wrestling games are very much “of their time” in terms of their character roster, and the available characters here would raise a smile for anyone old enough to remember the start of the so-called ‘Attitude’ era. Stone Cold Steve Austin was the poster boy for it, along with Triple H, The Rock (still Rocky Mavia at this point,) Kane, The Undertaker and Mankind.

Oddly enough, Bret Hart was also a playable character in the game. Presumably his involvement in the development (some live-action promos from each wrestler were filmed for the Playstation version) occurred before the Montreal Screwjob. But since the game was released almost a year later when he would have been under contract with WCW, one might reasonably wonder just how long it took Acclaim to make this game!

Stunner! Who hasn't tried this on a
younger sibling at some point?

The wrestling was interesting beyond the basic punches, kicks and blocks. There were beat-em-up style input commands for some of the basic throws, which isn’t surprising since Acclaim were also responsible for the early Mortal Kombat games. You could pause the game to bring up your moves list, and work to that. But getting your opponent in a tie-up was where things got interesting, as your move was more likely to succeed or fail depending on the circumstances. In essence, the player who did the weaker move would win the tie-up against the player who did the stronger move, with the idea being that the weaker move would be less damaging but easier to pull off against a stronger move that would be more likely to be interrupted. But this would change depending on how much momentum your wrestler had built up; if you went into your grapple with full momentum or while your opponent was stunned, there would be no stopping you no matter what move you were trying to do! This worked great against the computer but I would imagine cause disparity between players of differing levels of experience; if you know how to do all of one character’s moves, it would put you at a distinct advantage against someone picking up the game for the first time.

I chose Shawn Michaels for my playthrough. The Championship mode was simple enough; defeat a succession of Wrestlers to become the World Champion at the top of the ‘tree.’ I think there were some other stipulations; you couldn’t lose more than three matches. Also, sometimes a previously-defeated opponent would challenge you to a ‘grudge’ match, and if you lost this one you’d drop a whole step off the ladder. Nothing a bit of scum-saving doesn’t sort out!

You would think that it would be the finishing moves that decided the outcome of the match, but they’re very tricky to do, requiring a longer-than-usual input command. I managed Shawn Michaels’ Sweet Chin Music a few times, but I often found that trying to do the move left me open to an attack at a time when I couldn’t afford to lose health needlessly. I found it a far more effective tactic to get the opponent’s health down to red and learn the command for Crucifixion – a pin that can be done from the standing position. That won me a lot more matches – and the Championship – than any mount of faffing about with complicated finishers!

Having now won the World Championship and been rewarded with a pretty standard cutscene, I’m ready to move on. I know the game has more to offer but it’s basically an unlock-fest from this point, and while War Zone is a good game, I don’t necessarily feel the need to play through it multiple times to unlock all the costumes and wrestlers. I might think about coming back to it later, though – there are wrestlers in this game that didn’t appear in the later games, so War Zone might be the only opportunity I have to play as Ahmed Johnson, or British Bulldog. Until then, I’ll move on to another game and see what new challenges await…

Backlog Beatdown: Destroying Cars with Destruction Derby 2

There were no shortage of racing games on the PS1, and Destruction Derby 2 was one of the ones that everybody had played at some point. It must have been something of a bold venture at the time, as racing games that had destructible cars as their main gameplay mechanic were almost unheard of. Yes, there were games where the cars could take damage, but not necessarily games where that was the whole point of the game!

Destruction Derby 2 is a racing game which follows a pretty straight formula of drive around a track and attempt to reach first place. If this was all there were to it, the game wouldn’t be much good. The graphics are OK for the time but the limited draw distance results in a lot of ‘pop-in’ on certain tracks. There is limited commentary that gets old quite quickly, and this game was released before analogue controls were standardised so it’s not that easy to control your cars effectively.

What sets this apart from the other racing games of the time is that it’s less about your race position and more about how many points you can get by causing your opponents to spin. If you collide with your opponent and cause them to spin 90 degrees, you get ten points. If you cause them to spin one 180 degrees, or force them to retire from the race, you get 25 points, and if you manage to get them to spin all the way around you get 50. Your points and those of your 19 opponents are totalled up at the end of the race – along with 50, 25 and 10 points available for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd positions respectively – and the driver with the most points is the winner. The Championship mode involves four seasons of four races plus a ‘Destruction Derby’ mode at the end of each race where the cars all drive at each other in a coliseum-like setting and see who lasts the longest, and the idea is to get promoted to the top division and win the Championship.

Definitely the car to choose if you want to win...

It was a good idea, but it wasn’t terribly well-executed. Scoring points for the race by crashing in to other cars was fun when it worked, but more often than not it didn’t; sometimes the car wouldn’t spin, sometimes I’d clip straight through the car altogether. And let’s not pretend that the few times I did manage it weren’t more by luck than by judgement. The Destruction Derby levels were a lottery based on how many cars had already been knocked out of the race by the time you get a chance to score. And because you have to be hitting the cars at a certain speed to get them to spin at all, the only car to choose out of the three that are available is the Pro car – maximum speed, minimum control. The only reason I made it through the third season is that I was fortunate enough to score something like 400 points on the first race; to this day I still don’t know how I managed that.

I did eventually manage to beat the game but with such an inconsistent scoring method, the only way I could do it was to scum-save the game between each race when I got a relatively decent score. Somehow I’m taking up 5 blocks on the memory card with a one-block game!

There was a “Stock Car Racing” mode – a mode where the score is based on your position and nothing else – but I didn’t bother with that. Destruction Derby 2 doesn’t handle well enough to get much fun out of it as a racing simulation, and there are far better games out there for the purpose.

I probably sound quite negative about this game but the truth is that I did enjoy my experience with it. I learned little tricks and quirks of each track to help my progress, which gave me a sense of achievement. Actually making it to the finish line was always nice, and never a guarantee. And props to the soundtrack of grind-y Nu-Metal, which was very much of-it’s-time and leaves me in a nostalgic haze.

Backlog Beatdown: Saving my Bacon with Hogs of War

So Ebay may very well become my downfall in managing my video game backlog. I’ve been ordering all sorts of titles mainly for the PS1, inspired by the game collector and Youtube star MetalJesusRocks. I’ve bought around 15 games so far and I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the ones I’ve played, most of which I’ve previously owned at some point and it’s leaving me in a nostalgic haze.

And what a delight it was to play Hogs of War again…

The idea was best summarised by the Playstation Magazine Demo Disc it appeared on: “Imagine Worms in 3D. Now put pigs where the worms should be, and…” It is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a squad of usually five pigs. They have a limited amount of time to move around and position themselves to attack the enemy, as almost all the attacks are done from a stationary position. The hogs have a certain amount of health each, which is drained with each attack it takes, and the last team standing is the winner.

I had War Pigs by Black Sabbath going round in my
head all the way through my playthrough of this.

Much of the strategy of the game comes from choosing where to put your pigs and deciding what weapon to use. The sniper rifle, for example, does as much damage as a direct hit from a bazooka, however it can only fire in a straight line and leaves you open to a follow-up attack if you don’t kill your enemy straight away and are in an awkward position. The bazooka has area-of-effect damage and can be fired over terrain, but requires you to ‘charge’ your attack to the appropriate amount of power you need for the shot; if you don’t get this right your accuracy will suffer and you’ll very likely miss your shot entirely. Deciding what to use, when to use it, and where to use it from is the key to getting through some of the harder levels of the game.

The game has a campaign mode, where it puts you in a linear series of 25 levels taking over the continent of Saustralasia. Your hogs are somewhat limited in what they can do at first, but you gain ‘medals’ throughout the game as rewards for completing levels and surviving, and you use these to upgrade your pigs. You can take them down a Heavy Weapons route, or Espionage, Engineering and Medic. You can choose them to suit your play style if you want, but you’ll find it much easier to have two of each (you start with a total of 8 hogs) and swap them in and out of your squad as you need to. A fourth promotion brings them up to Commando level, which specialises in all weapons, and the final level is Hero, who can use more or less all weapons and has a few special ones to work with as well.

The true strength of this game is its sense of humour. Your team of pigs is selected from one of 6 ‘Nations,’ very stereotypically based on the English, French, German, American, Russian and Japanese. They all make amusing and borderline-racist remarks when they make their attack in hilariously overblown accents. Plus the cut-scenes, usually “Training” videos, are funny in their uselessness. The whole thing is capped off by having many of the voice-overs done by the sadly-missed Rik Mayall, whose performance brings the cheesy lines and camp over-acting to life.

The game challenges me at the right level; it’s tough enough in places but the campaign took me around 15 hours to get all the way through and that’s quite enough for me. The AI sometimes makes some very strange decisions indeed, and the controls feel clunky – I suspect this was a quite deliberate design decision that adds to the feel of the game. After all, guns are hard enough to use at the best of times, never mind trying to do it with trotters!

I love this game; I regretted selling it years ago and I’ll certainly be hanging on to it for a good long while this time. Maybe I’m getting old, but I found myself thinking around half-way through my play-through that we just don’t get this kind of game in the mainstream these days. Turn-based strategy games are still something of a niche, and in a Triple-A release, the edgy dialogue would be focus-tested out of the game before you’d even got on to Rik Mayall’s booking agent. Plus, it’s fighting pigs; not relatable in any obvious way (though the game has a surprising amount to say about the futility of war!) and a ridiculous concept. You won’t see this on any Youtube advertisement, and if people still make games like this, then they are consigned to the depths of what is now called Indie Gaming. A bit sad, really.

*EDIT*

Chances are some of you may now be thinking: "Well, this seems pretty good, I'll give it a go." If you do, be advised the PC version of this has slightly better graphics and is inferior in all other respects. The main problem with it is that the enemy pigs don't move, they just stand and fire. This is not a bug but was deliberately coded into the game, and I'd like to find out why, because it should be coded out again with extreme force. It removes any challenge from the game and you're basically just playing a shooting gallery. Get it for the PlayStation, or the handhelds if you can.

Backlog Beatdown: Collecting EVERYTHING with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might be forgiven for thinking “But Matt, haven’t you already beaten Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga?” And you would be correct, well done, especially if you’re not one of the (currently) 33 people who read that blog in the first place. And you’re right, I wouldn’t normally count a game as ‘beaten’ if I’d already done so. However, I allowed myself a free pass with Lego Star Wars. And here’s why:

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is the first full game on the Xbox 360 I have completed 100%. That is to say, I have completed all the campaigns, collected all the collectables (and this is a Lego game so there are a LOT,) and got all the achievement points.

Playing as Obi Wan in his full 'Cool
Old Guy' glory. What's not to love?

In fairness, this is probably the only game in my collection where I have a hope of achieving all the achievement points. It’s not because I’m bad at games, not just because of that anyway. It’s just that for the vast majority of games I’ve got on the 360, a lot of the achievement points are tied up in the online Multiplayer mode. And since I’m always going to struggle even to get a game in now that most people have moved onto the Xbox One, the chances that I’m going to get many achievements that depend on multiplayer games are slim indeed. There was one achievement, in this case, that required me to complete a level with another player online, but I managed that one a couple of years ago.

I got a long way to doing this when I was participating in No Game New Year back in 2014, but after collecting all the mini-kits and other various achievements, I realised I was essentially going to have to play through the game at least another two times in order to complete the game and it got filed under “can’t be arsed.” Nearly a year and a half later, I came back to it and found that I needed to get all the Blue Mini-kits in challenge mode. I used an online guide for this because I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down, and even then some of those kits were very tough to find in the 10-minute time limit. It took a while, but I got them all.

Then I needed to complete the bounty hunter missions for the final few gold bricks. These turned out to be quite easy and very enjoyable; the bounty hunters are always fun characters to play and it’s nice to play the familiar levels with different characters. Yes, I know Free Play allows you to do this, but the Bounty Hunter missions lock you with those 6 (I think) characters so you have to utilise what abilities you have – some have more than others – to get through the level.

The final thing I needed to do was to complete Super Story Mode – in this, you apparently have to get through each story in less than an hour and collect 100,000 studs along the way. Now, I’m not complaining, but I found in my play-through that I only actually had to do the latter, as some of the stories took me well over an hour and were marked off as complete anyway. Collecting 100,000 studs is really not that hard to do, so it was just a matter of getting through the story again, but I managed it for the final achievement of completing the game 100%.

Fitting that this was the scene at the end of the
Lego Star Wars - TCS journey...

And that should be it for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I’ve done everything there is to do and there’s no reason for me to own the game anymore, so I should probably just get rid of it. Except… for some reason, I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know whether I’ve got an ill-proportioned amount of investment in this game now, or whether I’m thinking of playing it through again in the future, but I don’t want to delete it from my hard drive just yet.

Maybe it’s because whatever else it might be, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is actually a really good game.

Backlog Beatdown: Biologically Shocking with Bioshock 2

One of the things I want to do when playing video games this year is to get through some of the series of games I’ve been hoarding. I’ve got quite a few; the entire Gears of War series, Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, XCOM to name but some of them. The trouble is that by the time I get to the end of one game in a series, I’m usually itching for a change of pace and playing the second or third instalment of it straight away is the last thing I feel like doing. The result is I’ve got games I haven’t even touched because I haven’t finished their prequels. That’s something I’m hoping to address in the coming months.

Take Bioshock 2 for example. My main incentive for getting this particular game was that I’d downloaded Bioshock Infinite onto my Xbox 360 when it was released for free on Games with Gold. I’d already played the first Bioshock game – a very good game, in my opinion – and I’d heard that the second instalment was arguably the weakest in the trilogy, but as it had been a good couple of years since I’d beaten the original Bioshock, I thought the time was right to give its sequel a go.

This time, instead of playing a pure human, you play as one of the Big Daddies; huge hulking lummoxes in diving suits that are genetically engineered to protect the Little Sisters – strange, waif-like girls who walk around harvesting corpses for ADAM (genetic materials that can be used to enhance capabilities.) The story goes that ten years ago, you were forced to shoot yourself by the game’s primary antagonist: Sophia Lamb. You awaken, and have to re-connect to your little sister, now a young adult, in order to survive and escape the huge underwater city of Rapture. Sophia, however, has her own plans for Eleanor – her daughter, and your little sister – and will not let her go without a fight. She has engineered a fanatical cult-like collection of splices and bitter enemies, and will stop at nothing to impede your progress.

Have a guess where I'm going
to stick this...

I didn’t find the change in character affected the gameplay to any major extent; you can take as much punishment as Jack from Bioshock, and apart from some changes in the weapons (rivet gun instead of a pistol, Big Daddy Drill instead of a wrench etc) the game plays much the same as it ever did. This is a good thing, since Bioshock played so well in the first place. It is reasonably well-balanced; I died a lot but it was always because I was rubbish rather than cheap deaths often put upon you in lesser games, and since your only punishment for this is to go back to a Vita chamber – the game’s save points – with half your health and EVE (mana,) the game is not harsh enough to derail the whole thing if you make a mistake. The enemies are surprisingly well-varied, and are all potentially a threat if you don’t take care as you go through the levels. The game also rewards you for taking your time, exploring and finding all the loot hidden around the city; ammo is not exactly scarce but it’s very easy to burn through and you can make things a lot easier for yourself by looking for all the ammo-dumps and med-kits.

One thing I did find a bit redundant was the Plasmids. While they can potentially create a whole host of fun effects, I found myself sticking with the Lightning Bolt – which has the additional effect of stopping the enemy for a few moments – more often than not. It suited my play style but it meant I missed out on a lot of the potential fun from the game. It is in many ways a step backwards from the previous game, which required you to use a certain plasmid in a certain area in order to progress. But that’s not a complaint so much as an observation on my own particular taste.

Bioshock 2 does a very good job of blending gameplay with storytelling, and the closer you get to your goal of rescuing Eleanor, the more invested you get in the plot. It takes a few hours to get going, as you’re introduced to various characters and mechanics, but once you’re in, you’re hooked. The game lasts around 12-14 hours, which for a game like this is plenty of time. The last couple of levels in particular have a feeling of frantic desperation about them that keeps you going right until the end. There are a few different variations of the ending depending on what moral decisions you made during the game; always a nice touch but I can rarely bring myself to play through a game to get the bad ending so I finished the game with the best ending and looked up the rest on Youtube.

Bioshock 2 does enough things differently to Bioshock to justify its title of ‘sequel.’ I think if it had come out the year after the first Bioshock game it would have been a disappointment, but it looks like a very well-paced series and if Infinite is the last instalment, I understand it went out with a bang. I’ll probably play it at some point, but right now I can feel accomplished at beating a well-designed enjoyable game that tells its story brilliantly.

Backlog Beatdown: Old School Platforming with Mega Man X

Mega Man X is a game that I first played when I was about 10 or 11, my friend Matt had a Super Nintendo and borrowed it off someone. I remember enjoying it at the time; it made enough of an impression for me to download it onto my Wii U 20 years later.

While I wouldn’t have consciously thought this when I first played it, I guess Mega Man X is a “gamer’s game,” and as standard as they come. A side-scrolling platform game with colourful characters, bosses and upgrades, easy enough for me to get more or less all the way through the game without me discovering many of its secrets, but challenging enough on the right level for it to be fun. Also there were plenty of optional upgrades to discover for those people who wanted to look for them.

Watch for the attack patters, or just
shoot it until it dies - game's fine either way.

I haven’t played many Mega Man games, but as far as I know the pattern scarcely varies between each game – you go through a number of levels, fight a boss at the end and take his weapon if you beat him, and then go on to the final level where you get a boss rush (fight all the bosses again) and defeat the game’s final boss for the win. It’s a simple enough concept, and is solid enough for it to still be popular even to this very day, with new games in the series being released as little as a few years ago.

The gimmicks of the ‘X’ series – and what sets it apart from the other games – is that you can upgrade Mega Man himself. In the main series, your upgrades were limited to the weapons you received from the bosses you defeated. In Mega Man X you get that too, but you also get upgrades to his legs, chest, helmet and gun, allowing him to dash, take more damage, break certain ceilings with his helmet and charge more powerful shots, respectively. You can also pick up items to increase your maximum health, and even ‘sub-tanks’ that allowed you to store health pick-ups to re-fill your health bar when you were ready. Finding and using all of these upgrades is the real challenge and reward of the game.

The levels are well-designed and challenging. Very few of your enemies put up much of a fight and will die if you hit them a few times, but some of them exist to get in your way and force you to come up with strategies to either avoid or kill them quickly. You die far more often to traps and pitfalls than you do from taking damage! You can access the levels after you’ve beaten them to search for the secrets, and brilliantly, areas hidden areas of some levels are only accessible once you’ve beaten others. This is a classic example of good design – you’re not forced to discover these secrets in order to beat the levels, but it is a rewarding challenge for those who do.

Most of the bosses can be beaten by analysing their attack patterns and reacting accordingly, but you can make things a lot easier for yourself by finding out which boss is vulnerable to which weapon. The classic example is Spark Mandrill – once you have the Shotgun Ice weapon, he freezes as soon as you hit him with it. Boomer Kuwanger is almost impossible to hit, but is particularly vulnerable to the homing missiles you get from Launch Octopus. The final bosses of the game are also weak to certain weapons.

I’ll admit that I used a wiki to help me to discover some of the game’s more obscure secrets – the last few health tanks, and the final bosses’ vulnerabilities. Some may call it cheating, but these were tricky enough moves to make and did not detract from the challenge of the game. I’ve had a lot of fun with Mega Man X; it’s a splendid platformer from a strong development team at the very top of their game. I’ll keep it on my Wii U in case I fancy another go, but I can’t see that happening any time soon as I’ve seen most of what there is to see.

Backlog Beatdown: Being alone with Thomas in Thomas Was Alone

What a delightful game this turned out to be! I can’t remember where I first heard about it; most likely TotalBiscuit, but I remember the idea of moving coloured blocks with some amusing narration was intriguing, if nothing else. I didn’t play it for the longest time because I was trying not to buy more games than I could beat, or at all, but then when I bought a Wii U and found it available on its virtual console, I thought I had to give it a go.

So this game shouldn’t be news to anyone really but what Mike Bithell managed to do was create a game with very simple puzzle-based mechanics and use a fantastic musical score (David Housden) and an incredible performance from Danny Wallace as the narrator to maintain engagement. It follows the story of Thomas, a little red rectangle, as he tries to escape the world he is in. On the way, he meets some different coloured rectangles, each with their own shapes, sizes and personalities – which are never heard, only narrated, in a manner similar to a children’s TV show circa 1980s/90s – and they have to use their various shapes and capabilities to help each other through the world. It takes what could have been an abstract and not-very-interesting concept and breathes life into a gaming world which at the time (2010-2012) was sorely missing some colour and wit. And it works. The music offers a sense of peace and calm, and you can’t help but be invested in the story of Thomas and his friends, as it continues to unfold in a manner which leaves just the right amount open to imagination. The game does have a rather convoluted plot, but it’s not pretending to be sensible – and you’re far more interested in the relationships between each of the characters anyway.

Easy to figure out what needs to happen here -
but how do you get them all up there?

With all the gushing people tend to do over the production, it would be easy enough to assume the score and narration carry the whole game. Thankfully, this is not the case: Thomas Was Alone is a very competently-designed game which has a good learning curve that gently introduces the player to the various different mechanics, and moves on when it is ready. The puzzles are rarely complicated, and require but a moment or two of thought. Some of the more challenging levels require some precision over their execution, but this is nothing a little patience doesn’t solve and there is a sense of achievement in completing them.  Sadly the controls weren’t quite as responsive as they needed to be, I don’t know whether that was to do with the Wii U or the game’s design but it hindered me few times.

The game isn’t very long, but it doesn’t need to be: If you blitz through it as a speed run it’ll take no more than a couple of hours, and even though I took my time I don’t think it took me more than four. I was happy just to pick this one up and have a play from time to time; it was a refreshing change to be able to do a bit at a time without having to level up, or follow a contrived plot, or even take it remotely seriously. It knows what it is – a game about moving coloured blocks – and even though the score and narration do a lot to keep the player engaged, the game is not so long that it outstays its welcome. When it ends, you feel it could conceivably keep going for another few levels, and any game that leaves you wanting more is a great game by any stretch of the imagination.

There is longevity there if you look for it. You can time-attack the levels and there is an online ranking system. The Wii U version – and presumably whatever platform you now buy the game on – comes with an option to play the game with a DVD-style commentary; I haven’t looked in to that yet but it’s great that Bithell managed to squeeze even more life out of such a game. I might look into his other game, Volume, in the future. Until then, we’ll see what comes next…