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.