Last Week's Games: Cluckles' Adventure, Spiderman, and making DnD characters.

After getting nearly half way through the year and only beating one game, suddenly I find I’ve beaten two games in one week!

Chickens can stick to walls, who knew?

The first was Cluckles’ Adventure, which I beat early on in the week with all the stars and wrote a review for it later in the week. You can read it here! I’ve talked about Cluckles often enough in the blog, but I have a few additional points I’d like to make here First, I think it’s absolutely brilliant that the game is simple enough that anyone can pick it up and play. It’s not a hard core game, far from it, but it’s also not a cow clicker that relies on micro-transactions. Gamers can play the game, partners can play the game, children can play the game, parents can play the game – there aren’t enough games like this these days, and it’s great that not only does Cluckles’ Adventure have the potential to engage a wider audience than core gamers, but does it with a refreshingly simple idea.

That being said, I was hoping to get all the achievement tokens for this game and was a little disappointed when I didn’t get the achievement for collecting all the stars, which is the last one. I left this out of the review as it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of playing the game, but apparently I’m not the only one whose achievements have bugged out so, if you’re in to that sort of thing, keep it in mind.

(Incidentally, I only usually think about achievements if I’ve got a hope of getting them all. If some of them are tied up in multiplayer I’m probably not going to worry too much about it!)

I did most of the last half of the game in this suit.

The second was Spiderman on the PS4. As some of you who have been following my blog for a while will know, I’ve had a lot of fun with this game, and while it’s ended at the right time and not outstayed its welcome, I was very pleased to have reached the end of it. I’ve written the review for this one as well; I shall check it over in the next few days and hopefully have it out on Friday. There’s more to do in the game – I can replay the game in New Game + mode and aim to beat it on Ultimate Difficultly, and then there’s the DLC as well – but for now I’m happy to put Spiderman to bed and play another game.

Also when I’ve had some time in the week I created a new Dungeons and Dragons 5e character: Patrin of the Great Church of Torm. This is a Dragonborn Tempest Cleric. Am I going to use him in a game? I hope to be able to at some point but there aren’t many games around at the moment and I doubt I’d have time to play them even if they are!

He probably looks like this.

I’m mentioning it because I’ve got a way of building characters that makes the process in itself quite fun: I roll randomly for the Character Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws. I’ve also been using the tables in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything that you can use to randomly determine some specifics of your background, i.e. your parents and your reasons for taking up your career or class. Rolling for these characteristics can often lead to stiff little sentences on your character sheet, but what I like to do is treat them as raw data, from which I can process a story that makes sense.

I don’t usually bother with this when I’m creating a character for 5e, simply because the bulk of my experience in playing it has come from the Black Country Roleplaying Society, and things like traits, bonds and flaws tend to come out during the course of the game which you’re only usually in for about eight weeks anyway. But what I’ve got with Patrin is a character whose background I’ve created before the fact, and can implement as much or little of it as required into the game, with only a minor tweak for settings if necessary.

I’m not expecting a huge amount of free time next week, so we’ll see what happens.