Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts and Regicide

One rather prevalent theme running through this blog lately is not having time to play many games these days. It’s becoming somewhat cliché now, but it’s true; between everything and everyone I’m supposed to be dividing my attention between, I basically get Monday afternoons to sit down and play some games. And not always then! Last Monday I spent the vast majority of that time shopping, ironing, sorting washing out, doing a couple of bits and pieces for work that need doing, and of course writing this blog.

Some people didn't like the Gummi sequences.
I love them!

What didn’t help was that the game I chose to play was Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Remix on the PS4. Not that the game itself is bad – quite the reverse, actually. But because it was a recent acquisition for me and I hadn’t played it yet, I felt compelled to wait for the game to download before I could play it. I actually had the option to jump straight into the game, but from what I understand from others who have done this with all sorts of games, this rarely amounts to more than a title screen, and as I was talking to someone on Facebook Messenger at the time I thought I’d stick with that, for what turned out to be roughly three quarters of an hour for a 4.5 gig download. I know that waiting for games to download onto the modern consoles is a thing that happens now and shouldn’t be news to anybody really, but I’m not used to it yet! I’ve heard it said that it’s to do with the structure of the PS4; no matter how fast your internet connection is, it can’t receive more than a few megabytes at a time. Given that my laptop would have done that download in about a third of the time, I have no trouble believing that!

The upshot of all this was that by the time I’d got through it, I had about an hour to play the game on Monday night. But it’s always nice to play a game and enjoy every moment of it! Kingdom Hearts is an absolute joy to play; a successful integration of familiar characters if you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy games, and a lovely bit of fan-fiction if you like Disney characters. The version I’m playing at the moment is Final Mix, and I’m not entirely sure what the differences were supposed to be but the only one I’ve noticed so far is that the sounds on the background music was slightly different. The composition was the same but the instruments had been… improved? I don’t know. I like it for now, but I had it tested in Traverse Town. I’ve got a lot of investment in that theme; that gorgeous clarinet melody over the piano accompaniment is potentially the most welcoming, yet hauntingly lonely 16 bars of music I think I’ve ever heard and I didn’t want that messed with. It turns out there’s an extra keyboard (I think) sound added above the melody; I was sceptical at first but in the end I decided it adds to it more than not.

I was actually looking for a picture of the Death Company.
Had to make do with this instead.

When I had some spare time with my laptop I played Regicide for a while, the 40K chess game. I’ve been stuck on a level for a while now, where I have to eliminate three Ork Stormboyz (Knights) and one Meganob (Rook) with three Tactical Marines, (pawns,) Three Assault marines (Knights) and a Librarian (Queen.) The problem I am running in to is that I’m going for the secondary objectives as well, in which none of my pieces are allowed to fall. If you lose the Librarian, you fail the mission, but if you lose anything else you won’t achieve your secondary objectives. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’ve run in to a few missions like this where the only hope I have of achieving those objectives is to wait for the A.I. to make a mistake, and take the win from there. I’ve said in the past that games need to have a solid process and a satisfying outcome; you rarely get either when you rely on luck!

See you all again next week.

Last Week's Games: Mordheim and Pathfinder

So here are the significant things that happened to me this week:

I spent a lot of time on Monday afternoon playing Mordheim: City of the Damned. You may remember that the last time I talked about this game, I’d failed the third Human Mercenaries campaign mission, and intended to return to it once I’d trained up my ogre to be a match for the Daemons I know are in the library. That was my mission for that session; to train the ogre to the point where he’d be good enough to take on the mission (roughly 4^th level.)

Slight problem with that: he died.

He can dish it out and take a punch...

After taking him into a few battles and levelling him up quite a bit, I then found myself against the Undead, who are a very messy faction to contend with. Most of them are not affected by fear, and they can do a brutal amount of damage before they fall. The vampires themselves cause terror, and that severely limits the effectiveness of your warriors against them. Unfortunately they have a habit of tying up your best warriors in combat and there’s not a lot you can do about it once you’re there. It was a ferocious pitched battle against the two factions, which I eventually won but not before their Crypt Horror tanked most of the health from my Ogre. I managed to drop the Crypt Horror in the end, but after that it fell to one of the ghouls to inflict one blow on my Ogre, which was enough to put him out of action and, when the time came to roll on the injury table, kill him.

I’ve got a new one now – I didn’t have enough money to pay for a higher-level Ogre, but I don’t mind training one up again. I don’t know whether I’ll train him enough to have another go at the campaign mission. I’m more likely to use the regular warriors in the warband for that, because of timing issues. The campaign missions take ages to get through, and I need to give myself enough time to do it, so if I get an evening with a couple of hours spare I’ll do it then – with or without the Ogre. I certainly can’t afford to take him on the mission at the moment, knowing that he will go down quite easily.

Then on Sunday I carried on running the Pathfinder game: Rise of the Runelords that I started two years ago. This is as long and as high-level as I’ve ever run a game of anything! The line-up of players and characters have changed over the years but the core of the group remains the same. We’re at the beginning of Chapter 4 (of 6,) Fortress of the Stone Giants, and the group enjoyed a battle for to save the town from marauding Giants, before investigating certain aspects of the town (trying to avoid spoilers here!)[1]

Great adventure path.

Pathfinder’s an odd game to run; it’s got a huge amount of depth to the rules but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can also get quite unwieldy. There’ve been a few times when I’ve been running it and playing it I’ve found myself thinking, “roll to hit and then do your maths homework.” Thankfully most of my players are familiar enough with the system to know that they at least need to be able to tell me what they want to do and how it’s going to work, otherwise they’ll slow the game down to a crawl.

Where Pathfinder stands out for me, though, is the quality of the adventures – it’s got the best long-form campaigns I’ve seen in eight years of roleplaying games, and it’s a pleasure to be able to run them. I’d even run the same adventure with a different group to see how differently they’d handle it – if I had time.

I’ve got a new game I’m about to try out, and I’m looking forward to telling you all about it next week…

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[1] By the way if you’ve gone through Rise of the Runelords and are wondering how we’ve only managed to get this far after two years, our group meets on a monthly basis.

Last Week's Games: Roll the Ball, Ultra Street Fighter 2 and Plot Depth Discussions

I’ve been playing a lot of Roll the Ball on my phone this week, as my gaming time has mostly been limited to whenever I can get a moment to sit down and do some none-work related recreation! If you don’t know from my previous coverage, it’s a puzzle game where you have to connect tiles with paths through them to roll a ball from the start of the level to the end. I downloaded it onto my phone last summer and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since.

This is a different mode entirely,
but we'll get to that...

I played through and beat Bianca level pack on Star Mode. The basic principles of this are described above; what Star Mode brings to it is that certain of the tiles have stars in them; three per level. You have to connect the two ends of the path using the tiles, and the more star tiles you use, the higher number of stars you get at the end of the level. This rarely requires much thought, as it’s usually pretty obvious what you have to do to make the path, and only becomes challenging once they start introducing star tiles in the tiles that can’t be moved – you then have to work out how to move the rest of your tiles around them. But for how much of a faff the rotation levels turned out to be, it was nice to be able to blitz through some of the levels. I proceeded to the Bravo level pack in Classic mode, where you have to create the path for the ball in as few moves as possible, with three stars given when you achieve the target number. Usually this is obvious but there are a few challenging levels in there which take a few goes to get it right – the paths are often easy to make, but doing it with maximum efficiency is a different matter entirely! I’ll be on these levels for a while.

I might have to write a review of Roll the Ball soon. I usually only do this once I’ve beaten a game, or when my time with it has reached its logical conclusion. But the time it’s going to take me to do this with Roll the Ball could potentially run in to several years; I may even have a new phone before I do! As it stands, I’ve had a go with all four variations of the level design. Nothing will be news to me now; I’ve seen all there is to see, so I might as well give it a review!

Will a Sonic Boom help against Fei Long?

I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers on my Switch too. This is the only game I’ve played on the Switch so far, and I’m enjoying it. Most of us have done Street Fighter 2 at some point; the addition to this game other than re-done voice-overs and graphics is that Akuma, Evil Ryu and Violent Ken are available to play from the start. I played it a lot over the Christmas break and managed to beat the game on its hardest difficulty, my favourite character being E. Honda due to his power, speed and reach. But I had another go at it recently and couldn’t even get past the first fight! Arguably I was out of practice, but it didn’t help that the game kept putting me against Fei Long, who is absolutely nails.

I also had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend Kirsty while she was playing Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on her PS4. Four out of the seven games we have for it are remakes or remasters of older games, in some cases several generations old. Kirsty was talking about the difference between Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, the nearest the PlayStation really had to mascot platformers, with regard to the plot. Crash never had much going for it in that regard but Spyro’s seemed to be fleshed out a little more. I don’t know, I never really played much of either game, but perhaps it highlights the evolution of story-driven games during the 5^th console generation. It’s worth thinking about, if only to get some insight on the level we enjoy games on these days!

Last Week's Games: Mordheim, Crash Bandicoot, Roll the Ball

This week, I’ve been playing Mordheim: City of the Damned on my laptop. People who follow my blog posts will know that I love this game, even though it has all of its bugs and imperfections, and the fact that it tanks the power on my laptop to the point where I’m terrified it’s going to cause the blue screen of death. I started a game using Human Mercenaries late last summer and I carried on with that rather than starting again. I got through the first two campaign missions quite quickly, especially since I found how to avoid the bug I was running into last time (I think. It was a vague recollection I hesitate to dignify by calling a memory!)

I tried the third campaign mission in the Library as well, but here I ran into some difficulty. The principle enemies in the Library are Daemons, which cause terror to most of the warriors in the warband. This reduces your chance to hit and some of your strategy and offence points, which means your warriors are less effective when fighting them. The exception, of course, is Luther – the Dramatis Personae who accompanies you on the campaign missions. He is immune to fear and terror, so I over-used him to fight the Daemons. He eventually fell, but with the campaign missions, if the Dramatis Personae falls, the mission is over, though thankfully with no further consequences to your warband.

They're like onions, I've heard...

Next time I tackle that mission I’ll bring my Ogre – he is also immune to fear, and probably terror as well, so I’ll have at least two warriors that can fight the mission at full capacity. But he’s going to need some training before I take him out on a mission that vital, and the problem I’m running into is that he rarely survives any mission I take him on. When you take an Impressive class out on a mission, the AI always does the same – and theirs is usually better. They cause fear by default, and will often have abilities and hit points far in advance of yours. If they surprise you with their location, you very often find that there’s no time to wear them down first, and taking them on comes down to a straight fight between the two impressives, that yours can’t win. It doesn’t always work out that way, but more often than not it does.

There's getting through the level, then there's
beating the time trials...

While I was playing this, my girlfriend Kirsty was sat next to me playing Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy on her PS4 and I was helping her out with some of the harder bits. I’d played Crash Bandicoot sparingly before, usually when I’d been around somebody’s house, but I never owned the game so I’ve never put any substantial amount of time into it. Nonetheless, I was able to help with some of the harder platforming sections, such as in the Native Fortress and a few of the Ice levels in the second game. I even managed to get an achievement for it – the one where you “accidentally” spin away an extra life. (Funnily enough, that trophy is called “I meant to do that.”) I’m having a decent amount of fun doing it as well; 3D platformers aren’t games I play very often, and it’s nice to have a go at one from time to time.

This was one of the levels I
"cheated" on.

On my phone, I played Roll the Ball; the only game I have on there and what I play when I’m fed up of reading about Brexit on Facebook. I got to the end of the “Angle” level pack in Rotation Mode. It’s a tough set of levels as it’s not always obvious what combination of spins you need to do to guide the ball to the goal, and I confess I have had to use youtube guides for one or two of them. This is arguably cheating but if I’m getting bogged down to the point where I’m not enjoying the game anymore, then I guess it’s OK.

Last week I had the benefit of the Christmas holiday giving me some free time; I won’t get that this week and I’m expecting a busy time so next blog may be a bit lighter!