Last Week's Games: The Elder Scrolls: Area, Super Castlevania IV, Fire Pro Wrestling World

Now that I've seen this, I've got Medusa and Hemlock
by Cradle of Filth buzzing around my head...

This week I’ve been playing a bit of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This was the first Elder Scrolls game released in 1994; I’ve had a dalliance with some of the Elder Scrolls games that have been released since then but have never seen one through to the end. While a lot of the ideas that ended up in the later games were there from the beginning, the interface shows its age! I’ve had a reasonably good time having a go with the different character races and classes, which is easier to do in Arena than it was in Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim because the first dungeon (in which you start as a prisoner, so it’s good to see the Elder Scrolls series started as it meant to go on) can kill you quite quickly if you’re not careful! I got to know the area very well; where all the loot drops and enemies were, as I explored it multiple times with different characters. I eventually settled on a Wood Elf mage; I’m aware that the stats of a Wood Elf don’t necessarily support the Mage class, but I found that it had enough physical power to outlast a lot of the other classes I’d been playing. I guess this is one of the areas where video games differ from table top RPGs; when there’s only one player character, you must be able to handle more than the situations your class would normally deal with! I eventually managed to get to the end of the dungeon but then emerged into the town in the middle of the night and got killed by the enemies hanging around the town; often before I even knew they were there! Thank goodness I thought to save the game. It was also amusing to see that the Khajit were originally human in appearance, rather than the feline appearance they later acquired. 

Tricky though this bit is, it's nothing
compared to the next bit...

I also tried Super Castlevania IV on my WiiU again. I played the level where some of the old music from the previous games had been remixed for the 4^th iteration of the game – including a track that was involved in one of Jim Sterling’s “F**Konami News” gags, so that raised a smile from me! That level has some very tough platforming segments, so I didn’t get very far, but my three-year-old daughter noticed what I was doing and wanted a go. I set her off on the first level; she hasn’t quite got the dexterity to handle platforming yet, but she was having a fine time making Simon Belmont walk up and down the stairs on the first screen! She enjoyed the results of whipping the skeletons too, though she hadn’t got the reaction times to do it quickly, so I often ended up doing it. But it’s all good; at this point she just enjoys doing things with her Daddy!

Alright mate, put it down; you'll get DQ'd!

Finally, I had a go with a game I’ve left far too long without trying: Fire Pro Wrestling World. It’s been a while since I had a wrestling game to play with, and the WWE series that started with Smackdown has, if I understand the commentary on it correctly, disappeared into its own bottom trying to make the best and most comprehensive creation mode while forgetting to make the gameplay itself any good. Fire Pro Wrestling, free from the shackles of having to use licensed wrestlers or keep up with constantly-evolving graphics engines, has certainly put a lot of thought into the gameplay. The controls are more of a timing-based system than WWE’s button-mashing, and you have to balance light and strong attacks, or you will very easily be countered. I’m currentlyplaying through the mission mode, where you have to achieve a certain condition by the end of the match (not always a win!) This is a great way for me to get used to the different wrestlers in the game, and to learn the mechanics. I even streamed some of it earlier today and put on a rather embarrassing show, but the one person watching it sat through most of it so I’m not complaining! I’ve really enjoyed Fire Pro Wrestling World so far, and I hope I’ll continue to do so!

Last Week's Games: Into the Breach, X-COM: UFO Defence, Sega Megadrive and Ninja Gaiden 3

The first thing I did in the week was beat Into the Breach for the first, and hopefully not last, time. I’ve written the review for it and it’s coming out on Friday, but I thought at this point I’d make a few additional remarks that I didn’t think fit the purpose of the review:

Always a fun time splattering bugs...

It came to my attention, I can’t remember how, that the scope of the game was quite a bit bigger than what we eventually received. There was supposed to be a much deeper strategic element to the whole campaign, with some XCOM-style base management in it. However, at some point the developers had to have a very difficult conversation when it emerged that those wider elements of the game just weren’t any fun. It was just bulk, micro-management, padding out the game, and their play-testers weren’t enjoying it. So, the decision was made to scrap those elements of the game and make a game based almost entirely around the tactical game I’d been enjoying. I’ve got a lot of respect for decisions like that; it’s never easy to look at something you’ve been working very hard on over months and years and decide that it’s not up to standard and needs to be shelved. Maybe we’ll see those ideas come up in a later game, I don’t know. But it was a brave decision to chop out a lot of the game’s intended content to make a better game, so well done on that.

After XCOM Enemy Unknown it was surprising
how squishy these soldier's were...

Elsewhere, I had a go with the original X-COM game. On the icon on my laptop it’s called X-COM: UFO Defence, but I know it better as UFO: Enemy Unknown. I’ve always enjoyed the X-COM games, Enemy Unknown and Interceptor were my favourites, but playing it back twenty years later I couldn’t get quite as in to it as I had been before. Maybe it’s a bad time for me to be throwing myself into another long-form strategy campaign, maybe it’s because the interface really hasn’t aged that well and I’m getting frustrated at losing soldiers and battles because I’m getting the implicit rules of the games wrong, but it wasn’t happening for me that night.

Eternal Champions. Another tough one!

Kirsty bought me an ATGAMES Sega Megadrive Plug & Play for Christmas in 2017, and a few nights ago I finally got around to having a go with it! It’s got quite a few games on there, many that I can only describe as “The Usual Suspects,” (Sonic, Golden Axe, Columns etc) plus several arcade games that I’ve never heard of. I had a go with Comix Zone, Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions, perhaps because I just wanted to beat something up after the complexity of some of the other games I’ve been playing. Unfortunately, these were all games that I’d either owned or borrowed in the past, and because of this, I realised that the emulation wasn’t quite on point. The games were playable enough and I had a decent time, but the music and sound effects were all about three semitones too low, and with Comix Zone in particular, it made the music in the game sound horribly out of tune. But it’s a fun enough time, and I’m sure I’ll give it another go in the future.

No idea who this is but it took a few goes to beat...
Him? Her? I couldn't tell. The sound was down on the TV.

Finally, I had a go with Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge on the Wii U. I’ve played a couple of Ninja Gaiden games in the past, but this is the first time I played one in a while and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult they can be! At this point I’ve just about got past the boss on the first stage. It’s a strange one because the game seems to want you to learn all the moves and the combos when you just want to be mashing buttons, but there’s a sense of satisfaction when you analyse the attack patterns of the bosses and work out the best strategies to beat them. Nonetheless, the game is brutally hard! We’ll see if I can see this one through to the end, but it’s always good to play a game I’d never played before.

I’ve also installed Elder Scrolls: Arena, so we’ll see what next week brings!

Backlog Beatown: Charting Fortunes with Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

I bought Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Trilogy soon after I gained access to a PlayStation 4; having been on Xbox and PC for most of the years prior, I hadn’t played any Uncharted games prior. I knew the basic premise of the game, (Gears of War meets Tomb Raider,) and I knew the lead character Nathan Drake was a wise-cracking rogue who could never quite make you sure whether you wanted to buy him a drink or deck him, but other than that, Uncharted was a blind buy.

Straight in the nuts. You know
you want to!

I had a go with the first of the three games it showcases – Uncharted: Drakes Fortune – and I found what for me was a standard action-adventure. You play as Nathan Drake; an Indiana Jones-like character who bears a passing resemblance to a younger Gerard Butler and is voice-acted by the renowned Nolan North. You’re on a quest to find the treasure of El Dorado, either for fame and fortune or for the fact that you may or may not be related to Sir Francis Drake who was looking for the treasure originally – probably a little of both. Along the way, you get caught up in a conflict of interest between Sully, your mentor, Elena, a reporter, and a group of criminals and mercenaries who also want to find El Dorado. Conflict escalates, and you are forced to run, gun and jump your way through an increasingly hostile environment as you search to find the truth behind the treasure and save your friends.

There are two main sections to the game: Platforming, in which you jump from wall-section to ledge in order to traverse difficult-to-get-to areas, and combat, which mainly involves shootouts with modern-day pirates. The platforming is not difficult; it is rarely a challenge to see where you need to go and even if you do get stuck, the game will show you where you’re supposed to be going next if you stand still for a few seconds. Once you know where you’re going, the route is usually obvious, and the challenge is avoiding traps and making sure you don’t linger to long on a ledge lest it crumble beneath your feet.

The bulk of the game's action is in scenes like this.

The combat is standard cover-based shooting, and is handled well enough, with the one puzzling exception that grenades are mapped to L1 (R1 is the standard, right?) You shoot some enemies, move up to the next area, find some cover and shoot some more enemies. There is an array of weapons in the game, but you can only carry two at a time; a pistol and one other weapon. These are what you would expect; machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers. Uncharted is very much “of it’s time” in terms of its level design; the ammo pick-ups are in all the right places so you’re never out-gunned, and conserving resources between one fight and the next is rarely a consideration. One particularly memorable moment near the end of the game came when I was in a church with snipers in the raised areas; this could have presented a very different challenge if there hadn’t been a sniper rifle lying around in the first place you dive for cover; classic 7^th gen design!

I mean, even if Wikipedia wasn't a thing,
you'd know how this was going to end up...

Uncharted is presented well; the voice-acting is spot-on, and the graphics are good for their time. The sounds are as good as they need to be, the gun sounds work fine and the music fits the environments, though it isn’t particularly memorable. The game is not especially long, but it tells a fun story with an effective twist, and it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

It’s difficult to know how to call this one. While I was writing this, I had to go back and check all the times I’d written the word “Standard” and go back and change some of them. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in 2007 and, while it’s still fun to play now, doesn’t bring anything to the table that wasn’t there before. It’s as standard as a 7^th generation game gets, and is very competently put together, but now that I’ve got to the end of it, I’ll be more likely to put it to bed than go hunting for all the achievement trophies.

Final Score: 3/5. Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: Painting a Dark Apostle and Uncharted

I’ll start this week by talking about something I should have mentioned in the previous one: I’ve finished painting my Dark Apostle for my Chaos Space Marine Word Bearers army.

This one was a massive faff to keep it held together. This being a Finecast model, it wasn’t terribly well cut and there are some rather wobbly joins holding it together. The result is a model that would very likely fall apart if somebody breathes on it too hard, (even as I write this the star on the top of his weapon has broken off again,) and a lot of the time I wanted to spend painting it was spent repairing the thing.

Not the best picture but
the best I could do at the time.

I was a little puzzled at first as to what colour I should be painting him. Dark Apostles are, of course, the Chaos Space Marine equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, and they always wear black armour no matter what chapter they are attached to. I wondered if the same applied to Chaos Space Marines and whether I would necessarily have to paint it in that dull rusty colour that appears on his box art. After a little research I couldn’t find a definitive answer, so I opted to paint him the usual Word Bearers colours of red and silver, making a neat job of the trimmings but not with the level of detail one might expect from a character model such as this. I’m pleased with the result nonetheless, and I look forward to putting him on the gaming table at some point.

This concludes the 500 points block of Chaos Space Marines I was painting in the Word Bearers colours, including a Chaos Space Marine squad, two squads of Cultists, a Chaos Lord and the Dark Apostle. Nothing particularly hard-hitting there, but those of you familiar with the most recent edition of Warhammer 400000 will recognise that this brings them into the Battalion force organisation chart, which means I have 6 strategy points to work with for a 500 point army. I don’t know how well it’s going to work but I’m hoping to find out soon.

I own more models for the army than this – I’ve got another squad of Chaos Space Marines and a Helbrute – but as I’ve not used any of them yet, I’m hesitant to get into a battle that’s too big, as I invariably end up slowing the game to a crawl by having to check the rules for the different units every few minutes. Far better, I think, to play a few games with what I’ve got, find out what works and what doesn’t, and add to it after I’ve got used to the rules for the models I’m currently using.

The next project is a Raptor squad that I intend to paint in Black Legion colours, inspired by the Horus Heresy: Legions game I’ve been playing on my phone. I’ll write more about that once I start to progress!

Pretty good, but not much motivation to play it again...

In other news, I reached the end of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and wrote a review for it which is scheduled to come out on Friday. From the tone of the review it seems quite negative, so I just want to clarify that it really is a good game. It was more a case of… you know when you’ve really enjoyed a game and you get to the end of it wishing there were more of it so you can keep playing? With Uncharted, I was quite ready for it to be over when the end credits rolled. The fact that it was 3am probably contributed to that.

Also, there are some new cards out for Horus Heresy: Legions; the Word Bearers are now a faction and a tough one at that. They seem to work around summoning Daemons, which fits the lore, and while they take a while to get going, once those Daemons start to arrive, they can take you down very quickly. I’ve not had a go with them yet, (I tend to keep to the loyalists in the events,) but I’ve got one of their Warlords so I might have a go with them in the future. It would be fitting, since that’s my 40K army!

Last Week's Games: Uncharted, Into the Breach, The Witness and Pathfinder

After the previous post’s self-serving revelation that I should be getting on with beating some of these games I’ve been buying had gone live, I went back to my Xbox 360 to try to reach the end of Army of Two; a game that you’ll remember I played over the summer. I knew I was up to the last bit and it shouldn’t have taken me too long, however I ran into a rather fundamental issue: My Xbox 360 broke.

What’s happening is the controller isn’t connecting to the console. (This is happening with both controllers we own. “Try a different controller” is the first thing that comes up on every bit of advice I looked up. I tried. It didn’t work.) It’s still turning the machine on, but not connecting to the point where I could control anything. I tried re-synching it; it didn’t work. I tried moving the console and controller around (this has happened before and carrying it around in my backpack apparently fixed it last time!) but still nothing happened. I looked up a YouTube video on how to get at the parts, got as far as taking the side panel off that gives you access to the hard drive, and gave up when I realised that even if I had the screwdrivers I was going to need in order to get at the motherboard, and even if I could access the correct part, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, my old Xbox 360 has gone in for repairs; I dropped it in this morning. From what I understand, if it’s a component part that can be replaced then it shouldn’t be too difficult to repair. If something’s gone wrong with the motherboard, they’re manufactured by machines at a micro level so there isn’t much that can be done. To be fair, I bought it in 2012, it was second-hand then and I’ve got a lot of use out of it since; it doesn’t owe me a lot. And it’s not like I’m short of video games to play!

It's well characterised, I'll give it that!

To that end, I decided to play a game that I’d bought for the PS4 nearly a year ago and hadn’t got around to playing yet: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. This is the first in a trilogy of games in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake collection. I’d seen some coverage of it, and it came across as, rather crassly: “Tomb Raider with a bloke.” And to begin with, that’s exactly what it is, though with a 7^th-gen design sensibility that made the game more like the later Tomb Raiders than the earlier ones. I’m enjoying it so far; the game is fun to play and while it doesn’t look particularly long (apparently, I’m roughly 40% of the way through having just beaten the first bit?) there’s a lot to do. I don’t know what, if anything, the PS4 remaster has done for the quality of the graphics or game but for me it’s all about whether I enjoy it, and at this point, I am.

Massive amounts of Vek and environmental
hazards make this a very difficult mission to beat.

I also played a couple of games on my laptop I hadn’t played in a while: Into the Breach, which I’ve talked about before, and The Witness, which I haven’t. Into the Breach is always a fun game; I really like how it can potentially only take about an hour to get to the final mission so that you’re not bogged down in an hours-long campaign, and I like that the final mission scales up with the rest of the game so it’s not as though you can level up and cheese your way to victory. I haven’t beaten it yet though, as either way it is very difficult. I came to within one turn the last time I tried, but all my mechs got destroyed before I could finish the mission.

These tree puzzles were easy, until they weren't...

The Witness is an odd puzzle game that is about exploring an island solving puzzles on computer screens, such as you might find in a puzzle book. I played it last year briefly during a time where I wasn’t doing the blog and came back to it now because I figured if I have 20 minutes dead time at work I could jump in and do a few puzzles, but I find myself oddly engrossed whenever I put it on and often find myself playing for a long time when I put it on. It’s a weird game, but there’s something quite satisfying about solving the puzzles. I’ve had to look up a guide to find out the conceit of some of the puzzles, but there has only been one so far where I had to look up the actual solution, and even when I found it, I couldn’t see how the clue fit the puzzle!

Fiendish.

Finally, I ran Pathfinder for the usual crew at the end of last month. I had a really good time with it this time; the problem with a lot of the battles in upper-level Pathfinder is the characters often have abilities which trump most of the monsters that you throw of at them. Action economy becomes an issue as well, especially with 5-6 player characters. However, at one point they come across a Forgefiend who can move through the walls and create very difficult environments for them to fight in. Also, it does a huge amount of damage by spewing molten slag out of its belly, which makes me sound quite vindictive, but the PCs have quite high defensive capabilities as well, so getting to a point where I do some damage to them isn’t all that common for me!

I am hoping to get the next edition of Pathfinder again quite soon, but for how often I play roleplaying games and the fact that I’ve got at least another year in Rise of the Runelords, I can’t justify spending the money on it currently. But we’ve got Christmas coming up, so you never know!

Let’s hope next week starts a bit better…