Tuesday, 25 February 2020

Last Week's Games: Bubble Bath Bunny, Doom and Mordheim


How many tokens can you get?
This week I’ve had to balance being off work for half term with having my daughter for a lot of the time in between. I’d had less time to play games than I might have wanted, though she and I did get in a game of Bubble Bath Bunny at one point. This is a great little game that is designed to improve memory skills, and while I don’t know how much the game itself has been conducive to that in the eight months that we’ve owned it, it’s great to see that she’s getting better! We also had a go with Pop-up Pirate, Crocodile Dentist and Burp the Baby; kid’s toys that rely almost entirely on chance but they’re fun for the time we’re playing them, and it keeps them amused!
Cacodemons. Horrifying when you're low on ammo.
I carried on with Doom, which suddenly got a lot harder once I’d got on to the second chapter: The Shores of Hell. I found myself for the first time ever (while playing Doom) worrying about conserving ammunition. As with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was developed before it became usual to program ammo dumps prior to finding yourself in a situation that needs it, and while it does help you out in certain situations, for the vast majority of the time you’re on your own if you burn through your ammo carelessly. This has created an extra level of challenge that I’m not used to with Doom and means that I’m going into certain sections of the game severely under-powered. I might need another run through the chapter in order to get it right, but it hasn’t stopped the game from being very good fun to play.
Nonetheless, high-octane action isn’t always the experience I’m looking for, and when I found myself preferring to take my time, I returned to my old sparring partner Mordheim: City of the Damned. People who read this blog regularly may remember that I became stuck on the third campaign mission of the Mercenaries campaign, as Luthor – the Dramatis Personae who, as a win condition for the mission, cannot be killed – was the only member of the warband who wasn’t reduced to a gibbering wreck at the sight of a Daemon. So, I rallied my troops, trained up an Ogre, took some skilled archers and gave my troops items that would assist them with fear and terror tests. I won the mission without suffering too much damage to any of my men, though I had some close calls!
Glad to have cleared this one...
The next mission is going to be one that haven’t done yet, and I’m wondering exactly how I’m going to approach it and whether to take the Ogre. Obviously, he’s useful against the enemy’s impressive characters, which they almost always use on campaign missions. It’s just that I haven’t forgotten the mission in the Cathedral with the Possessed warband – the Impressive character you have to fight there (the one that relates to the Sisters of Sigmar; I actually don’t know what that is called because I never recruited one) doesn’t appear until you’re several levels higher, which even if I had taken a Chaos Spawn, he’d never been able to approach.
It doesn’t help that completing those missions takes a fair amount of time that I can’t always guarantee that I have. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, it takes a couple of hours to explore the levels and find what you need to do – which, between work, family and the occasional need to have a rest, isn’t always possible.
But hey, I’m ready to tackle it when I’m ready, and until then I’m busying myself collecting Wyrdstone for when the inevitable requests come in. Although it is possible to have your warband all but destroyed, the only actual lose condition for the game is when you fail to complete those deliveries four times – I’ve been running this warband for so long now, and the requests becoming more and more demanding, that failing the delivery may be a distinct possibility if I don’t watch what I’m doing. But for me Mordheim is a game that’s always kept on giving, and I’m glad that nearly five years later I’m still finding new challenges.

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