Last Week's Games: Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

This week I have had very little time to play games. I pre-empted this and played Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Knowing the game was very short and that I could potentially beat it in one night, I gave it a go, and I did. This will end up on Backlog Beatdown eventually but I haven’t finished my write-up. In order to avoid publishing two blogs within a week of each other going over the same ground, I am instead going to cover what Metal Gear means for me. This might sound like an odd thing to want to talk about, but while it’s true that Ground Zeroes fell short of expectations, it wasn’t for the reasons I was expecting.

This had never been done before...

The first time I owned a Metal Gear game (Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation,) I was fifteen. 3D games were still developing at that point, and while some were good, there were some clangers as well. Metal Gear Solid not only blew most of the 3D games out of the water, it also was the first game I remember outside of RPGs to have a truly memorable plot. Rather than taking you around the world on different missions, it stuck you on Shadow Moses island; one military base to cover the entire game. Characters had complexity and depth, there were betrayals, cover-ups, a reason to unlock both endings, and some clever fourth-wall breaking. Not to mention, Snake was cool. It was one of the few games on the Playstation I played through multiple times.

Snake. The hero we both need AND deserve.

On the Playstation 2, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was one of the most hyped games. The characters would look better than ever, it would take advantage of the advancing hardware, there was even a demo of it available in Zone of the Enders; it was an exciting time! Then the game came out and, while very few people remember Raiden fondly, the game was very well-designed – even if, you spend a lot of the time listening to the codec. The plot was contrived; I had to go on to Wikipedia to make sense of it, but it was fun to speculate.

Then we got Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This is a phenomenal game in terms of the camouflage system and survival mechanics. But I didn’t like playing it without the radar anywhere. Snake was still a cool character but I guessed you were playing the character who would eventually become Big Boss – the overarching villain for the original Metal Gear games and who overshadows the Metal Gear Solid franchise. So I had an idea of how the story would work out and wasn’t interested in seeing it. I never got to the end of it.

I missed Guns of the Patriots entirely, as I never had a Playstation 3. From what I understand it wraps up the whole meta-plot of the franchise, though there was still more to explore. But now Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is out and laced with controversy surrounding Hideo Kojima’s relationship with Konami. If the game wasn’t truly finished and never will be, it’s not a game I have any interest in playing, even if I owned a machine capable of it.

A good game, but not as much as I was expecting...

The first two Metal Gear Solid games still resonate with me to this day because they never forgot they were only games – radars, health packs, fourth wall breaking and the like. I was a teenager when they came out. I’m thirty-two now, and I’m becoming fed up with games where stealth is the central mechanic. Ground Zeroes was a very competently-designed game, but felt less like a Metal Gear game and more like a 3^rd-person action-adventure that could have been any game, really. I had no investment in the characters, no reason to play this at all really beyond wanting to play and beat a relatively short game. This done, I had no interest in playing the other missions, or finding out what it was all about. I’m not saying it should have stuck with the old style; of course it needed to evolve. But it’s become a very different game to the one I enjoyed playing when I was younger.

Last Week's Games: Heroquest, Dark Souls, Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes and Open TDD

Near to the start of this week I found myself wondering about the video games that have been put out under a Games Workshop license. I’ve owned, borrowed and played some of them in the past and for the most part I enjoyed them, but there are more out now than I’ve played. I downloaded some of the earlier games now classed as “Abandonware;” games that are no longer supported by their publishers and, provided no one else has the rights to it, are available to legally download for free. I toyed with the idea of trying to obtain them all, and do a whole series of blogs on Games Workshop-licensed video games, but one thing at a time!

Those slightly-differently textured floor tiles
are rock falls. Who knew?

So the first game that I tried was the DOS version of HeroQuest. Games Workshop are known these days for their flagship franchises, Warhammer and Warhammer 40000, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were producing all sorts of games and this was one of them. I never played it since it had been and gone long before I started showing any interest in the hobby, but I had a look at the video game to see if it was any good. First impressions are of dungeon-bashing with a dice mechanic. You’re on a grid of squares featuring rooms and corridors, and you roll a twelve-sided dice to see how far you can move on a turn. You’re allowed one action per turn, during which you can attack an enemy if one is there, which uses a six-sided dice system, or search the room for treasures and secret areas. The latter is necessary to get through certain sections of the game. You can play as a Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf or Mage, the idea being that you can have up to four players playing at the same time as per the board game. I’m unlikely ever to touch the multiplayer functionality; because even if I could find three other people willing to play a DOS game released in 1992, for some reason DOSBox will only run in a window about an eighth of the size of the screen – and I’m playing on a laptop.

I’ve enjoyed games like this in the past, and I feel I should be enjoying Heroquest a lot more than I am. There’s nothing wrong with it, and to be fair I shouldn’t necessarily expect all that much from a 1992 Dos game. But for games with random number generation mechanics to work, they really have to make sure the stakes are high when it happens, and offer meaningful consequences for success and failure. I’m not saying Heroquest doesn’t do that – but I haven’t seen it yet.

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Dark Souls again. I’d got a way in to it as a Deprived, but I’d spread the skill points I’d acquired far too thinly, and I was stuck on the Bell Gargoyle without the mobility to deal with it. So I started the game again as a thief, and I’m actually doing a lot better, putting most of my points into Dexterity and playing with low damage, but high mobility and critical hits.

I’m continuing to enjoy Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes; there’s a lot of fun in finding out how each of the character’s powers work so that you know what you have to do to build up an attack. This is almost essential if you’re not relying on micro-transactions, because you need to know which characters can affect the enemies or the board as well as do the damage. Sometimes it can be frustrating but it’s more fun than simply throwing money at a game in order to get through it!

Great to have a cityscape like this...

Also on Sunday after I got snowed in I had a marathon session on Open TTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I don’t play this game very often but when I do, I get into the ‘just one more turn’ mentaility that often comes with playing games like Civilisation – and it’s not even a turn-based game. Seeing your transport network influencing the development of the world around it is a pleasure I find it very difficult to describe!

Backlog Beatdown: Diving through the air and going NOOOO!!! with Max Payne 3

I bought Max Payne 3 new last year. I’d played the first two games and liked them for the most part, and although the plot was consistently bleak and hard to enjoy, it fitted its theme well enough. I’ve been enjoying ‘kick back with a podcast, switch your brain off’ games lately so I didn’t want to pay too much attention to the plot, which is why it took me so long to play it. But with an unexpected day off work, I thought I’d give it a go, and was astonished to discover I’d played through the entire game in a weekend…

It never gets old. Never.

The series is a third-person shooter, with a gritty setting and a thoroughly depressing leading man in Max Payne. Its main gimmick is the “Bullet Time,” where you slow time down and give yourself more time to aim. You can also use this feature to shoot-dive, where you launch yourself in a direction and go into bullet time to shoot the enemies on the way down. And this never gets old. All those cinematic moments where this happens was available to play in a game for the first time with Max Payne, often imitated but never duplicated. Part of the charm is that the game is not afraid to let you fail; as it’s perfectly possible to go flying into a desk or a wall and de-rail the move entirely. You would think that this would make the move far too risky to be fun, but consider the alternative – Quick-time events that either couldn’t fail or won’t progress the game until it’s passed.

Max Payne 3 brought some new functionality to show for the eight years since the previous instalment: Typically for the seventh generation third-person action games, it included a cover system where you press a button to hide behind a wall. It meant I was using dive-shoot a lot less, but it works for the game. It also has one aforementioned quick-time event, which for once is properly utilised – to showcase the player character doing something not covered by the game mechanics. One addition for this game was the Last Man Standing function: If you take enough damage to die but you still have some healing items left, instead of dying the game goes into bullet-time mode and you have about six seconds to kill the enemy that mortally wounded you. If you manage it, the healing item is used and you carry on, but if you fail, you die. It’s less frustrating than dying when you’ve got painkillers left, but it’s not good to rely on it as sometimes the enemy who shot you will be blocked by cover or otherwise out of reach.

These takedowns are pretty cool too.

I found myself thinking that Max Payne 3 was the story Die Hard might have been if it had removed all the camp humour and was more grounded in reality. At this point, Rockstar were presenting their games very well, and Max Payne 3 is beautifully constructed with a staggering amount of attention to detail put into the environments. It dispenses with the graphic-novel style intermissions for fully-rendered cut scenes. The plot, while standard and with lot holes, nonetheless has a sense of desperate urgency that compels you to keep going. The soundtrack is incredible; atmospheric and complimentary to the scenes, and I’m far from the only person to have found Tears by Health an utterly mesmerising piece of music. The only slight mis-step is Max himself, who in an effort to convey what the past couple of decades have meant for him, refuses to see any light in any situation. Even the few positive remarks he makes are laced with self-deprecation. I understand the man had been through a lot, and hadn’t looked after himself in between times, but lifting his sense of humour a little would have made all the difference.

After one play-through, I’ve barely touched on the game’s content; there are collectables, achievement points and even a multiplayer mode. But as a story told, Max Payne 3 was a very intense experience that I won’t be returning to any time soon. Give it a go if you’re up for it. Just don’t expect a happy day!

Pickups and Trades #2

A while ago I made the mistake of copying my “Interesting Games” list onto the Wishlist on my Steam account. Every so often I get emails telling me that some of these games are on sale, and if they’re charging less than £10 I’ll very often buy them. In hindsight, that’s probably not the best way to go about it since I’ll be very surprised if I even play all of these games this year, let alone beat them! For financial reasons, I doubt I’ll be doing the same next month. Still, I’ve made it a priority to at least have a go with some of these games I’ve been buying, so keep your eye on the Last Week’s Games series to see what’s been going on.

On Steam, I bought the following games:

Bastion, Transistor and Pyre: These games went on Steam sale, and was on my radar for being talked up by a lot of the Youtube channels I follow who were impressed by the games 
and art style.

911 Operator: A game about, well, being a 911 operator. Over the last few years I’ve been really getting in to games trying to do things just a little bit differently, and I’m looking forward to trying this one out.

Desperadoes 1 and 2: From what I understand about the gameplay to this one, it’s Commandos with a Western setting. I was sold straight away and when it went on sale with both games for less than £2.50, I jumped at the chance!

I ended up playing this in the end, and what
I played of it was compelling to say the least...

Reigns: This appears to be a whimsical game about the decisions you might make as a king. For not even £1, it’s worth a look at least.

Enter the Gungeon: A Rogue-like Dungeon-Crawler with an emphasis on shooting. I’ve been waiting for this to go on sale for a while!

This War of Mine: A wartime survival game of some considerable renown; I’ve been looking forward to picking this one up for a long time.

Mount and Blade, Warband and Fire and Sword: I seem to remember Totalbiscuit talking these games up a while ago. Looking forward to playing them!

STALKER: Call of Pripyat: A rare (for me!) shooter on the PC with references to Chernobyl, this will be an interesting experience!

Detention: A horror game set in Tailand. I’m not big on Horror games but this seems to do the job well, by accounts.

Also from GOG, I acquired Dungeons 2 for free, from an advertisement sent to my email address. I have no idea what this one is about but it’s got Dungeons in the title so that’s good enough for me!

Rest in peace. I'll stick to the Lego games in future!

One game I had to say goodbye to was Marvel Heroes Omega. I did intend to return to this at some point but sadly Gazillion Entertainment, who ran the game, has been shut down, and so therefore has the game. The game doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s no reason for it to be on my hard drive either, and this highlights a wider issue currently under discussion: There’s a massive push form some of the larger game publishers for games to become “Online Services,” i.e. games played entirely online and funded by the people who sink a lot of money into micro-transactions for it. It might be working at the moment, but the demographic who play these games won’t be doing so forever, and if the decision is made to shut down the games, the game, the players and any money they’ve put into it is deleted permanently.

This is a risky venture for players, but also for game developers. If we’re creating an environment where a small number of games have to be continuously funded in order for them to survive, it will be difficult to sustain a job for very long. Let the horror of Marvel Heroes sink in: Just before Thanksgiving last year, at least 75 people at Gazillion lost their jobs, all accrued benefits and their livelihoods, because the game was shut down. There were a lot of very complex reasons for this that I’m not aware of but for what it’s worth, and I hope that Gazillion’s former employees managed to find more work.

For the Xbox 360, I downloaded Split/Second from Games with Gold. I had to delete some of the games I’ve got physical copies of to make room, but I managed it! This was one of the games on my list to collect so I was very pleased to acquire this one for free. I look forward to playing this; it’s been a while since I’ve played a racing game!

I also bought Mini Ninjas from CEX in Merry Hill; it looks like a good fun Ninja game that doesn’t take itself too seriously so I’ll be glad to have a go with that.

Last Week's Games: Rayman Origins, Dark Souls, New Super Mario Bros and Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes



A kid's game it may be, but there's
something Lovecraftian about these villains...

After the rather intense experience of playing Max Payne 3 all the way through in a single weekend, I felt I needed something light to lose myself in for a while, so I tried Rayman Origins. Rayman is a franchise that I thing I should have given more time to than I ever really did; it came at a point where 3D graphics were becoming the standard, and a 2D platformer was not what I was expecting of the 5^th console generation. It was my loss, really, because Rayman was a very good game, one I currently own for the Playstation and hope to return to at some point. I haven’t played any of the games in between, but Rayman Origins is a very competently-designed action platformer. It’s addressed some of the issues presented by the first game – the difficulty appears to be reduced, you have unlimited lives etc – and this makes for a very fun game. You run and jump across some beautifully-drawn and colourful words, trying to free the Electoons (Little pink blobs,) punching bad guys, and capturing Lums (the game’s equivalent of coins.) Occasionally there’s a shoot-em-up style mini-game with a mosquito which breaks up the action nicely. I’m enjoying my time with it so far, I’ve got to the second ‘World,’ and I mean to carry on. As the achievements are all earned in-game and none of them are tied up in online multiplayer as far as I can see, this is one of the few games I have a hope of 100% completing; it’ll be an interesting journey if nothing else! 

Strewth...

It will be worth remembering how much fun I’m having with Rayman, because the other game I’ve been playing this week is Dark Souls. I’ve started this game a few times and never got very far; all the rumours about the games difficulty are absolutely true. You play as an undead fighting your way through the land of Lordran, to… actually I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve, other than avoiding spending eternity locked in the Undead Asylum you escape from at the beginning. You fight your way through other undead and demons, each and every one of which wants to see you dead. Which is for the best, really, because you’ll be obliging them on multiple occasions before you’ll get anywhere. Dark Souls has a very technical combat system, and you have to work out the function of each of your moves. A light attack does some damage, a strong attack does more damage and can breaks defence, which is its primary purpose. You can do a jumping attack for the same purpose and to close some distance, while a front kick will knock enemies back; great if you’re fighting near a sheer drop. If you have a shield you can block, and also parry attacks. The latter is almost mandatory for getting through the game, but requires precise timing to pull off. I’ve been playing it a lot over the last week and had to look at a Wiki to find out what I was doing wrong; quite a bit as it turns out. Also it was far from the first time I’ve tried to play through this game and this time I found the lower section of the Undead Burg I’d missed completely for the first time! I think I might have to restart again and follow the Wiki. Is that cheating? Possibly, but even armed with that information, Dark Souls is a very hard game.

Oddly compelling...

When it was convenient for me to be playing on handhelds, I kept on at New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS. I’m enjoying it, but I like being able to put this one down now and again. For some reason, playing through this one knowing I’m almost certainly going to have to do so again to unlock everything isn’t filling me with a determination to do so. On my Kindle Fire, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes. I’ve been enjoying that; it’s a Match-3 but with an element of strategy to it. Can I beat it without spending any money? I hope so, but it’s a bit of a grind!

Last Week's Games: This War of Mine, Enclave, Mordheim: City of the Damned, Max Payne 3

We had another couple of snow days over the last week, so I found more than the usual amount of time to play some games! Indeed, over the weekend, I did little else…

I started by playing This War of Mine. I’d been aware of it for a few years and always wanted to give it a try. It’s a 2D survival game based on the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, where you control a group of refugees who shelter in an abandoned building, and have to build amenities for themselves there as well as scavenge the city for salvage and food. The characters have requirements that need to be met, such as the need to sleep and eat; this aspect reminds me of the Sims. It’s a far darker game than that, though. It is necessary to go out in the night to try to acquire food, medicine and materials. Depending on where and who you take these things from will affect how the characters feel about it: Taking medicine from an abandoned cottage is one thing, but if you take medicine from the hospital where people legitimately need it, your characters will feel awful. It’s got permadeath as well: if one of your characters dies, that’s it; they’re not coming back. They may be replaced later but that character is gone.

Even the house you live in is bleak...

The coverage I’ve seen on This War of Mine prepared me for a bleak experience, and the aesthetic, art style and subject matter certainly fit that interpretation. The game handles well as a “point and click,” although I’ve yet to experience any combat. It’s a compelling game, certainly, but I’m not sure if I’m actually enjoying it, or just have a compulsive need to find out what happens next and how it works out for the characters in the shelter. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to play a war game from the point of view of the people affected by it, and perhaps we should entertain some time and patience to appreciate the conflict it showcases. In this day and age in the UK it’s easy to write war off as something that happens to other people, but for some, what this game depicts is very real. There’s no glamour, no heroism. Depending on whether or not you are able to do what is necessary, you either survive or you don’t.

I had a go at Enclave, an RPG I previously owned on the original Xbox but didn’t get very far with. I didn’t get very far with it this week either; the graphics and initial gameplay aren’t exactly inspiring and while most RPGs need progressing past the first hour or so before they’re any good, there were other games I could have been playing in that time.

Like Mordheim: City of the Damned! I’m still thoroughly enjoying playing this as the Possessed warband, and I managed to beat the first Campaign mission – no mean feat, as I usually struggle against the Sisters of Sigmar. I’m still discovering new things about the game, like the fact that Impressive heroes are available from the first campaign mission you beat, but to actually hire them, you have to click on a slot that’s in a group of three and doesn’t currently have any other warrior in there. I’m having a fine old time rampaging around with a Chaos Spawn!

Let's face it: This looks cool.

Finally, I played Max Payne 3. From the size and complexity of most games released in the last ten years, it is rare indeed that I can play through one in an entire weekend, but I managed it with Max Payne 3! I’d played the previous games on the Playstation 2 years ago, and there weren’t many surprises here in terms of game mechanics, but it’s a beautifully-presented game and is very much driven by the plot. I enjoyed the Bullet-time mechanic again, and the Last Man Standing sections – where you take enough damage to die, but if you have any healing items left, you get a few seconds to shoot the guy who killed you to use an item and carry on – were a welcome addition. Check out my full review later in the week, and I’ll tell you more!