I haven’t had time to play a huge number of games this week,
but it will make writing about the ones I have played a little more
straightforward:
I bought, downloaded and played the original Warcraft on my
laptop. This was a game I’d owned in my youth; I’m old enough to remember a
time before the massive entity World of Warcraft eventually became, and the
first three Warcraft games were real-time strategy titles. This particular
genre of games had something of a “Golden Age” in the mid-late 90s, and along
with Dune 2, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was one of the first games to really
make the genre popular.
Neither game aged particularly well, though. The graphics
were OK for the time but look hideous now, and the interface, while functional,
was handled much better in later strategy titles. The main aspect that later
games developed out of was group-selecting. In Dune 2, you couldn’t do it at
all, and in Warcraft, you can only do it by holding the shift key as you select
up to four of your units – and as there is no way to keep them in the group you
have to do this every time you want to select them. As you can imagine, this is
a massive faff!
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| Not quite sure how those numbers at the top work, but whatever, we'll run with it. |
With that being said, I’ve really enjoyed the game so far. I’ve
been playing as the Orcs for my play through, and once the first two levels
have taught you the principle game mechanics, it lets you on your own to tackle
the missions as you see fit. As resources are finite, a war of attrition is a
very dangerous game indeed, and it is up to you to find different strategies to
beat the level, often employing advantages in the map. On the third mission,
for example, the key points of the map are the two bridges – if you can put a
strong enough force on both bridges, you’ll buy yourself enough time to build
up a big enough army to attack the Humans. On the fifth mission, the Humans
have access to more powerful units, and once I’d secured the bridge on to the
Human side of the island, I found it most effective to attack their peasants to
stop them getting any money – therefore removing their option to build their
heavier units.
I also really enjoyed the fourth mission where you have to
take a small force through a dungeon full of Ogres and Slime to assassinate the
Orc Commander’s daughter. I used to hate missions like these because I didn’t
like not having the option to build more units. Now that I’m a bit older and I’ve
played more games, ‘how do I win this’ becomes a very different question when
you’ve got more limited options, and I had a lot more fun utilising the options
available to me. Once I’d dealt with the horde of slime monsters, I had a good
time drawing the ogres out with my Raiders into a wall of spears thrown by my Spearmen,
with a couple of Grunts to finish them of if I needed to. I guess I like going
back to the core experience of video games, to see what they had to offer!
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| Does whatever a Spider can, I've heard... |
I’ve been playing Marvel’s Spiderman on the PS4 when I’ve
found the time; I’m doing quite well now. However, I hope it isn’t necessary to
earn gold on all of the Taskmaster’s challenges in order to 100% the game! The
bomb and drone missions in particular are very challenging indeed, although I
managed the stealth missions easily enough.
I’m about 80% of the way through the game now, and while the
principle villains of the game are pretty obvious from the start, the story aspects
are handled very well. There have been many interpretations of how Spiderman’s
rogue’s gallery got to be the way they are, and without wishing to spoil, it
was a refreshing change to see some of them become the super-villains as a slow
descent into madness rather than one specific incident that happens at the
start of most of the films. It is a far richer story as a result!
See you all next week!
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