Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate and Far Cry 2

Fun fact: I originally opened this blog with some scathing, sarcastic remarks about how I have nothing better to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, (I normally put these blogs out on Mondays,) before appending that I’d actually written the vast majority of it the day before. The joke was on me in the end, as it turned out I actually had got better things to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, and ended up posting it two days late. Well done me. 

So, what have I been playing this week?

One of the best and most compelling characters I've seen...

I had a go with Hand of Fate, in anticipation of getting the second one at some point, most likely when it goes on a Steam sale. It’s a game that I was originally put on to by TotalBiscuit a few years ago. The idea is that you’re sitting across from ‘The Dealer,’ a mysterious Games Master-like figure who is using cards to take you through your adventure. It’s definitely inspired by a few different kinds of what I now call “Hobby Games;” there’s a board game, a deck-building card game and a role-playing game in there somewhere. The Dealer lays the cards out in a pattern, and you move your piece on to each card, which is then flipped to reveal the encounter. Sometimes it will be a quest, sometimes it will be a shop, sometimes it will be an opportunity to get some new gear or another bonus, with a random chance mini-game. Other times it will be a combat encounter, whereupon the game transports you into a combat arena and becomes a fighting game that borrows heavily from the ‘Arkham’ combat system. There are 3-5 ‘levels’ to each adventure, and each one culminates in a boss fight. If you win, you progress into the next adventure, and if you lose, you can try again as many times as you like.

It’s an intriguing prospect, however the game increases your engagement by adding rogue-like elements to it. You can beat the first few levels without trying, but the game becomes a lot harder later on. However, you don’t start with all of the cards in the game; you gain other cards as you go along. Some cards have tokens attached to them; each token has a set of new cards in there that you can add to the deck if you beat the encounter on the card. You get to keep all the cards you win, even if you lose the adventure, so there is a sense of progression in the game even if you don’t do too well.

The combat has been criticised for being too ‘clunky,’ but I don’t notice; my laptop doesn’t run especially high frame rates. I really enjoy the game – and I like being able to dip in to it every now and again and still feel like I’m making progress.

I'm enjoying it at the moment, but will it
carry me to the end?

I’ve also had a surprising amount of fun with Far Cry 2, a game I haven’t played since No Game New Year. It’s a first-person shooter set in sub-Saharan Africa, and the emphasis is on exploration and story progression. I struggled with it for the longest time; the game appeared to expect me to meticulously plan everything out and attack targets after spending ages planning and scouting, and when that invariably didn’t go very well, I lost a lot of the fun out of the game and gave up after not very long. It got much better once I threw all that out of the window and approached the missions from the angle of getting an assault rifle and killing everything that moves. I find I’m making a lot more progress and enjoying the game a lot more. I might even make it all the way through the game this time! Now that I’ve increased the pace of the game, and therefore decreased the time it takes me to get through the missions, I can play the game for roughly an hour and feel like I’ve made progress. It’s is a long game, but I’ll stick with it for a bit longer and hopefully have a lot more fun in between, whatever happens.

Last Week's Games: Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Cluckles Adventure and Spelunky

Haven't got to this bit, funnily enough...

After beating L.A. Noire, I felt the need to do my thing where I beat a heavy game, then play a couple of light ones. For this, I dug out my WiiU and play Super Mario Bros again, and Castlevania. Both are challenging platformers, and both are very hard to beat if you don’t know what you’re doing; with Super Mario I got stuck on World 7 where there is some very precise timing required, and with Castlevania, I couldn’t even make it past the third level. I had a saved game somewhere around the fourth, but it requires bang-on precision with the platforming and attacks, and more often than not I fall foul of the knockback that plagues the earlier games. How anybody managed to beat this I don’t know! Then again, the game is from a very different generation, where it was usual for people to not have all that many games (I have several hundred now) and the challenge of the games they did have was added to by ferocious difficulty, and a lives system that forces you to go back to the start of the level after every few deaths; in Super Mario it ends the game altogether! I’m not all that far away from the same thing happening on New Super Mario Bros U, which I also had a quick go at.

Probably shouldn't jump on that snail...

Contrast this with Cluckles’ Adventure. Aesthetically, it’s designed to look and play like one of those older games, but the comparisons end there. There is no lives system; you can replay a level as many times as you want. The 100+ levels are a lot shorter; even the longest one I’ve come across takes about a minute and a half. There are power-ups that help you (so far I’ve only come across a shield that will allow you to take an extra hit,) but none that you’re supposed to have in order to get through a level. No boss battles either, that I’ve seen! It’s just you and a small number of core gameplay mechanics vs some very competently designed levels.

Old classics were great at the time, but things move on.

For example, 30-something levels in to the game, one of the stages telegraphs a secret room by putting a large square boulder on the ground that doesn’t impede you in any way, but is deactivated by a switch at the bottom of the level. Once you return to the area, the boulder is gone, but if you jump straight down rather than clinging to the walls, you fall on to a spike trap, die and return to the start of the level. Now if that were at the end of a level you’d spent ten minutes on, or you had limited lives, it would probably feel quite cheap. But since the only penalty for this is about 40 seconds from your life, it puts you in a position to say “Yeah, OK, you got me. Well played. I’ll know for next time.” I’m not saying the new games are better than the old classics, or the other way around – more that they are indicative of the generation in which they were developed.

A gamer's game, to be sure!

I also had a go at Spelunky. I’ve had this game on my Xbox 360 for a while, and I pick it up every now and then. This is a bit of a weird one because I can never usually play it for very long. It’s a rogue-lite, and the obvious comparison is to Rogue Legacy that I have on my laptop. It’s a similar sort of thing; go around a 2D procedurally-generated dungeon in to find a lot of treasure, defeat the enemies and progress through the game. Where I find Spelunky lets itself down is that there’s nothing you can do with the treasure in-between runs. With Rogue Legacy, the gold you earned could be used to upgrade your character or equipment. With Spelunky, you can buy new equipment as you’re going along, but other than that there’s nothing else to do with the treasure and you lose it all in between runs. It’s good to pick up and play for a few minutes but the brutally hard progression system makes it difficult to remain engaged for long. 
 
 

Last Week's Games: Cluckles' Adventure and L.A. Noire

This week worked out significantly differently to expectations! While I wasn’t expecting to have much time to play video games this week, I had arranged with Warlords in Netherton to run a Ticket to Ride demo event for them on Sunday. The idea was that I’d run some games of the demo version of Ticket to Ride, hand out their promotional Golden Tickets to anybody who plays and generally have a great time.

Two things altered this plan: Firstly, I was off sick on Friday, and took advantage of that to play some games which I’ll talk about in a minute, and secondly, it snowed. Which won’t mean much to people who live in those parts of the world where it snows all the time, (I have a surprising number of readers in Canada,) but in most of the UK our reaction to snow is to grind our infrastructure to a halt. I wasn’t going to rush to a gaming shop in the middle of the snow, as even if I’d made it, most people who were far more sensible than me would have stayed at home. I also cancelled band practice for similar reasons, and gave myself some time to recover from what had been a pretty heavy week.

I spend far too much time on Youtube watching people talking about video games, and if I see one I like I think “I’d like to try that at some point,” only to forget it moments later. To prevent this, I started writing down all the games I was interested in on a file on my laptop called “Interesting Games.” I’m not sure what that says about me, keeping a record of what games I’ve been interested in so I know which ones to buy, but it meant I could go through the list and see what was on offer on Steam. I downloaded two games: Age of Empires 2 and Cluckles’ Adventure.

I mean, literally, this is it...

I played Cluckles’ Adventure first. It’s a platform game with a pixel-art style that looks almost – but not entirely – quite unlike games released on the NES and Sega Master System. It certainly plays like such a game, with about as ridiculous a premise as most of them. You play as a chicken with a freaking sword, alright, and you’ve got to traverse the different levels. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, but you can also explore the levels to collect all the captured chicks. I played it for an hour and I really enjoyed it. The controls are tight, with one puzzling exception that pressing down make you jump down to the next platform – most games do this by hitting down and jump. The gameplay is fun; the platforming is fine and the enemies are varied and interesting. Most things go down in one hit, including you, and Cluckles’ only attack is a forward dash, so you need to be careful where you do it in case you dash yourself off a cliff. But what I really like about it is that each level is a self-contained challenge. There’s no experience points, no equipment upgrades that are necessary to beat a level: Everything you need to get through a level is there; whether or not you do is dependent on your skill as a player, as it should be.

Beautifully presented, I'll give it that...

The other game I played was L.A. Noire. I played this way back in 2013 and hadn’t touched it since then. I remember liking it at the time but as I needed to give at least an hour to get through even a bit of it, I didn’t come back to it too quickly. I originally intended to go for a 5-star rating on each case but, as doing that without a guide would take me far too long and suck all the fun out of it, I decided to pick up the game from where I left off. I actually finished the story mode in the end, so that’s another one off the list!

Not sure what’s coming next week, though I’ll try and play Cluckles again at some point because it deserves far more of my time than it’s had so far! 

Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel, Super Mario Bros

We’re in to one of the busiest times of the year for me; I’m a music teacher and the end of any term is always fraught with many more things I need to do in addition to whatever foetid standards pass for normal. That combined with the significant changes in my personal and musical life over the last few years means that once again, I’ve not found much time to play many games. Life gets in the way! But, also, life finds a way, as shown to us by the Jurassic Park franchise. And amongst the many, many videos I watched of other people talking about video games, I did indeed manage to play one or two of them.

I thought I had another picture for this...

I continued with my game of Sacred: Citadel, managing to get past the part I was stuck on that was halfway through the second act. I’m progressing through the game at a steady pace, and I’m still enjoying it. But I have to wonder what in the world I’m supposed to be doing about the score challenges. If you’re issued a score challenge, you need to get through the level you’re set having scored 6,666 points. Considering that I don’t think I’ve ever done that even when I’m not doing a challenge, and that I can’t find a way to increase your score other than boost your combat multipliers, I find myself wondering how I’m supposed to do it. Am I supposed to pick a less-damaging weapon so that I can increase my number of attacks? I’m aware that there are probably videos on Youtube that would answer my questions, but I haven’t looked for any yet. The game’s enjoyable enough and I’ll probably keep playing it when I’ve got an hour to spare, but if I find myself with more time in the weekend (I might, you never know!) I might try a heavier game.

That was it until yesterday morning when I decided on a whim to put my WiiU on and have a go at Super Mario Bros. I downloaded the original NES version of the game not long after I bought the system, and I play it every now and. It’s a game that I hardly need to introduce; it’s one of the finest platforming games ever designed. It’s balanced, fun and challenging in all the right places. While other games in the series were more fleshed-out, with different themes being applied to different worlds and demonstrably better with the introduction of new mechanics, the core of what Super Mario is started with this game. I focus on collecting as many coins as possible to get extra lives – a standard mechanic of the time – and I tend to get up to the seventh world before they run out.

Apparently those blocks are supposed to be
the people of the Mushroom Kingdom that
Bowser and the Koopas changed into blocks
with magic. Let that horror sink in.

I’ve actually beaten the game before, ages ago, when I had it on the Super Nintendo as part of the Mario All-Stars compilation, but there was a crucial difference in that version of the game: you could save your progress. You could start from any of the previously-visited worlds and you didn’t have to do the entire game in one sitting. That, I’m pretty sure, is why I haven’t beaten this version it yet – after the time it takes me to get to the sixth or seventh world, I start to lose concentration, and make costly mistakes.

And yes, I know that the structure of the WiiU allows you to save game states and you therefore don’t have to get through the entire game in one sitting on this console either. I don’t mind doing that on Castlevania, which is a ferociously difficult game due to its design, or Mega Man X that is a large game that I wouldn’t expect to be able to beat in one go. With Super Mario Bros, it’s a short enough game that I think I ought to be able to get through the whole thing in one sitting, and the challenges it presents aren’t unfair; I die due to my own mistakes that I should be able to correct if I keep trying. That’s the level at which Super Mario Bros challenges me, and that’s how I am aiming to beat it.

Backlog Beatdown: Assassinating Creeds with Assassin's Creed

Assassin’s Creed is one of the first games I owned for the Xbox360; I bought it back in 2012 not long after I bought the console. By then, the series that had gained some acclaim, but had started to lose its way with the almost yearly sequels and rushed production. I bought the first game in the series; I already knew the later games had done it better but I prefer to play games in sequence and I also wanted to see the core mechanics of the game before the later games introduced a lot of extras. 

I don't know what it is about scholars that compels
 people not to attack them, but I'll play it to my advantage...

The series follows the story of Desmond Miles, who is descended from a line of Assassins and has been kidnapped by agents of Abstergo industries in order to recover the memories of the early years of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, a senior member of the Assassin’s brotherhood during the time of the Crusades. Through the knowledge gained, Abstergo hopes to recover a lost artefact. You play the bulk of the game as Altair, who has to redeem his honour after a botched attempt to recover the Ark of the Covenant by killing nine specific targets. This takes you into a journey across three cities of the Holy Land: Damascus, Jerusalem and Acre, where you have to research your target’s movement patterns and weaknesses by listening in on conversations, stealing maps and intimidating people for information. This done, you finally have a chance to kill your target, taking you through each stage of the game. But, as is so often the case, all is not as it seems…

The gameplay is very good at what it does, but very repetitive and it took me a while to get through the game. I’d play it for a while and then not play it again for a number of months or even years. The plot is an odd mixture of being straightforward enough to understand, massively contrived and ruined by several Youtube videos that have come out over the years, so thankfully I didn’t feel the need to return to the start at the game for the sake of the plot. I also found more fun in the game when I stopped taking it so seriously. An assassin would aim for his target and avoid as much collateral damage as possible, and in the early part of the game, that was how I played – only getting in to fights when I needed to. This lead to a slow, methodic traversal of most of the environments in the game which became very frustrating after a while. Within the last couple of weeks, however, I found it far more fun to run across the rooftops and throw knives at any guards who happen to see you. This made getting around much easier, and the game more comfortable to play.

Can't honestly remember this happening in the game...

The bulk of the game is not that challenging, and even the final boss battle doesn’t present much of a curveball. I generally only died when I was careless with the blocking, and even then, my health bar was so high after a certain point that this was rare. So I breezed through the second half of the game quite quickly. Now that it’s done, am I going to go for a completionist run?

Well I would, if it weren’t for the flags. In almost each area, there are 100 flags you need to pick up for achievement points. A lot of them aren’t hard to find, but the environments are so expansive that searching every conceivable nook and cranny for them would get old very quickly. There is a map available on a Wiki that gives the location of the flags, but there are so many that unless you had the foresight to print it off and mark them off as you go, it’s hard to keep track of which ones you have collected. The achievement available for defeating all the Templars runs into the same problem, although there are only 60 of these in the game. So, I’ll probably leave Assassin’s Creed alone for now. I might come back to it if I need to kill an afternoon, but I’m satisfied that I’ve reached the end of the plot.

Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel and Necromunda

Regular readers will note that I very often complain about not having enough time to play as many games as I would like, and this week has been no exception, though for different reasons than usual. I got caught up in a family emergency of the kind not terribly considerate of the average number of hours in a day, and while that’s been mostly sorted now, a lot of the spare time I was expecting to have this week has been taken up in dealing with it. Sometimes life gets in the way, and this week there were other places I needed to be!

See what I mean? It couldn't look
more XBLA if it tried!

On those days where I had an hour or two to spare, however, I found myself playing Sacred Citadel. One pattern that regularly occurs when I’m playing games is that after I’ve finished a big, heavy game like Assassin’s Creed, I’m more likely to play a couple of light or retro games that I don’t have to think too hard about in order to have a pretty decent time. Sacred Citadel is a fantasy-themed hack-and-slash brawler with RPG elements, similar in gameplay to the old arcade brawler machines that were the staple of the arcades in the early 90s, but with a look I that can only describe as Xbox Live Arcade. I didn’t realise until I was doing the research for this blog that it’s actually a part of the Sacred franchise, which isn’t a series of games I’m familiar with so I had no pre-conceptions about the content of the game. Honestly, at this point I just wanted to hit something.

You choose from one of four characters; the Warrior, the Ranger, the Mage and the Shaman. They have different abilities depending on who you choose; I went for the Mage because it’s a refreshing change to be able to fireball something to death without having to commit to a 40+ hour roleplaying game. The game is divided into four acts each with a number of levels in there; it starts out easily enough with the game showing you the different mechanics in the first few levels and taking the training wheels off for the rest of the game. You have access to a range of attack combos and can also upgrade your weapons. The more recent brawlers I’ve played have mechanics like this and they’re not awful, but it’s an illusion of depth as your weapon upgrades etc increase in power as the game increases in difficulty, as the enemies you face can take more damage as you’re going along.

Where the game truly becomes like an RPG is in its levelling-up system, where once your character gets a certain amount of XP they level up and you have to distribute points into their characteristics. This should also be an illusion of depth, and it would be if the game didn’t have a massive difficulty spike halfway through the second act and force you to go back and grind for XP to have a hope of beating the boss. There are some challenges to make this more interesting – complete a level without dying, or in a certain amount of time, or score a certain amount of points – but it’s brought the pace of the game right down to a standstill for me. I’ll keep going at it from time to time though, as I’m not expecting to have much time this week either and I’m not quite ready to get off my casual gaming horse just yet!

Looking forward to opening this!

I also bought Games Workshop’s new release, Necromunda Underhive. Necromunda is a game that was available when I first got into the hobby but had been and gone by the time I’d considered getting in to it. Games Workshop’s smaller skirmish games have a lot of good character development rules, though, and I remember Mordheim very fondly, so I’d love to see how it works in the futuristic gang war setting. I haven’t even had time to get the box out yet, and I suspect it will be a while before I do as I want to make sure I do a reasonable job with the painting this time, but we’ll see what happens with it.

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies and Assassin's Creed.

Doing this blog has opened a lot of doors for me in terms of the games I’ve been playing over the last couple of months. Most games require days, weeks or even a couple of months of my time to complete – and that’s if I play it for roughly a few hours a day whenever I can spare that time – and I have to keep my blog interesting by playing a mix of games during the week. I actually managed to beat Assassin’s Creed earlier today and had to put some time in to that to make it happen, but if that had been all I’d done all week I’d end up replacing the title of “Last Week’s Games” to “Last Week’s Blog.” Against anything I would consider my better judgement, people do actually read this; roughly 100 or so people a week depending on how many games I played. While they’re probably not all retained readers, I think I owe it to the few people who do read what I have to say week in week out to not repeat myself all the time. And it’s not like I haven’t got a tonne of games I haven’t played… 

Does this look 8-bit to you? Thought not.

To this end I found myself alone with my laptop for a few hours and played a game I downloaded quite recently: 8-Bit Armies. This is an isometric Real-Time Strategy game that purports to have 8-bit graphics, although that’s more to do with the design aesthetic because anybody who’s ever played an 8-bit game would know they don’t look even remotely this polished. I was aware of it because TotalBiscuit did some coverage on it a while ago; at the time he said something along the lines of while the mechanics of the game were solid enough, it was difficult to recommend because out of the proposed six factions, there were only two in the game at that point and they functioned more or less identically. I was reluctant to buy it straight away for that reason, but when it came up in a Steam sale a few weeks ago, I bought it and its two sequels, which is where I expect the four remaining factions ended up: 8-Bit Hordes (medieval combat) and 8-Bit Invaders (Sci-fi combat.)

I really enjoyed playing it for the relatively short amount of time I had. It controls well, and I’m mature enough now to know when the game is teaching me its mechanics of its various component parts as we progress – letting me see the purpose and function of the lower-tech units before letting me loose with the big stuff. So far it hasn’t challenge me in any massive way, but there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in executing a plan. An early mission has you destroying the enemy’s motor pools in each of the three bases in the area, and it was good fun to send my armoured cars in their first to scout the area, establish where the traps are and plan the best attack route before attacking with a horde of rocket launchers and infantry. This isn’t a set piece; the game doesn’t hold your hand. You have to work that out for yourself, and it’s all the better for that. It’s not perfect; with an isometric viewpoint some of the things in the game are blocked from view and there’s no way to rotate the map that I’ve found yet. But it’s a solid game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it.

Lots of people to save. Kind of contradicts
the point of an assassin, honestly...

And, I beat Assassin’s Creed. I’m not going to say too much about that as it’s going to get its own blog in the next few days, but I will say this: I might play the other games in the series at some point, and with each effort to innovate, the original Assassin’s Creed has become more obsolete to the point where many people now find it unplayable. I know I have an almost-obsessive compulsion to play all the games in order and that rarely does me many favours, but in this case, I’m glad I had the chance to be the game that forms the core experience of Assassin’s Creed –before all the innovations came in.

Last Week's Games: Assassin's Creed, Pathfinder

I decided when I came home late on Monday Evening to give Streets of Rage 2 one last hurrah, but I found that I wasn’t concentrating properly and making too many silly mistakes. So instead, I had a look at some of the bonus games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection: Space Harrier, Alien Syndrome and Tip Top. They are all very difficult early arcade games, and I didn’t really give them a lot of time engage me; it was just a way of winding down after a long and not very easy day. Realising I was getting nowhere, I moved on the following evening.

You can't see me...

I started playing Assassin’s Creed, of all things! I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this game. The series itself has come under fire in recent years for releasing the same game over and over again with naught but a token effort to innovate, but having only ever played the first one, I haven’t really noticed that. The game is decent enough, and follows a core loop of the Master Assassin, Altair, researching and investigating a target for assassination in the Holy Land, before planning your attack and delivering the killing blow. It’s good at what it does but the gameplay is very repetitive, and not in a way that I find particularly enjoyable, so I play a bit at a time and then not touch it again for months, sometimes even years. Thankfully, this isn’t a game I feel the need to return to the start of for the sake of the plot, or we’d be here for a very long time.

During the last time I played, I manage to get the achievement points for surviving one hundred fights without dying. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing; once your health bar gets to a certain point the fights are generally over before you take any significant amount of damage. So this would normally be of little significance but I came very close to messing it up! I started off in the city of Acre, and had forgotten that you’re supposed to blend in with the scholars in order to leave as most of the guards in the game will attack me unless I’m hiding. So I ran right through the guards, who promptly attacked. I tried to fight back, but I’d forgotten the controls too and it was taking me a while to get an attack pattern going, by which time I was surrounded by six or seven guards that I knew I hadn’t got a hope of beating. I ran off to avoid being killed, managed it, and got the achievement about half an hour later. I realised that the bulk of the work I’d put in for that would have been done years ago, and that if I got killed I’d have had to start all over again, so I was very grateful I’d had the sense to run from that fight!

Those kind of stories are what make the experience for me, but on a broader scale the game has a lot going for it. Graphically it’s gorgeous, and the level design is on point for a game of this size. I’ve progressed about half way through the game and I’m actually finding it a lot more enjoyable now that I’ve realised I am supposed to be killing the guards as well. When I played the game previously I was trying to do what an assassin would do, which is try to kill his intended target with as little collateral damage as possible. Then I read the achievement list and realised I was actually supposed to be assassinating the guards. I find the game a lot more fun having discovered this!

I also continued running Pathfinder for my friends Dave, Victor, Shane and Ian. I’ve been running Rise of the Runelords for them monthly for a year and I’m really enjoying how the campaign and the characters are setting up – particularly Victor, who’s played through the vast majority of the campaign before with a different system but is enjoying the different approach this group is taking. We should get another session in next month.

Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2 and Hydro Thunder Hurricane, plus buildng Warriors of Khorne

It’s been a bit quiet on the gaming front this week, due to being extremely busy for most of it and asleep for the rest. Here’s what I’ve had going on:

For a while I’ve been meaning to start a new game on my Xbox360. Which one? I don’t know yet. I’ve got quite a few single-player narrative-driven games to play, many of which I’ve never even touched despite having owned for years, and I’d like to get down to playing some of them. However, because I’m out most evenings, and because I’m very tired when I come home, I put on my Xbox, try to work out what I’m going to play (Current frontrunners are Blue Dragon, Shadow of Mordor, Of Orcs and Men and Enslaved) and invariably go “Never mind, I’ll have another bash at Streets of Rage.”

I can cheese that big fat guy on the right -
but only if I face him alone...

So that’s the principle game I’ve been playing this week, and I find myself using Axel more than Max for my play through these days, perhaps as way of keeping the game fresh for me! Interestingly I got as far as the fifth stage and found that I wasn’t concentrating anywhere near as much as I should have been; for this reason I lost the game on the elevator boss rush on the seventh stage. I don’t usually get much further than that but I could barely keep my eyes open!

It's big, it's dumb, it's fun. I love it!

I’ve also been playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane; I’ve been really enjoying going for the gold score on every level. I don’t play many racing games; there’s fun in learning tracks and optimal customisation options, but it is a long-winded process which gets tedious after a while. With Hydro Thunder, you pick the right boat for the track and away you go; any customisations are purely cosmetic – so I know if I’m going wrong it’s because I don’t know the track very well, not because I don’t know how to set up my vehicle and am therefore knackered from the start. It’s the kind of arcade racer I used to play when I was younger, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than I might for not taking itself too seriously.

In my quest to tackle my ever-growing backlog of hobby models, I had some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards on Sunday and put together some of the Warriors of Khorne from the Age of Sigmar boxed set that came out – and I bought – over two years ago. I built and painted most of the Stormcast Eternals, and some of them appeared in my previous blog, but it was so long ago that I can’t actually remember how I painted them. (Yes, I know they’re blue. I can’t remember what I did to get the highlights etc. I don’t want half my army looking different from the rest!) This is a problem I never even considered I would run in to before, but with many, many paints in the Citadel range, I’ve started keeping track of my paint schemes a little better now. I build all of the character models and monsters, and five of the Blood Reavers; I’ll do the rest at some point but that should keep me going for now.

If I have a large number of models from the same army I like to alternate painting the “rank and file” models in blocks of five, and then paint something else. That keeps it as fresh as it’s going to get and I get more done for not having to paint the same model over and over again, or take ages to see any progress for painting too many models at a time. I like to do a good job – or as good as I can manage – but I fall foul of many of the fallacies that plague many amateur painters: Rushing the last few parts, trying to get as much as I could do in the time and not taking breaks when I need to. I try not to paint to a deadline anymore, as this puts pressure on me to do something I’ll never manage and I get disillusioned.

Went on a bit about the paint there, but I’ve not got much else this week!

Last Week's Games: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Lock's Quest, Shinobi III, Streets of Rage II, Vectorman 2 and The Story of Thor

With a well-received week off one of my two jobs, I found myself with a bit more time to play games this week, including some important finishers. Let’s see what they were:

I recently downloaded Hydro Thunder Hurricane for free from Xbox Live Gold, and inspired by Youtube’s MetalJesusRocks, who likes games like this, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a speedboat racing game, and is good fun; it has a good selection of modes and there’s plenty to unlock. I probably won’t ever complete it, as some of the achievements rely on local multiplayer of all things; I currently only have one controller. But I’ll dip in to it now and then to see what it’s got to offer.

Also I had another look at a game I’d been meaning to finish for roughly five years and have now got round to coming back to: Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. I started the campaign again as I’d forgotten most of the plot and the mechanics, but I found it coming back to me quickly enough, even if I had forgotten how hard the game is! I’ll try and get to the end of it this time, when it’s convenient for me to be playing a handheld system.

But the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection is still in my Xbox360 and is not leaving any time soon. I can’t think of any other Xbox360 game other than XCOM: Enemy Unknown that I’ve got more mileage from during the time I’ve had the console. I gave Shinobi III another go, and very nearly got to the end. I lost on the last stage; the fighting is easy enough but at one point you come into a section of the final level where most of the floors and walls are electrified, and you need some precision platforming in order to survive; I just don’t have the right set of skills! Also, during a quiet night at work, I transcribed the tune “Whirlwind” from the game’s soundtrack into Guitar Pro. One of my hobbies is listening to old video game music and transcribing them; it’s a great way to train my musical ear!

I attacked Streets of Rage II as well, because why wouldn’t I. Once again I fell down on the last boss rush, however I’ve been varying my runs by playing as Axel every so often. Normally I would play Max, but Axel has his own charm. His Grand Upper attack does a huge amount of damage, and spamming it is a great approach to most of the bosses, but I find other aspects of his style a little hard to deal with – he’s nowhere near as good with the heavy weapons as Max.

I played, and to my surprise beat, Vectorman 2. After being stuck on the fifth level for goodness knows how long, I took a more methodical approach to playing the game, and got to the eleventh level with a good amount of lives in reserve. Feeling that I had a good chance of beating the game, I ploughed ahead to the end and did just that. You can read my full review here.

Finally, I played the oddly-titled The Story of Thor. Oddly-titled because in North America and Europe it’s actually called Beyond Oasis, which makes more sense in the context of the game, and also the story has nothing to do with any iteration of the character Thor that I am aware of. It was called The Story of Thor in Japan. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good Zelda-like RPG, designed for the Mega Drive’s 6-button controller and with surprisingly good graphics and sound. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I’ve only got as far as I needed to unlock the Water shrine, which is what I needed to do to get the achievement points.

This brings my quest to get all the achievement points for the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection to an end, and it’s been quite a journey! There’s still mileage out of some of the games and I don’t think I’ll ever say goodbye to Streets of Rage 2 again, but it’s still a milestone for me.

Backlog Beatdown: Taking Out the Trash with Vectorman 2

I’ve been stuck on the fifth level of Vectorman 2 for a year now, and I occasionally play it when the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection is in my Xbox 360 to try to get to the eleventh stage, which was what I needed to get the available achievement points. Imagine my surprise when, not only did I manage to win the achievement, but I beat the game as well…

Vectorman 2 is a 16bit platforming game that was released on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis back in 1996. You control Vectorman, an “Orbot” – a robot made entirely out of orbs – as you run and gun your way through a nasty collection of insect-like enemies over twenty-two levels, aiming to find out who shot your ship out of the sky.

This is only the second level, and it's brutally hard.
Mainly because you can't see.

In the 90s, platforming games were one of the main styles of game available on consoles, and the better ones had their own gimmicks and mechanics that set them apart. Vectorman’s most obvious shtick was to morph into different things like tanks, space-ships, and some shapes based on his tougher enemies like scorpions and stag beetles. But the quality of the game comes from doing a lot with a very solid base of game mechanics. The controls were great and responsive, for most of the game there were two buttons (jump and fire,) the power-ups were meaningful, the graphics were of the highest quality the Megadrive could manage, and it was a lot of fun.

It was also very hard. Where I was going wrong was that I wasn’t exploring the levels enough. The game’s power-ups come in Power Sacs, bulbous green eggs hanging from various points that you have to shoot several times to break open and grab what’s inside. They’re dotted in various locations around the levels. Their contents range from health, to photons (the game’s equivalent of coins, which contribute to your score,) to temporary weapon upgrades, to access to the bonus levels and multipliers. It is on the latter power-up that the genius of the game’s design comes through. In most games, most multipliers multiply your score; decent, but it doesn’t really help you progress. In Vectorman 2, it also multiplies your power-ups. For example, a health orb would normally restore one hit point. If you have a 3* multiplier and you grab one, it restores three hit points. The same applies to extra lives, and while the game is competently-enough designed that it doesn’t put extra lives in easy reach of a 10* multiplier, it’s possible to create a good amount of extra lives beyond your starting three.

I did a bit better this time because I explored the levels and bonus stages enough to find the power-ups that increased your hit points beyond your starting four. This was crucial, as I could take enough damage in the later levels to not lose sight of what I was supposed to be doing. When I reached the eleventh level, and found I was half way through with nine hit points and thirteen lives, I found myself thinking ‘Wow, I could actually beat this today!’ and saw the game through to the end.

A lot of the levels had little puns like this.
I like it!

The four boss battles work well. Vectorman can morph into different things and upgrade his weapons – but not on the boss battles. Apart from increasing your hit points, you can’t stack the odds in your favour and rely on upgrades to beat the bosses. You have to do the same thing you always have to do in older games: Analyse their attack patterns, learn their weaknesses and exploit them to your advantage. I admit I had to check a Youtube video to find out how to beat the last boss; after having come so far I didn’t want to lose due to ignorance, but I still had to beat it!

Vectorman 2 is not perfect; the difficulty curve is harsh, and the tank section has fiddly controls. And it’s not a game I grew up with, nor has it engaged me on such a level that I could see myself returning to it. But it is a competently-designed and very fun platformer. If you have it on a collection, or own a Sega Megadrive/Genesis, it’s worth playing.

Last Weeks Games: Painting Word Bears, Building Project Pandora and Beating ZombiU.

This week’s was interesting. I beat ZombiU, and while I will talk about that later, much of what I want to say about it was covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. So for this week, I’ll be talking a bit more about my hobby projects:

Had a fine old time
painting this one!

The first and most important thing to examine is the Warhammer 40K Start Collecting! Chaos Space Marine boxed set that I finally finished on Sunday. I bought it back in April/May, and having finished painting the Chaos Space Marine Terminator Lord, I’ve now painted everything in the box. I’m not a very fast painter; it can be months between painting sessions, however over the last few weeks I’ve managed to find some time to go in to Warlords 'n' Wizards in Netherton and spend an hour or so painting. Doing little bits and pieces at a time when it’s convenient yields many more results than painting on those few hours I have to very deliberately set aside when I’m at home! Who knew?

This is my fifth Chaos Space Marine army – I love Chaos in 40K – and for this one I used the Word Bearers colour scheme. My mate Dave started a collection of Ultramarines at about the same time, so I painted them up as their sworn enemies, hence the Terminator Lord having an Ultramarine helmet on display and – from the advice from Steve from Warlords – the head of a Tyranid of Hive Fleet Behemoth. Dave’s taken a break from war games for a while, so I won’t be playing against him any time soon, but I’ve now got some Word Bearers to show for it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of doing a force full of religious nut-jobs, so I ran with the Word Bearers legion and I hope to add to them in the future.

The whole boxed set was a joy to paint.

I’d like to give a shout out to the videos I used as a guide to painting the miniatures; I’m not a strong intuitive painter, and having a guide is pretty much the only way I learn. So thanks to The War Gamer for the vast majority of the help I received with the painting, and to Warhammer TV for the fiddly but crucial parts.

Elsewhere, I opened my Project Pandora: Grim Cargo boxed set and built all the Corporation models. I bought this game a couple of months ago. If you don’t know, it’s a dungeon crawler set in futuristic space, published by Mantic Games. It’s concerned with the battle between the Veer-min, rat-like creatures stealing secret cargo, and the Corporation soldiers defending it. I haven’t played the game yet since the models require some assembly, and unfortunately there’s no assembly guide included in the game. The Corporation models weren’t exactly challenging to build, but it was fiddly when it came to attaching the arms. The fit of some of my models suggests a certain set of guns are supposed to fit a certain set of left arms, however the game gives no indication of what arm goes with what guns, and the parts look identical. So some of my corporation guys look very odd indeed! Also, the models are plastic resin rather than full plastic, and required the use of super glue rather than the usual poly-cement.

Yeah. It got me.

Now, ZombiU… Some of my previous blogs may have given the impression that I wasn’t enjoying the game, but I actually had a decent time with it once the story got going. There were several parts where I got careless and rushed into an area full of zombies, woefully under-prepared, and one or two well-paced jump scares that managed to startle me. Very few times when I’m playing games these days do I find myself thinking: “Yeah, you got me. Well played.” ZombiU managed it, so well done! As I mentioned in my review, I beat the game but got the bad ending, as I didn’t manage to reach the helicopter before dying, but I checked the good ending on Youtube and it’s not much better, so I doubt I’ll be rushing through the game again in order to get it. I might play the Survivor mode at some point though.

Backlog Beatdown: Killing Zombies with ZombiU

ZombiU is a game I’ve had for a while, played for a bit and never got past the first few parts. I came back to it a couple of weeks ago and after having some difficulty getting started, I managed to beat it last Thursday with an unexpected day off work. Let’s see how it worked out:

ZombiU was one of the WiiU’s launch titles. First person Survival Horror games are nothing new, and ZombiU doesn’t do anything different with the theme. The notable differences are: It’s set in London, it makes use of the WiiU controller, and there are Rogue-like elements.

They'll drive you batty...

The London setting works; it is familiar to me as I am from the UK, but only in an aesthetic sense as I don’t live anywhere near London and even if I did, I don’t know enough about the interiors of Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London (two of the game’s key locations) to make a comparison. Neither, I suspect, do the developers, who appear to recognise London and its people as overblown caricatures, and presumably have never been inside Buckingham Palace either, as from what I understand about the place you don’t just ‘go in.’

The WiiU touch pad contributes to certain aspects of the game, like aiming some of the heavier guns, adding and removing barricades, and inventory management. The latter is where it helps the most; you can add and remove items from your inventory with tablet-like functionality, and it can be used as extra buttons to select your weapons and equipment in real-time, rather than having to pause the game.

The Rogue-like elements come in to play when your character dies. You respawn as a different character, with limited weapons and equipped with whatever you stored at your safe house. The game itself doesn’t change; nothing you killed during your previous run will respawn, except that your previous character is now a Zombie. You need to kill them to reach the equipment that they had; if your new character dies before you manage this, that equipment is gone forever and late in the game, that’s a nasty business indeed.

The game took a while to get going but I enjoyed it once it did. You’re guided by a disembodied northern voice called “The Prepper,” through the speaker on the WiiU controller. He initially teaches you the skills you need to survive. Later in the game you find yourself at odds with him as other people turn up and give you things to do, as Prepper seems to think there is no point in trying to escape the city; he tells you that your only chance is to survive. But, as is often the case, things are never as they seem...

So this turned out to be a thing.
Not a nice moment of the game!

The game is challenging, thrilling and scary in the right places. There’s just the right amount of “panic” moments where you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded by zombies, and some well-paced jump-scares. There’s some optional world-building documents to collect, but you’re not obliged to read them to progress. The campaign rewards a careful, methodical approach to progression, and punishes over-confident hubris. The controls can be fiddly, but I believe it better represents the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re playing. However some of the dialogue requires some suspension of disbelief to accommodate the different survivors. For example, there is a section where you fetch an item for a doctor. You’ll probably have died several times by the time you return– but he talks as though he recognises you and makes no mention you being a different person!

I beat the game, but there’s a post-credits sequence that determines the ending. To get the better ending you need to escape the city via helicopter, but as you make your way there, you’re surrounded by zombies that respawn for the only time in the game. I didn’t beat this; I didn’t have enough firepower left to deal with the zombies effectively, and I’d forgotten which way I was supposed to go and ran in to fire. There is a Survivor mode – where you have to beat the entire game with one survivor – and some multiplayer modes. I haven’t looked at these yet, but they’re there if I need them!

Last Week's Games: ZombiU and Greyhawk

Because of my usual problems with time allowance, this blog will be more of a review of ZombiU. I started it last week and, continuing on this week, I’m finding it tough to play – sadly not for the right reasons.

I’ve been spoiled over the last ten years or so by Autosave, where I expect a game to save itself every so often so that I don’t have to do the last half an hour again if I lose during the game. ZombiU works differently to this. When your survivor dies, you carry on from the same point in the progress of the game with a different survivor; functionally identical but a different person. The problem is that the game doesn’t save when this happens. To save the game you have to sleep in the safe house. I didn’t know this, and lost all the progress I’d made on Monday through forgetting to save the game.

A cricket bat. Could it be more British? Good for conserving
 ammo but it takes a lot of hits to drop a Zombie...

“No problem,” thought I, “I wasn’t doing very well, let’s start again.” I got to the point early on in the game where you have to go to the supermarket and hack the security camera junction boxes. I died a number of times – usually as I’d managed to traverse to a different area. When I’d finally finished what I was supposed to be doing, I headed back to the safe house, to find that the game had glitched and hadn’t registered that I’d made it to the supermarket. This was a requirement to end the mission, and because it hadn’t registered, the game would never progress beyond that point. I could have started again, but I was tired and went to bed instead.

The game itself plays OK. The handling’s a bit off but I’m choosing to believe that it better represents the relative skill of the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re controlling. The best – and simultaneously the worst – bits are where there were more zombies in the area than you were expecting, or you trigger a trap, and you have to make a quick blind decision as to where to go next. You can barely see, you’re panicking and the chances that you’ll get it right are slim indeed. You’ll probably die at these points, and it can feel quite cheap. On the other hand if I was caught up in a Zombie Apocalypse that’s probably what would happen to me!

The WiiU game pad works better in some situations than others. It’s good for inventory management; touch screens are ideal for those situations. I also liked it’s utilisation for things like opening sewer drains, or setting and removing barricades; that’s representative of at least some of the physical effort required by your character to do those things. It reminded me of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS, essentially the first Resident Evil game that included some added bits of touch screen functionality.

Less welcome are those times where you have to use it to aim the heavy machine gun near the safe house; you have to aim in first person using the gyro and the screen on the pad. Those guns should be a challenge to use. But you hold the pad flat to play the game, and hold it up to your face in order to aim on the screen with the full range of movement. The trouble is if the aiming begins while your pad’s still flat, you’ll hold it up and will be looking straight at the floor. Even though I later found that you could use the right analogue stick to correct this, it disrupts the flow of the game!

ZombiU’s OK, but that’s all. I might not through to the end before moving on!

I expect Simeon looks a bit like this...

At the Roleplaying group we’ve changed games for this rotation; we’re continuing a Dungeons and Dragons: Greyhawk campaign started a while back. It’s not a deliberately funny setting, but I’m playing a half-elf fighter called Simeon D’sai who has a Wisdom score of 6 with a -2 modifier. This has created very fun situations where my character is easily fooled, both in the adventure and my colleagues who take advantage of it! It’s been fun so far, and it should continue to be.

Last Week's Games: X-Wing, Ticket to Ride, Castlevania, ZombiU

This week I played a surprising number of games…

The first one was Star Wars: X-Wing. I’m playing through the main campaign mode and I’m about two thirds of the way through the first episode; I’m enjoying it so far. I like how there’s always a specific objective you need to work within the game parameters to achieve; there are escort missions, combat missions, missions with specific targets to destroy, rescue missions and everything in between. You might be forgiven for thinking that’s standard, but the game doesn’t hold your hand. You get a briefing, and then you get dropped into the mission – after that, you’re on your own. You get some support in the form of wingmen and updates from your computer, but you need to work out how you’re going to tackle the mission; the game doesn’t tell you and your wingmen won’t win it for you. Quite often, you’ll work it out through trial and error – but that’s a positive thing; it puts some necessary thought into the process of beating a level.

Also, there’s a risk of you getting captured or killed in the game. Again, you might think this an obvious point, but let me explain: If your ship gets destroyed when you’re on a campaign mission, one of three things will happen. If you auto-eject, you’ll either be rescued by the Rebels or captured by the Empire. If you can’t eject because of bad luck or a systems malfunction, you die. If either of the latter two happen, your character can be revived, but he loses his rank and experience and is demoted to Flight Officer, the second lowest rank.

In this edition of the game this doesn’t make much difference, but in previous editions, this could potentially have an effect on your wingmen. You could have several pilots on file, and before you launched a mission you’d have the opportunity to deploy these pilots into the ships that would be flying with you – the higher their rank, the more competently they would fly. You’d run the risk of them dying but you’d also have a wing of pilots you’d created and nurtured yourself. They even had pictures! This was removed from the Windows version of the game I’m playing, presumably to streamline the experience, but it also removed the potential for some X-COM-like storytelling in there in addition to the main campaign.

Great game.

I also spent some time in Warlords 'n' Wizards, a new hobby shop in Netherton, and managed to have a game of Ticket to Ride with one of the lads there. Most people who play this know what a great game it is. I won the game, but with Ticket to Ride, the time between playing the game for the first time and understanding what you have to do is quite short, and the guy I was playing picked it up very quickly, so he had a lot of fun as well. That’s the mark of good game design, in my opinion! I might talk about it more in depth on a slow week, but it’s a very well-designed game that everybody should play at least once.

Hard game!

I dug out the WiiU and played a couple of games on that as well. The first was the original Castlevania, and I’d forgotten how brutally hard that game was. I’m going to have to exploit the WiiU’s infrastructure to scum-save the game, because there’s no way I’m going to finish it any other way. Some might say I’m not getting the true experience if I play it with an option to save, but these old games were designed in a time where the length of the game was extended by its difficulty. I’m having fun with Castlevania – but I’m not looking to get bogged down.

The other one was ZombiU. This was an interesting take on the Zombie game genre, because it functions like a Rogue-lite: you take a survivor up until the point where you die, and then when you take over as another survivor, you have the opportunity to fight your previous character – now a Zombie – and pick up your old equipment. I’ll talk a bit more about it next week! 

Last Week's Games: X-Wing and Final Fantasy II

This week I’ve found myself short of spare time, so I didn’t play many games. But I get to talk more at length about the games I did play, so here they are: 

The main game I played was Star Wars: X Wing. I talked about this last week, but I’ve been getting really in to it again because of how the game plays. It is a space flight simulator; there’s all sorts of different controls and buttons and you have to use most of them at some point in order to succeed. It’s challenging for a number of reasons, the main one being the power distribution system, but it’s not insurmountable and is still a lot of fun.

I'm pretty sure this is the edition
of X-Wing I am playing...

I beat the A-Wing proving ground: a track where you have to fly through gates and shoot targets, some of which shoot back. The track is the same layout no matter what ship you’re in. There are eight levels you have to beat in order to gain the reward for it; a flight badge. You have a limited amount of time to beat it, which gets progressively smaller as you beat the levels. If you miss a gate, you incur a penalty of 15 seconds; for some of the middle levels, that’s disastrous. Also, the targets shoot more aggressively in the later levels, and in the last one, they even shoot you from behind – but if you shoot them, you gain 2 extra seconds to complete the level. There are certain stages that are all but impossible to beat without this.

The challenges in the proving ground are more or less substantial depending on what ship you are flying. The middle tier levels have the tightest time and usually present a significant challenge, but less so with the A-Wing as it moves fast enough for time to be less of a consideration. It doesn’t do such a good job at boosting its shields though, and for that reason, the later levels with the more aggressive targets were more challenging. If your systems start to shut down then you’re in trouble; if your guns are taken out then you can’t fire back, if your shields are knocked out you’ll be destroyed in seconds, and if your flight control or engine goes then you lose a lot of time getting them repaired. Despite all this it was a surprising amount of fun addressing the different challenges each level presents, knowing that there is way to beat it if you can only get it right.

I also enjoyed the A-Wing historical missions; they’re less challenging and a relaxing change of pace. Here’s where a lot of the genius of the game design comes in to play: The missions rarely take more than a few minutes to beat, and you can play through them quite quickly, but there is a reward for each one. It’s a graphic of a badge on a display uniform; not much in itself, but because the game shows you a tangible reward for doing these training missions, you have the incentive to beat them all.

I started the main campaign mode as well. More on that next week!

These hornets are a threat at the beginning.
Not for long...

I also progressed with Final Fantasy II. I love the Final Fantasy games but rarely see one through to the end; the first game is the only one where I’ve managed it so far. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’ve arrived at the point where I’m heading for Mysidia Tower. I’m playing it on my Gameboy Advance, although I find that the game is best enjoyed when I have my phone to hand. I don’t know whether it’s a design error in this edition of the game, but whatever command is supposed to display the world map isn’t working! I’ve had to call up an image of the world map come up on more than one occasion so I can see where I’m supposed to go. The game itself isn’t all that challenging, although I am aware that the difficulty level was re-balanced for the GBA editions.

So, what’s next? More of the same, or will I try a different game? Will I even have time? We’ll see…