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…
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| 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.
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| 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.
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