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.