Last Week's Games: Shadowrun Returns, Cooking Fever, Mordheim, Co-Optional Podcast

A rather interesting mish-mash of games for me this week:

Beautiful game, but not running too well...

I started this week with my new game for the week, which is Shadowrun Returns. This is an RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate or one of its sequels, and has you create a character to perform ‘runs,’ a series of missions in a cyberpunk world that go outside of the mega-corporations controlling it. The combat works very similar to XCOM, and the couple of hours I played of it were more enjoyable than the awful multiplayer-only shooter on the Xbox 360 by some considerable distance.

Unfortunately my laptop really doesn’t like running Shadowrun. It crashed a few times during the time I was playing it and I had to restart the computer. I don’t know whether the game is poorly optimised or whether this is one of those games my laptop would rather not be running, but I’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how that’s working out before I put many hours into the game.

So many sausages...

I’ve become rather engrossed in a game on my Kindle Fire called Cooking Fever. It’s a game where you create various dishes to serve to customers in a set amount of time. For a game that’s supposed to be a time-waster, it does a fine job of hooking you in and convincing you to play just one more level, and I’m having a good amount of fun with it so far. You serve customers to earn money, and serve them quickly to earn tips. You then spend that money to upgrade your equipment and eatery so that the customers will wait longer, tip higher, and your cooking efficiency improves. It has micro-transactions in the form of diamonds that have to be used to unlock some upper tiers of food production, customer satisfaction and more restaurants. These can be earned in-game via an experience point system, but I can see this becoming a grind in the later stages of the game!

I finally finished painting Angron. This was a Forge World model that my mate Dave asked me to paint ages ago in exchange for some dwarves. I got so far in to the project and then left it for literally years; by the time I give it back I will have had that model for nearly five years. I definitely won’t be accepting any more painting commissions, as I have little enough time and patience to paint my own models, and it looks pretty poor to accept a job and then not do it for nearly five years. I was far from pleased with the final result; I know I can do better. But Dave told me he needed the model back, so I did the best job I could in an evening and I’ll hand it back next time I see him.

Ogres are amusing, but will need levelling up
before they're much use!

Finally, I started another campaign on Mordheim: City of the Damned with Mercenaries again. This time I’m doing them all as Nordland Pirates, who have their skills in ambush attacks. It will work or it won’t! It’s a special game that I run in to so many bugs with, yet enjoy enough to keep coming back to it!

I also watched the Co-Optional Podcast #222 featuring Sky Williams. I’m mentioning this because he gave an interesting piece of gaming discipline that I thought I might try: He said that he’d got bogged down playing the same two MMOs and not really doing anything with his other games, so now he’s trying to beat one game a month. I’ve got a long list of games I’ve yet to even played, never mind beaten, so I think I might try that over the next few months to see how it goes. I’ve certainly not done a Backlog Beatdown blog for a long time!

On that subject, the blog posts may be a little erratic over the next few weeks due to holidays and a very busy week on the horizon! I try to get these posts out on Monday but that isn’t always possible. In particular, I will almost certainly miss Monday 6^th August, though I will probably try and publish something later on that week.

See you all soon!