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!
No comments:
Post a Comment