Sunday, 22 April 2018

Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate, OlliOlli, Pokemon Leaf Green, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Cultists


It’s been quite an eventful week for me in terms of playing games! I had a couple of highlights, not the least of them finally getting to the end of Hand of Fate after owning the game for nearly two years. You can read my full review here, but I’d like to re-iterate how much it adds to the game that there’s no real plot to speak of, no Jacobean tragedy of characters to keep track of and no need to restart the game in order to remember what in the world was going on. It’s just you and The Dealer, and even though none of it gets explained by the end of the game, I feel it would have ruined it the game if it had tried to resolve it. It is a hugely fun experience, worth more than the sum of its parts, and one that I would more than recommend giving a go.
My new game for this week was OlliOlli; a 2D skating game. I’m finding this one very difficult to get to grips with because the system for tricks and landings is completely different from what I’ve come to expect from the 5/6th generation Tony Hawk-style games. With those games, the face buttons combined with the directions handled the vast majority of the tricks, and landing was as simple as pointing the skateboard the right way when you hit the floor. With OlliOlli, the tricks are done almost entirely off the left thumb stick, and the A button (on the Steam controller) handles the landing. It’s taking some getting used to, but then, so did Tony Hawk, so I might come back and give it another go if I’ve got a few minutes.
I carried on with Pokémon Leaf Green for a while, getting to the other side of Moon Mountain and into Cerulean City. I haven’t done anything there yet because I didn’t play the game for very long this week, but I’ll keep going at it whenever it’s convenient.
I also carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2, arriving at the point where you have the option to spend some money to rebuild the town. It does require a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that roughly two years have passed between arriving at the villa and the game’s plot progressing, and I’m not sure to what end you are re-building the town. Some of the buildings have obvious benefits, but for the rest of them, I’m not sure what the purpose is unless there comes a point later in the game where you have to spend a lot of money! I’m having a pretty decent time with it, but while it does seem to take control of its own plot more than the previous game, it appears to be less open than Assassin’s Creed as well for that reason.
Finally I spend some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton painting Chaos Cultists. I enjoyed painting them a lot more once I’d got the block colours done on the clothes, because at that point they started to look quite good. I probably put a little more effort in to them than was necessary for rank-and-file models that will die if my opponent so much as breathes on them too hard, but hey, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to complete the army!
I had a look at some of the options for building my Word Bearers army, and found that with the addition of 20 cultists and a Dark Apostle, I could build a Battalion formation in a 500 point army. This would give me six command points to spend on Stratagems, and I found a couple of interesting ones that relate to the army I’m trying to build. I could, potentially, remove a unit of cultists from the board and bring it back at full strength on any of the board edges I like; this is a bit of a gamble but it might pay off in objective-based games. Also the Stratagem that relates to the Word Bearers take some of the risk away from summoning Daemons, I will see how this effects the composition of the army as it grows.

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