Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month! 

Last Week's Games: Fantasy Zone, Alien Syndrome, Altered Beast, Theme Hospital

Yeah, I didn't get to this level.

Needing to fill an hour on Monday Night, I had a go at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. My new game for the week was Fantasy Zone, a very colourful shoot-em-up. You play as a small flying ship that looks like it was made from Duplo bricks, and fly around the screen shooting at other creatures invading the land (I couldn’t tell you what any of them are right now!) There are eight larger targets in the level, which take some heavy shooting before they are destroyed. After that, there’s a boss battle, in which the game becomes a Bullet Hell as you try to attack the boss’s weak point while desperately looking for a gap in the projectiles flying at you. I got to the boss on the second level and was defeated, after that my concentration failed and I couldn’t reach that point in the game again, so I moved on. I do want to come back to it though; it was a lot of fun!

I also played Alien Syndrome, which I really enjoyed. I was expecting another side-scrolling beat-em-up when I first saw the game, as you unlock it by getting to a certain point on Alien Storm. But it’s actually a top-down shooter, in which you fight your way through constantly-spawning aliens to rescue your comrades, and once you’ve rescued 10, you go into an arena for a ferociously hard boss battle. It’s a good game, and one I look forward to coming back to in the future!

One game I will be glad not to have to play again is Altered Beast. I played the arcade version of this on the same disc. I didn’t really enjoy it that much but I managed to beat it eventually; you can see it covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. I also persevered with Killer7 for a while; I’m not sure whether I’m “enjoying” it in the usual sense, but I’m finding it intriguing enough to keep going for now at least.

I'll show you the games once
I've played them, alright?

I ordered a copy of Atari Anthology for the PS2, having been persuaded by one of the Metal Jesus videos, and before playing I had a look at the manual to it. With compilation discs, I usually mark the individual games off as complete once I’ve beaten them. One of the problems I was going to have with the Atari games is that most of them aren’t supposed to be “beaten” in any meaningful way. They’re arcade games; you play them until you die and aim for the high score. I wondered how many of the games I’d be interested in playing, because I like to see them through to the end. But Atari fixed this by putting unlockable items in the game; different game modes and interviews etc. Hot Seat mode looks intriguing! So once I’ve unlocked everything, I’ll mark off the whole disc as complete. Otherwise I’ve just taken on 85 games that can’t really be beaten!

Brilliant game, still playing it 20 years later.

Finally, I played Theme Hospital. I downloaded this from GOG a year ago; I have a copy of it on CD-ROM, but the chances I’ll ever get that to work on a modern laptop were slim, so I downloaded a digital version that runs off DosBox. And for a while, I enjoyed it hugely, building the hospitals, researching the cures, trying to let as few people die as possible. It took me right back to when I used to play it in the late 90s! I got to roughly the 8^th or 9^th level (I can’t remember which, it was a while ago!) and played quite a long way in to it before the game crashed and, since Autosave wasn’t a thing back then, and I hadn’t saved the game for a while, I lost a couple of hours of play. I know these things happen, but it’s a dangerous game to play with someone who was already looking forward to the end of the game by then. So I left it for a year, came back to it this week, and played two hours of the level I was stuck on before exactly the same thing happened. Well, darn.

Backlog Beatown: Altering Beasts with Altered Beast

I wasn’t quite ready to get off my Pick-Up-And-Play train, so I had a look at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection, including Altered Beast – Arcade. I’d had a go at the Megadrive port when I played through some of the games during the original No Game New Year, and I didn’t enjoy it all that much at the time. I expected something a little different from the Arcade edition, but it was more or less the same game again.

I actually thought these were two separate pictures...

The premise is that you are a Greek Centurion (and that’s wrong for a start; Centurions were Roman) who is raised from the dead by Zeus to rescue his daughter Athena from the evil Neff (and a quick Google search of Neff Greek Mythology only contains links to the game, so I’m not sure Neff’s even a part of Greek Mythology at all.) Not exactly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but hey, it’s a 1989 arcade game; no one is thinking about the plot too closely.

You punch and kick your way through undead hordes, two-headed wolves, demons and several boss battles, and for the most part, this is actually not very good at all. Your character moves slowly, and attacks even slower. You have to plan your punches around still wanting to punch the enemy half a second later. There is a strategic element to it – punches are quicker but kicks have more reach, and if you duck and kick he’ll attack upwards, – and you become familiar with what attacks are best against certain enemies, but there are so many that it’s a chore to get through the levels.

The conceit of the game is your transformation. When you defeat a certain enemy, (a white two-headed wolf although this is different across different versions of the game,) it drops a power ball; pick this up and you become steadily more muscular and powerful, and if you pick up three, you change into a human/animal hybrid. What you become depends on what level you’re playing. In order, they are: Werewolf, Dragon, Bear, Tiger and Werewolf again. The game comes alive then; your character moves and attacks much faster, having ranged attacks and in some cases an area-of-effect move. I found myself thinking that this should have been the game right from the start. Sega could have developed five different games out of the move set for each creature and it would have been better than Altered Beast.

The Transformation Screen.
Looks like bear-faced cheek to me.

But the main problem with the game is the balance. The enemies attack you in waves that your character just doesn’t have the speed to deal with, and some of the boss battles – the second one in particular – are all but impossible to beat without losing at least a few lives. Playing as the beast is the best part of the game but it takes far too long for this to happen. I understand that it was an arcade game, deliberately designed to be very difficult in order to entice quarters away from the paying public. But on a home console, this increased difficulty is incredibly frustrating. I beat the game, but I’m sure that the only reason that I managed it is that this version of the game has unlimited continues; you can keep going potentially indefinitely.

The tone of this post probably makes it sound like I don’t like this game very much. Well, in fact, I don’t. I know it’s an old game, and they were more difficult than current or previous generation games. The games that have stood the test of time are difficult as well – but not at the expense of fun. Altered Beast is a ferociously hard game; the difficulty in the levels feels cheap, but the unlimited continues remove the challenge from the game. One wonders why the game was in such reverence as to be included on the compilation disc; most likely it is because this game tended to be packed in with the early Sega Megadrives before Sonic the Hedgehog was released a couple of years later. So it has nostalgic value, but as I had no investment in Altered Beast prior to this compilation, this isn’t enough for me.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Mortal Kombat, Killer 7, Shinobi, Zaxxon, Orcs and Elves.

I’ve played quite a few games this week! Firstly, I finally beat Far Cry 2. It’s been a long journey to get to the end of that game and while I don’t see myself coming back to it, I’m glad I’ve played it. It seems to be the core experience of what modern open world games eventually became; the old games may not be able to match the new in terms of content, but it was developed at a time when the idea was new, fresh, and waiting to see what could be done with it.

After beating a long heavy game like Far Cry 2 I needed something light and playable to enjoy, and I left that task to my old sparring partner Streets of Rage 2. I’m getting quite far in to the final level before I lose all of my lives, but the boss rush on the seventh level still tanks most of them. I’m also enjoying playing as Axel more than I did before; as long as you time his moves correctly, he can be devastating.

I'd love to be able to play the BGM on classical guitar...

I went round to a friend’s flat who had a Sega Mega Drive console, and I played a couple of games with them including Columns and the original Mortal Kombat. Columns is as good fun as ever; I lost the game this time through being very tired (it had been a long day) and doing the cardinal sin with puzzle games, which is to try and be clever and look for combos. I’m sure, with more skill, this would be a great tactic. But right now, just trying to match three gems is good enough. Combos tend to happen by themselves. Mortal Kombat was a pleasure to play again. I found myself remembering some of the old moves that Johnny Cage and Scorpion used to do, and took no small amount of pleasure in using them against Kirsty and her friends who didn’t. It took me right back to when I used to play it at home and organise mini-tournaments with my friends; we’d knock each other out and the winner would get a sweet. Great times.

My new game for this week was Killer 7 on the Playstation 2. I bought it at some point last year thinking that this is a game of some reverence from the reknowned developer Suda51, and therefore must be a good game. It certainly succeeded in making me wonder what in the world it’s all about. I just about understand the shooting and I understand why it’s on rails, but I’m not quite getting the significance of the different characters, and why they’re being guided through the game by a guy in a red fetish suit who feels the need to constantly tell me I’m in a tight spot. Maybe I haven’t had enough time with it yet, and if I give it more time the plot might hook me in a little more. We’ll see how it works out but it’s not like I’ve got nothing else to be playing!

Very hard game!

I had a go with a couple of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I tried out Zaxxon, having heard it mentioned several times on Metal Jesus’ Youtube channel. It’s an isometric shooter that has you moving higher or lower, rather than up and down. It was probably phenomenal at the time it was released but I find it very difficult to aim like that; I guess I’ll get used to it if I persevere. Those games were designed to be hard! So too was the original Shinobi, apparently. You can respawn as many times as you like but it doesn’t help if you keep dying in the same place over and over again! But they were what I needed at that point, which was some mindless fun.

Also I played a bit more of Orcs and Elves; I’m enjoying it so far as the difficulty of the game is just about right for me. Also, as is becoming the case, I’m finding a lot more fun in the games where it’s ok to just pick it up and have a play, rather than immersing myself in a simulation.

Backlog Beatdown: Blessing The Rains Down In Africa with Far Cry 2

Yeah, I’ve been waiting nearly a month to make that headline joke...

All quiet at the moment, but there'll be soldiers
waiting behind those buildings...

Far Cry 2, then. It’s an open world First Person Shooter set in Africa, specifically a fictional (but probably based at least remotely on reality!) sub-Saharan country torn apart by civil war. Two factions have laid claim to the country, and your job is to assassinate The Jackal, the notorious arms dealer who armed both sides. On arrival, however, you contract malaria and end up barely conscious and face to face with The Jackal himself, who leaves you with a machete and a sidearm and leaves you to your own devices. After escaping the gun battle currently going on in the town, you’re picked up by one of the two factions, who sets you off working for them. Along the way, you rescue another foreign mercenary who becomes one of your stable of ‘Buddies,’ and make contact with the underground resistance, who are trying to move civilians out of the country and can give you medicine to treat your malaria if you do. After that, you’re on your own, and it’s up to you to find the Jackal and kill him. But as you get more deeply involved with the politics of the warring factions and your buddies, you realise that nothing is as straightforward as it might first appear, and that you potentially have the opportunity to end the conflict entirely. But with your health deteriorating and the chaos and devastation you cause, will there be anything left by the time all this is over? 

I’ve owned this game for a long time, and I had exactly the same problem with it as I had with Assassin’s Creed: I wanted to roleplay it in a stealth style. That meant sneaking through the undergrowth of the vast map, not killing unless I had to, and scout the items or mission objectives. It doesn’t work in this game, since most of the soldiers will attack you on sight, and while you have the option to use silenced weapons and camouflage later, I was having a lot more fun running and gunning the different areas. You’re not graded on the missions, so this is probably one of the only instances I’ve seen where “open-ended mission structure” means exactly that. You’re given various different missions by the factions, buddies, the resistance, arms dealers and even some intercepted telephone calls, and while they are all very similar, (take a thing to a place/blow up a thing/kill someone,) they each take about 20-40 minutes to do and some are actually quite challenging.

Whoever's in that car is in for a nasty surprise...

The Buddies serve a few purposes – you can pick up missions from them, or they will subvert the missions you’re already doing to make them more challenging with a higher reward. Finally, if you lose all your health, they will come to help you, but only once per mission – you have to visit a safe house to reset it. The arms dealers will offer you opportunities to attack convoys of weapons; doing this will unlock more and better weapons. The rest of the game is exploration: Searching for diamonds to buy the weapons, and for audio logs left behind by The Jackal.

I’ve had a good amount of fun with Far Cry 2 and for that reason I found myself more immersed in the story than I might otherwise have been. Some open world games are better paced, have more to do and have a clearer final objective, but the conceit of today’s open world games were very much in development when this was published in 2008, so it showcases the core experience of its genre. There are some glitches; nothing game-breaking but some of the soldiers suddenly appear on top of cars, and when I got to the second main area, the same audio log was coming up each time no matter how many I picked up. I won’t aim for 100% completion; the game took long enough to get to the ending, and most of the achievement points I’m missing are tied up in multiplayer modes with dead servers. But with a little patience, Far Cry 2 became a richer and far more compelling experience than I previously had.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Golden Axe Warrior, Zombie Dice, Hey! That's My Fish, Forbidden Island

This week I’ve been whittling away at Far Cry 2 whenever I get the chance. I’m making slow and steady progress through the game itself, although I did manage to unlock the achievement for unlocking all of the weapons. Part of my mission for the next few times I play will be to buy them all, as well as the manuals, upgrades and ammo packs!

This is where you start...

It wasn’t going to be long before the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection found its way back in to my disc drive, and my new game for this month was Golden Axe Warrior. This is one of the unlockable games, and was previously released on the Sega Master System. It’s a top-down roleplaying game, where you play as a warrior wanting to avenge the death of his parents and destroy the evil giant Death Adder. This being an earlier iteration of an RPG, there’s very little customisation or choice of path; you need to find nine crystals in various dungeons, and the game doesn’t appear too fussy about what order you do them in, but that’s about it. It’s all about the game, wandering around the world, killing enemies, looting money off them and occasionally finding items to improve your damage or armour. There’s a weird shielding mechanic in there as well, where if you’re hit just in the right place your shield will block the shot, but I can’t use it in any dependable way yet.

I actually enjoyed the game for the hour or so that I played it, and defeated the first dungeon. It’s hardly a great-looking game after all this time, and comparisons to the Legend of Zelda are obvious and not entirely welcome (of course Sega were going to try something similar when it realised how successful these kind of games could be!) but it’s good fun and a nice way to play a bare-bones RPG without having to worry about assigning points or morality. However, this style of game was very much in its infancy at that point, and some of the systems were underdeveloped. Not having the manual to it caused me some problems, as did the option to use quest items instead of handing them in. I got a quest from an injured dwarf to bring him the Golden Apple, which is said to heal any wound. I knew perfectly well that this was true, because I’d picked up the apple and, not quite realising what it did, used it about half an hour prior to that. At that point I gave up. I’m not saying I’ll never come back to it but I didn’t want to have to play through the first hour or so of the game to correct it. Maybe another time!

Mind those red dice...

I also played some games around Kirsty’s house again the other night! We played Zombie Dice; a push-your-luck style game in which you play as a Zombie chasing survivors for their brains. You roll three dice, keep the brains, keep the shotgun blasts, and re-roll the feet of the survivors who escape. The aim of the game is to get the most brains, and the game finishes once somebody gets to 13. However, if you take three or more shotguns, you lose all the brains you collected that turn. The mechanic is risk and reward, which sometimes comes off and sometimes doesn’t; Kirsty won that one.

She also beat me at Hey, That’s My Fish, but it was a close game this time and we enjoy playing it a lot!

Finally we had a go at Forbidden Island, a game that preceded Pandemic, and when you start playing that it’s easy to see the familiar mechanics and tense races against time. You play as explorers who go to the titular Forbidden Island to look for the mythical treasure said to be hidden there. Each character has different abilities that will help, but you have limited resources, and only a short amount of time to look before the island floods and you lose. We beat the game in the end through a combination of luck and teamwork, and there’s talk of me using this game in the future as a training tool for communication!

Backlog Beatdown: Solving the Mystery with L.A. Noire

About a month ago I came back to and completed L.A. Noire. I bought it for the Xbox 360 back in 2013, got about half way through then switched to something else, probably XCOM! Here’s what I found out:

I can only hope the previous owner of that
blood hasn't got a use for it...

The game has you playing most of it as Cole Phelps, a detective for the LAPD, as he progresses through different departments of the police force – Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson. There are a few distinct sections in the game: The open world, where you drive around Los Angeles usually to your next location, though there are side mission and unlockables. There are crime scenes, where you hunt for clues around various locations where crimes have been committed. And there is the interrogation scenes, when you’re interviewing witnesses.

The latter is where most of the effort went into the game’s presentation, as they used motion capture to make the character’s faces move in an almost film-realistic way. They did a good job of this, unfortunately it didn’t have the required effect, as character’s clothes and hair remain stiff throughout. Nonetheless, this is by far the most interesting segment of the game, where you ask a witness a question, and watch their faces for their response. If you think they’re telling the truth, you press A, and potentially get some more information out of them. If they look like they’re hiding something, you press X to doubt them. And if you know they’re lying, you press Y to accuse them; you then have to present a piece of evidence that contradicts the lie. And if you’re not sure one way or the other, you can press B to back out and come back the question later.

Apparently the guy never wore a fedora
even once during production.

I missed a trick here: I found out later that if you accuse them of lying first, then you have the option to back out if they’re not. But if they are, they will very often telegraph the piece of evidence you need to contradict the lie. With the other two options, it might seem that Cole is being ill-proportionately aggressive; you wouldn’t think that shouting someone down constitute “Doubt.” But there was a reason for this, too: When the game was in development, the three options were going to be “Coax,” “Force” and “Lie.” At some point, the first two options were changed to “Truth” and “Doubt,” but most of the game’s dialogue had already been recorded and was left in. Remembering this fact makes some of what Cole says make a lot more sense.

The crime scene sections are handled well too. In order to keep you immersed in what is essentially a hidden object sequence, you still control Cole in third person, and whenever he comes across something that is potentially a clue, the controller vibrates. You pick it up, examine it, and the game will add it to the records if it is relevant.

This might sound like a cross between an adventure game and a Bioware RPG, but the game can’t really afford to be de-railed if you get stuck. Your reward for getting all the clues and asking the right questions are not solving the crime – that happens anyway – but finding out the whole truth about what’s going on. That can lead to a certain dissatisfaction, as there’s no sense of influencing the plot, but rather whether you find out some of its finer points. Ultimately it was better that way around, otherwise you’d be wandering around hopelessly lost and confused.

I did enjoy L.A. Noire. It’s a game that promised much, and due to the limitations of its media, fell just short of delivery. I won’t be aiming for 100% completion, as aiming for a 5-star rating on each case (I didn’t manage this on the first one even after three goes) would suck all the fun out of it, and a lot of the achievement points are tied up in DLC that I have no intention of buying. But with a lot of focus-tested military shooters out at the time, and rinse-and-repeat open world games taking up a lot of triple-A games today, I’m glad I tried the one that tried to do things a little bit differently.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2 and Hey, That's My Fish!

Apparently in Africa everyone has the same car...

This week, my video gaming consisted entirely of playing Far Cry 2. There’s not much more to say about that game that I haven’t mentioned in previous blogs, except that I’ve got to the second act now. As I understand it, the game is based on The Heart of Darkness; the book by Joseph Conrad that eventually became the movie Apocalypse Now. The central themes running through both of them are dehumanisation, and while a video game is necessarily removed from realistic violence, the theme is picked up here quite substantially. You’re sent to Africa to kill one man – The Jackal – but I’ve killed hundreds of people so far to get close to him, for money, information or weapons. Is the reward for killing this man worth this much death and destruction? I don’t know how the game ends, but I suspect not. From what I understand about the Far Cry games, this is a running theme: When you’ve killed enough people to escape and return home, will you be the same person you were, or will the experience have changed you entirely?

When I resolved to play a new game every week, I didn’t factor in time management, and presumed I’d have some time over the weekend that I didn’t really have as my calendar filled up. So I was set to break my New Year’s Resolution after less than one week; there just wasn’t the time! Thankfully, my girlfriend Kirsty saved it by playing a board game with me. No one said it had to be a video game!

The game we played was Fantasy Flight’s “Hey, That’s My Fish!” I wanted to collect the game and that’s the reason I own it, though I definitely had Kirsty in mind when I bought it as well. The game is about penguins stealing fish off each other, and Kirsty loves penguins. This was always going to be a winner.

"Have you ever seen
A penguin come to tea?
Take a look at me,
A penguin you will see..."

How you play: The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, arranged in lines of 7/8 to make a rough square. You place on the board your team of 2-4 penguins depending on how many people are playing. The tiles either have one, two or three fish on them, and on your turn you choose a penguin to move in a straight line towards the tile you want. After the penguin moves, you get to keep the tile you just left. You keep doing this until the penguins can’t move anymore, and whoever has the most fish at the end of the game is the winner. Kirsty and I played three games, I won the first two, but Kirsty got the hang of it after that and won the third.

This sounds like a fairly light-hearted game, but dig a little deeper and there’s a clever strategic element as well. The penguins can’t change direction during a move, nor can they move through other penguins (including their own team) or empty spaces. That means it’s entirely possible to plan moves around blocking other player’s penguins in, effectively taking them out of the game. It might seem like an unfair thing to do, but it lends a competitive element to the game, and the games rarely last long enough for one player to be eliminated entirely for more than a few minutes.

The best board games meld together their theme and mechanics well. At its core, Hey, That’s My Fish is a competitive Solitaire-like game, and as an abstract concept the game would function just as well. Slap on the theme of Penguins fighting for fish, however, and suddenly there’s a lot more at stake. It’s more fun to picture a penguin stuck on the ice, eliminated with but a single fish to eat, and the devious penguins from the other team sauntering off with armfuls of fish! Kirsty, in particular, had a good time naming the penguins Speedy, Greedy, Angry and Drunk. It’s not perfect – collecting the tiles without messing up the board can be difficult if you’re not careful, and mechanics designed around eliminating players is always a risky move – but we had a lot of fun with it and I’m looking forward to playing it with more players. 

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Orcs and Elves, Dungeons and Dragons

Happy New Year, people! I make the usual resolutions every year – eat more healthily, practice my music more, write more songs etc – and I very rarely see them through to the end. However, as this blog series is doing reasonably well (roughly 100 views every week, which isn’t much but it is consistent!) I thought I’d try a new resolution in to it for 2018, and that is: Play a new game every week.

This might sound expensive, but I’ve also got a massive backlog of games, many of which I’ve owned for years and never played. I’m missing out on quite a bit in my collection of games without having to buy necessarily buy any more of them! So I’ll try to find time to play a new one every week. It will be tough, not least because many of them are long-form games that need weeks or even months of play to beat, but I’m up for the challenge and I’ll give it a go!

Funnily enough, sniping's not really
my thing any more...

For the Christmas Holiday week I’ve mostly been playing Far Cry 2. As I mentioned last week, this is a game I’ve owned for years and I’ve got really now! Maybe I’m enjoying games at a different level these days. For example, I like the fact that the separate missions take roughly 20-40 minutes to beat; you can do them in small chunks and feel like you’re making progress. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with hunting for the diamonds. I like the shooting, and the certain sense of vulnerability you get from not quite being able to see due to the haze. I’m enjoying the Buddy system as well, where they give you alternative ways to complete missions, give you more missions and rescue you if you get hurt. Indeed, I was actually quite sad when Josip, one of the buddies who’d been with me most of the game, died because he’d got in to trouble and was too badly injured by the time I’d got to him to help. I find the campaign is moving very slowly, as there’s a lot of faffing about with side missions – but as there’s almost always a valuable reward for these, it doesn’t feel like filler. Open world games have arguably lost their way over the last few years, as there was only so far this could go without becoming bloated, but Far Cry 2 managed to create a compelling world with just enough to do that it keeps me coming back. Whether it’s enough for me to see the game through to the end is a bit of a, er, Far Cry, especially since I’m back at work tomorrow and won’t have as much time for games like this, but we’ll see how we get on. I’d like to see it through to the end after all this time.

The wand talks to you. Yeah,

I also got Orcs and Elves for the Nintendo DS for Christmas and I’ve been playing that when I’ve got a spare few minutes. This is a roleplaying game somewhere between Legend of Grimrock and Fatal Labyrinth; you play as the son of an Elf adventurer and you’re on a quest to find out what happened to the Dwarven King. It’s a roleplaying experience with, from what I can tell, all the fat chewed off: There’s no assigning points to level up, or min-maxing stats, or customisation that I can see. It’s all about dungeon bashing, and collecting loot. And I’m fine with that; it’s a simple enough experience and one that I think works very well on the DS. I’ve not played many games that meld pick-up-and-play with a compelling plot and good gameplay mechanics so well!



I might talk about the orange cover
if it's a slow week...

Finally, I’ve volunteered to run a Dungeons and Dragons game at the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I’ll be running Palace of the Silver Princess, a 1^st edition module converted in to 5^th edition for the purpose. This is a bit of a risky move for me given that I don’t have a lot of time to prepare and run sessions these days, but it’s a simple-enough adventure and I’m hoping to do a lot of the legwork in the run up to Thursday when I run the first session.