I’ve had all sorts on this week…
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| Powerful, yes, but vulnerable in... wait, what? What's happening in this picture? |
I had another go with Age of Empires, playing the mission
where you attack Troy with Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus and whatever army you can
muster. I gave up in the end since all the heroes had died, and I couldn’t crack
the enemy’s impenetrable wall of Hoplites and Cavalry. They had destroyed all
my catapults, and I was getting to the point in the game where all the
resources are starting to dry up so I wouldn’t have been able to mount an
effective counterattack. I’ll probably come back to it at some point but those
missions take anything up to a couple of hours to reach their conclusion, and I’m
not keen on having another go just yet.
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| Funnily enough I'm several hours into the game and I've only just started fighting goblins... |
I carried on playing Arcania on the PS4. I stopped playing
it for a while; not for any particular reason, I just don’t play the PS4 much
these days for TV-related reasons. I remembered, whilst dealing with the clunky
controls and the not-brilliantly-voice-acted dialogue, that it’s not a very
good game. But I found it engaging enough to keep going, at least for a while.
It got me thinking about the way I do review scores. Those of you who have been
keeping up with this will know that I review games out of five, but as I only review
games once I’ve beaten them, and that I will at least have had to have been engaged
enough by the game to see it through to the end means that the chances that I
will ever give a game the lowest score of 1/5 is quite low. The one game that I
would have given that score to was Sweet Fantasy, a visual novel that took me
less than 45 minutes to see in its entirety – a feat I accomplished before I
started scoring my reviews. If I get to the end of Arcania that’s probably the
score I will give it, but as it’s quite rare for me to do this with a long-form
RPG, we will have to see…
I also continued my campaign on Assassin’s Creed 2, which I’m
enjoying on the basis that I dip into it every now and then and not worry too
much about the plot, or what in the world is supposed to be happening. In fact,
I’ve bypassed all the plot missions and am in the process of doing all the side
quests in the town I’m in now (I can’t remember what it’s called. The one with
the port.) Coming into the game every now and again, rather than trying to
defeat the entire game in one go, is proving a much more enjoyable experience.
At one point, my three-year-old daughter had a go with SSX World
Tour, a game I’d downloaded years ago and hadn’t played for a while. It was amusing
to watch her trying to control the snowboard (with a little help from me and my
partner,) and I’m not convinced she knows she’s racing, but you know what, she’s
having a nice time and that’s what counts.
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| Note the Blood Angel that this Raptor has killed... |
Finally, I completed some Games Workshop models for the
first time in a while, in this case some Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I was
inspired to paint these by playing the Horus Heresy: Legions game and wanting
to build a Chaos Space Marine army based around the Sons of Horus. Their thing
in Legions is that they like to attack the Warlord, or whatever the enemy is
counting on in order to win, and I’ve always liked that idea, so I decided to
paint some Raptors. I was quite pleased with how it worked out in the end. There
may have been a top layer of gold I forgot to put on but other than that I’m
enjoying how they look. The Champion’s power sword is the second time I’ve used
this technique, and while it definitely went better than the first time, it’s still
going to need some practice. But that’s what I like about my collection of models;
they showcase what I could do at the time and tell the story of how my painting
progresses as I’m going along.
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