Three things to mention this week:
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| They don't present a massive challenge, but they're hard to find! |
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World on the PlayStation 4.
This is the first Monster Hunter game I’ve ever played, and at this point I’m
not sure what to make of it. It seems to be a role-playing game that involves
hunting monsters on an island for research; that’s the basic plot. But there’s
a lot going on with it, namely upgrading your equipment from parts of the
monsters you have hunted, as well as the usual levelling-up progression. I’ve
had a decent time with it so far, the combat system is interesting and the world
is beautiful, although the most significant challenge it’s offered to me so far
has come in the form of the mission where I have to kill twenty Vespoids – and that
was mainly because that was the only mission where there was a real possibility
of over-extending the 50-minute time limit, as I had to spend a lot of time
looking around the map looking for the things!
Apart from that, the main thing I’m having to battle is the
game’s insistence on being an online MMO-like experience. I haven’t got PlayStation
Plus – I don’t play the kind of games that would make it worth my while. Unfortunately,
Monster Hunter World doesn’t seem to want to let that go, assumes it’s
connecting to PlayStation Plus when you boot it up, and even when you bypass
all of that, it still talks up the multiplayer content as part of the game.
Sorry, but MMORPGs are not my thing at all – if I had a group of friends who
wanted to play one then maybe but playing with some random people who want to
do it a lot quicker than I like to pace myself doesn’t appeal to me at all.
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| This one is off the... no. No. That's too obvious. |
I came back to Murder in the Alps on my mobile last week
too. Near to the start of the year I was playing the first run of mysteries,
and I thought I’d have a go with the second. It’s basically Murder on the Orient
Express – The Game, and I was engaged enough to want to get to the end of it,
though the fact that it’s a hidden object game requires some suspension of
disbelief. If the character has found the item she’s looking for, why does she
keep looking for the other twelve? It’s like that thing people say when they’ve
found something they lost: “Always the last place you look.” One might
reasonably wonder if they keep on looking after they’ve found whatever they
lost. In this game, that’s more or less what you’re doing!
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| A game about growing Bamboo, with a cute panda. What's not to like? |
The final game I played this week was a board game: Takenoko.
This is a game in which you must build a garden for a panda to live in. It
sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually really good – you have to build up the different
colours of the garden in a certain configuration, grow a certain amount of bamboo
in a certain place, and have the panda eat a certain set of bamboo in order to
score. I played it with Kirsty, and I’ve said it before but it’s always a sign
of a well-designed game when the gap between your first turn and learning how
to play the game is relatively small. It only took us a few goes, and we were
building gardens according to our cards, and trying to have the panda eat
certain types of bamboo, this that and the other. I won in the end, but only by
a point. Kirsty realised quite late in the game that her scoring cards were
relatively low, where as most of mine were mid-range, which gave me more
points. It was too late for her to do anything about it by then, but I considered
afterwards how looking for a lot of low-scoring points cards might be a viable
strategy with three or four players. I suspect that you wouldn’t want to get
bogged down with higher-scoring points cards when your opponents have three or four
completed ones already!
That was it for this week, I’m a little short of time next
week so we’ll see what I can get done!
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