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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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