Last week, I managed to beat Regicide (see my review here)
and after finishing a game that took me 60 hours to complete, I got right on a
‘Pick Up and Play’ kick, where I play a few games for a bit and move on. I know
what games I ought to have been playing
– Kingdom Hearts isn’t going to be finishing itself, and all the games I’ve
bought as part of a series I want to collect would probably be a bit more
significant if I played them every now and again. But picking up another 40+
hour campaign is something I’m rarely in the mood to do after beating a game of
any significant length, (not that it should have taken me anywhere near that
long to beat Regicide but somehow that’s where we are.)
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| I bet it was always cold though. |
I initially looked to my phone, specifically Murder in the
Alps. I discussed this last week, along with the reasons I was enjoying the
game and a little cross with its payment model. However, I carried on playing
and watching videos, getting to the end of the first two stories. It’s pretty
good in an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery way, although all of the
working out is done in the script – all you’re doing is finding the hidden
items. The first story was pretty good, the second was ok but disappointingly
short; I’m wondering whether Nordcurrent frontloaded their main efforts into
the first story to engage people, and put less effort into the rest? I suspect
we’ll find out as we’re going along.
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| A brief moment to collect your thoughts, then... |
I tried a game on the PC that I’d been thinking I should
look at for some time – Super House of Dead Ninjas. This is a fast-paced
Rogue-like game where you play as a Ninja jumping down the rooms of a tower, slashing,
bombing and, er, shuriken-ing your enemies as you go through. It reminded me of
Rogue Legacy, unsurprisingly, but this has a much faster pace. Generally
speaking it’s a solid experience, and does a lot to promote the “Just one more
go!” vibe! As a pick up and play game, it’s excellent, though I don’t know if
it will keep my interest into the long term.
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| Hopefully I'll build a map like this at some point. |
One of the games that came up on Rock Paper Shotgun’s 50
Greatest Strategy Games was Sid Meier’s Colonization, and I’ve had that game
for a while so I gave it a go. This purports to be an offshoot of the early
Civilisation games, focusing more specifically on the period of history when
what we now call America was colonized, up to the point where they achieved
independence from European control. It was described as a far more focussed
experience than Civilisation, and I believe it; rather than tell a sweeping
tale of the dawn of the earth to the end of the Space Race for whatever that’s
worth, Colonization focuses on a specific part of history that defined the
people in the country that made the game, and educated me (I’d never really
thought about the War for Independence before.) On the other hand, it’s an old
game and not that easy to play; if you don’t know what to do in what order then
you can fall flat on your face quite quickly. It’s my intention to keep on with
this, but I’ll be using a lot of guides to get through it!
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| Shocking. |
Finally, when I had slightly under an hour to spare last
night, I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2 on my Switch. I can usually take
or leave fighting games, but Street Fighter is probably the ultimate pick up
and play game if you’re playing in single player mode, and a nice way to fill
40 minutes. I set the difficulty as high as it would go and played through most
of the game as Ryu without losing even once, which I was quite pleased with. I
eventually beat it as Vega, and was quite pleased to see his ending sequence
substantially different from what I was used to (Street Fighter II:
Championship Edition, where it was a text scroll.) It’s not a new game but most
of the updates are in the right places!
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