Last Two Week's Games: Wet, Streets of Rage 3, Roll the Ball, Chaos Cultists

Normally I keep these blogs to 700 words; that’s roughly a side of A4 and about as much time as anyone’s got for anything I have to say about video games! However, as this blog has to cover two weeks rather than one, this will be a little longer.

Mordheim Mercenaries.

My time last week was somewhat limited but I did manage to get a few games in! I had my usual go through Mordheim: City of the Damned, and I’m not sure what’s going on with my warband but I seem a lot more susceptible to injuries than I ever did before. There have been a few characters I’ve had to prematurely retire before I’ve got as far as the campaign missions, which is slowing my progress down somewhat and I hope that the game doesn’t bug out on me when I get there!

My new game for this week was supposed to be N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, a game I’d bought for £1 from CEX a few months before. Having tried it, I’m not sure they checked the game when it was traded in. My Xbox 360 wouldn’t read the disc, and when I took it out of the machine to find out why, I noticed a white ring burned into the silver side. Knowing it would never work in a million years, and not having had the foresight to keep the receipt, I put it in the bin. CEX, you done messed up.

A typical action scene...

So the new game that was actually my new game was a game I’d bought in the same purchase, funnily enough: Wet on the Xbox 360. I know that it hasn’t got great reviews, but I bought this one on the strength of it appearing in one of Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos. He admitted it wasn’t great but there was some fun to be found in it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find he was right! It is a third-person action adventure, with an emphasis on combo kills and style. For example, you get more points for taking out an enemy while sliding on your knees, which is brilliant. Not the standard for games these days, but it’s always nice to see games doing things just a little bit different. I had a decent time with the arena battles particularly, where the enemies constantly respawn until you shut down the respawn points. I also really enjoyed the section where there’s a big car chase and you’re combining precision-shooting with quick-time events; the latter are rarely welcome but I’d have enjoyed actually having to jump between cars a lot less.

Unfortunately the game is let down by slightly wobbly controls; in certain situations the buttons take the lead character, Ruby, in unexpected directions. This is rarely a problem in the main section of the game, because I don’t mind having to figure out which jumps you can make and which you can’t. It takes me back to the old Tomb Raider games! But I don’t like it on the Assault Course stages in-between the levels, because you’re on a timer and can ill-afford to make mistakes because the controls are letting you down. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the game, and saw it through to the end. A Backlog Beatdown review is on its way!

New enemies, new character models,
new gameplay mechanics...

I had a go through Streets of Rage 3; the only game from the main series I never beat. I’d played it before and never seemed to like it quite as much as Streets of Rage 2. Nonetheless, I’ve been having some fun with the game, although it’s an interesting new take on the mechanics. Some of the moves were re-balanced, throws do a lot more damage, Max has been replaced completely by Zan, and there are environmental hazards to contend with as well. Also Blaze had a re-vamp; her character is better than ever! I’m finding her a lot easier to control than I did in SOR 2. My quest for all the achievement points is going to be a tough one, since the game contains a system where you have to max out your Blitz attack, and the only way to do it is to score 120,000 without dying even once. This is ferociously difficult and I’m going to run in to a lot of problems doing it but apparently there is a cheap trick you can employ on level 6 to make it happen. I haven’t got there yet though!

Puzzling...

My new game for the second week is Roll the Ball, something I downloaded on to my phone. It’s a puzzle game where you have to arrange tiles to roll a ball into a target square. There’s usually some parameters; a certain set of squares you have to go through, a target number of moves, and even a mode where the ball is moving as you complete the puzzle and you have to move the squares – often with the ball in it. It’s a nice distraction when I have a few moments to kill, and there’s a lot of levels so it will keep me going for ages.

The tile they're standing on is what I
use as a pallet, by the way,

Finally, I completed a hobby project: I finished painting my Chaos Cultists. I had the flesh and the base left to do, and once I’d done that and tidied it up a little bit they actually ended up looking quite good. I haven’t done a massive amount of justice to them with my camera phone but they are looking OK at the moment. I started my next project, a Dark Apostle, and I’d forgotten how much I dislike building resin models, as they barely hold together and fall apart if you so much as breathe on them too hard. I only managed to get the undercoat on before I dropped it and the leg fell off! But I’ll fix it and try again in the week.

A reminder – no Last Week’s Games blog next week; I’m on holiday. But I’ll try and do a blog covering both weeks for the week after.