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!
No comments:
Post a Comment