Last Week's Games: Jenga, Dominoes, Snakes and Ladders, and Happy Salmon

I’ve had a lot going on this week. Some of you may remember that I had a massive stack of board games piled up in my spare room. Well, it was never going to take long for my daughter to take an interest in it, and suddenly I found myself having to find some games within that collection that are suitable for a three-year-old to play. We found four in the end, all of which she enjoys to a certain extent but for entirely different reasons…

This is the version of the game we have.

The first game we tried was Jenga, where you must take a block from a tower of 54 blocks, putting the piece you took off onto the top creating an increasingly unstable tower. Strictly speaking, you’re only allowed to use one hand, but we weren’t too pedantic about that as Jessie only has small hands. She showed a surprising amount of dexterity and care as she checked for loose blocks and put them on the top of the tower. We’ve had a few goes with this and I generally win, but for one round I deliberately decided to go for the harder blocks – more to make me feel like I deserved it if I won again, as much as anything else – and after a long and tense match, Jessie was delighted to win one!

Fun fact: I pulled this picture from the Taken 2
Movie website - which now links to gambling.

Then we had a go at Dominoes. This one was probably the one she took the most from in terms of her own development, as she was identifying how many dots were on her dominoes and matching them up on the board. It reminded me of the first time I played this game as a child, where the dominoes were pictures of animals rather than the usual dots; that probably would have been preferable, but Jessie still had a good go. She tends to win by luck rather than judgement, as she usually has the smaller number of dots by the time we run out of moves, but she enjoys it. Probably as importantly, I’m encouraging her to keep her eye on both sides of the board, which should train a sense of situational awareness!

Picking things up and moving them around.
What could be better?

I bought Snakes and Ladders from the Black Country Museum with the intention of introducing it to Jessie at some point. This was an odd one: The debate about whether theme or mechanics are more important can fill entire books, but with both snakes and ladders being something Jessie can recognise, she finds the game a lot more engaging than the abstract puzzling of Jenga and Dominoes – at least initially. But the thing about Snakes and Ladders is that there’s no skill involved – you roll the dice and you move, and if you land at the bottom of a ladder or the top of a snake, you move to the other end. The first to get to the 100^th square wins, and that’s all there is to it. Without truly realising why, Jessie gets bored of that long before the game has finished. Still, it’s a simple enough game for us all to play and that’s probably main benefit: It’s a nice game to play with your family.

Absolutely mad, but a great game!

Finally, we had a go with an absolute gem of a game I picked up at the UK Games Expo a few years ago: Happy Salmon. I haven’t played this yet as you need two things: At least three people, and a safe environment to make a lot of noise. I almost always fall short of at least one of these things. It’s basically a mad version of snap: Everyone has a coloured deck of the same twelve cards with an action on them for two people to do. You frantically search for the person with the same card, do the action then drop the card. The first person to drop all their cards is the winner. We had a great time playing it, and me and Kirsty recognised that this is probably one of the most accessible games I own. That’s worth an entire blog at some point, but for now I’ll say that the fact that Jessie can’t read yet didn’t hinder her enjoyment at all!

So, a nice week of board games, in all!

Last Week's Games: Sensible World of Soccer, Of Orcs and Men, XCOM: Enemy Unknown

With things getting back to something remotely resembling normality (for me, anyway; the rest of the world might be saying something different!) I tried playing my new Xbox 360 this week. Some of you may remember that I had to buy a new one when my old one stopped working because the controller wasn’t connecting to the console. The daft thing is that I may not have needed to do that, because when the exact same thing started happening with the new one before I’d even played any games on it, I found a far more simple solution than I could ever have hoped to imagine – turn on the TV.

Yes, my controller only connects – and the Xbox 360 only comes on properly – when I turn on the TV. I don’t know how long this has been the case, but I would imagine it would be an update to the Xbox’s systems whereby it won’t come on properly until it detects some sort of Audio/Visual output. At that point, everything comes on and it works just fine. I don’t know whether that happened with my old Xbox, but I can’t remember an occasion where I tried it with the TV off and it didn’t work… so it may be that I’ve spent some money on a new Xbox 360 that I didn’t need! Ah well, I won’t know until I test it again and I certainly can’t be bothered to check right now. I’ve got a 250Gig hard disc out of it, and it’s always useful to have a spare in case I burn one or the other of them out.

Can he get one in before the half?

So, what games have I been playing? The first one I played was in fact the free download for early May which was Sensible World of Soccer. This is an old Amiga-generation (roughly 4^th) football game, with a top-down view, and one “fire” button to control kicking the ball – everything else depends on context. I’ve played it for a while, and I am hopeless at it. I can’t seem to aim my shots properly if I come at it from an angle, and the goalkeeper always saves the goal if I go head on. In the roughly 30 games I’ve played, I’ve won two of them; the first was an online multiplayer game where the connection was so awful I think the person I was playing let me win out of sheer boredom, and the other one was a game where I’d played the England team (and chuckled at the re-arrangement of somewhat familiar player names to avoid legal issue) against a deliberately weak side, I can’t remember what it was. The rest of the time I either lose, or at best have a goalless draw, although I offset this by playing as Birmingham City, so our forms match up somewhat. Nonetheless, the “pick up and play” mentality of this game means I’ll probably come back to it when I have a moment to spare!

Interesting "buddy" scenario...

I also tried Of Orcs and Men, a game lent to me by my mate Victor. This looks like a very interesting game, where the Orc and Goblin who serve as the player characters become unlikely heroes in the fight against a tyrannical Human regime. It’s an unusual twist on a tired trope, and thematically it works well. The gameplay isn’t what I was expecting, as you must put in a list of commands for the characters to enact in combat. The system reminded me of Knights of the Old Republic more than anything else, but God of War meets Tenchu this most certainly is not. Victor told me that the game starts a little slow but picks up later; I’m looking forward to coming back to it to see what else it’s got to offer.

I mean, canonically, XCOM loses the war anyway...

Finally, I returned to an old favourite of mine – XCOM Enemy Unknown. I’ve been trying to beat this game on Classic / Ironman difficulty for nearly eight years and have been beaten each time by a combination of random number generation and probably poor choices. I might give it another go, but try to employ the strategy it gives me, rather than trying to force my own through.

Last Week's Games: Forbidden Island, Dominoes, Misty, New Super Mario Bros U

This week I have been sorting out some thing with the new house; it’s an ongoing project and has left very little time for playing games! Most of the games I’ve played this week have been board games, which is just as well really, since as you all saw last week, I’ve got quite a few to get through…

There's just something about that tin...

The most significant one for me and Kirsty was Forbidden Desert, which we played a few nights ago. This is a game in which you play a team of explorers who have crash-landed in a city buried by sand, and have to race against time and the weather to find the four parts of a flying machine that can get you to safety. Once we’d figured out the game mechanics, how to find the various parts and what to do with them, we beat the game on its easiest setting – though not before an extremely tense moment where we would both die of thirst if we drew one more Sun card!

I’m a fan of Matt Leacocks’s board games, and the very distinct style of mechanic that comes with them. I also like the co-operative nature of the games, as I often find with board games that the winner comes down to the level of experience a player has with a game – not so when it’s a shared objective. As we played Forbidden Desert for the first time, we found ourselves making the comparison with Pandemic, and realising that we were probably enjoying the Forbidden series more. Are the Forbidden games better than Pandemic, which since its release has spawned a second edition, two Legacy games and several spin-offs including the obligatory Cthulu version? That’s a matter of opinion. But where Pandemic can be a stress-inducing headache where you never have quite enough in the tank to do everything that needs to be done to stop a global pandemic, (not to mention that the subject matter of Pandemic is a little on the nose these days!) the Forbidden games appear to be more of an Indiana Jones-style pulp-adventure. There’s not quite as much at stake; you’re finding lost relics, and if you don’t manage to do it then you have little to blame but your own hubris in looking for them in the first place. Game mechanics are important of course, but I think in this case, the theme of the Forbidden games may prove a more enjoyable experience for us.

Watch how you're spelling Dominoes, by the way.
Otherwise all you'll get is pizza.

One of the other games we’d played, that I’d not played for a good long while, is Dominoes. We’ve all played Dominoes, but it had been a while since either me or Kirsty played it; we had to look up the rules online because our version of the game was missing the rules. (They were probably there at some point but had been lost in the mists of time.) It was an interesting experience, depending as much on luck as anything else. I won two games and Kirsty won one, but it came down to drawing the right tiles! An enjoyable game, if a little short.

We also had a go with Misty; the simple card drafting and placement game Kirsty bought me for Valentines’ day. It’s an easy enough game to play and understand but there’s a definite strategy for winning – making sure all your moving cards are placed well and go in the right order – which I’ve figured out, but Kirsty isn’t quite there yet. Also, I suspect that playing the game with multiple players would be a very different experience – hopefully we’ll be able to find out in the not-too-distant future!

You can only save at Castles, funnily enough...

Finally, when I did manage to get one of my consoles working, I had a go at New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. This competently-designed and gentle platformer is always a good one to pick up and play, and, as with many of the later Mario games, enough going on to satisfy the completionists among us! Right now, I’ll be happy to get to the end of the game, which at this point I’m not too far away from.

I also bought a new Xbox 360 so we’ll see what happens with that…

Last Week's Games: Moving House and some other bits of faff...

Despite some major positive changes happening in my life lately, this blog will take on a mainly negative tone. None of it is all that bad, in the grand scheme of things, but there are some inconveniences which have meant I haven’t had all that much time for playing games over the last couple of weeks.

Yeah...

The most significant thing that has happened to me in a few years, then, is that I bought a house. This was something that we had to organise quite quickly. Kirsty and I had been planning to move out of our flat and into a house for a little over a year at that point; for various reasons we didn’t manage it until now. We viewed the property back in January and offered on it, then Covid-19 happened which bought with it all sorts of confusion with the solicitors doing the conveyance. By the time we’d got a straight answer and a date for completion, we had about six days to pack down our entire home and move it into a house – thankfully not far away, but it was a confused mess and we couldn’t count on much help! Part of what this meant was that I had to move my entire collection of board games, and this very afternoon I managed to arrange them all against the same wall our spare room, taking the picture you see on your right while conceding that I really do have problems with obsessive hoarding.

Apart from the time it takes to move to a new house and get everything fixed and tidy there, which is still an ongoing process, we couldn’t use our TVs for a while either. The landlord of the flat we moved out of cut the plugs off our TVs and wired them up straight into the mains so that we didn’t have wires trailing everywhere.[1] The problem was of course that with the lockdown, he couldn’t put them back on again, and because the plugs they came are sealed, neither could we. So, we had to wait for a convenient moment to go and buy some plugs to plug the TV in before I could use any of the consoles! Of course, there was always the Switch or my Laptop, but time was not on my side this week, so I didn’t get to play them too much.

I tried to come up with some sort of snide remark about
where I'd like to stick that sniper rifle but it just came
out really rude.

One game I won’t be playing again is Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any of it, but it’s cost me a lot more than it was worth. Basically, my account got hacked, and a certain amount of money was spent on it. I won’t say exactly how much here; it was more than a takeaway, less than the deposit on my house. I’d never had a problem with this before in a year of owning the Switch and came across it within weeks of sharing information with Epic Games, so in addition to changing my password, I’ve deleted Fortnite off my Swtich and I won’t be playing it anymore. I’m currently having some email dialogue with Nintendo to resolve the situation, so hopefully I will get my money back, but this has left a rather bitter taste in my mouth as you might imagine!

I tried to have a go on my Xbox 360 – I was hoping to beat Sonic Generations, and I’ve been able to see my games for the first time in a year and a half (they’ve been in the loft hitherto) so I was hoping to try those of them I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. Two things got in the way of that – first, the HDMI cable wasn’t plugged in, and second, it’s doing that thing again where the controller won’t connect to the console. This is the second time it’s had this problem this year, and it won’t be going away – it might be time for a new one. I’ll try and order one in the next few days; if nothing else I’ll get an extremely helpful new hard drive to download some free games on to!

Until next week…

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[1] It’s alright, he’s an electrician; he knows how to do it.

Backlog Beadown: Going on a Dragon Quest with Dragon Quest

I bought Dragon Quest when I saw it advertised on Facebook. This was not a series I had any investment in, or even many games for – one for the Nintendo DS that I haven’t played. But I like RPGs, and within the last few years I’ve been quite interested in the first iterations of long-running series. This is partly because of my almost OCD-like desire to play games in sequence, but I also find it fascinating to see the progression of games as a series: Where the story went, what mechanics were introduced, where the games were good and where they weren’t.

The box art has a certain charm...

Dragon Quest, then, is the first in a long-running series of what later became known as JRPGs – Japanese Role-Playing Games. As an opening statement of intent, it does the job well enough. You play as a stranger who is descended from the legendary hero Erdrick, who has journeyed to the land of Alefgard. Upon arrival, you are informed that the Princess has been captured by a dragon, and that the land has been overridden with monsters and danger from the Dragonlord. The hero then goes on a quest to rescue the Princess, follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, defeat the Dragonlord and bring peace to Alefgard. As plots go, this is as basic as it gets, but in many ways that’s a positive thing – there’s no massively contrived plotlines, no twists, no wandering around the world trying to remember what’s going on. Here’s the dragon, here’s the princess, here’s the Dragonlord, what are you going to do about it?

If you can get around the outskirts of the town without
actually leaving, you'll meet the key seller...

The gameplay is fine; it’s a top-down role-playing game that became the standard in the mid-80s to mid-90s. It is interspersed with a random battle system that pitches you against monsters of increasing difficulty depending on how far you are into the game. Both are quite simple; exploration is nothing too taxing, except for one or two of the secret areas that are necessary to discover to get to the end of the game. As a nice touch, most of the dungeons you can explore aren’t lit, requiring you to use torches – and later, magic – in order to be able to see more than a few feet. Some may call this a faff, but it puts a simple resource management mechanic into the game. The combat is turn-based and not difficult; you attack, the monster fights back, and who ever runs out of hit points first loses. This is for the best as Dragon Quest is very grindy and you will be in combat a lot to be at the required level. Magic is introduced later in the game but it’s mainly for healing; attacking spells are not particularly helpful in any way I that I noticed. Levelling up just happens once you’ve reached a certain number of experience points – there’s no assigning points or anything like that.

This is my evidence that I have no imagination at all
when it comes to naming my characters.

It’s a basic game that does its job well – but the Switch version has got a rather jarring art style. From what I understand, it’s a port of a version of the game that appeared on mobile devices, and some of the graphics are off-base. It’s rare for me to complain about graphics; I’m usually fine with anything if the art style is consistent. But that’s not the case here. The overworld looks like a slightly overdone Super Nintendo game. The monsters have cutesy Kids TV look to them – faithful to their original design but reducing their implied threat somewhat! And the fonts look like the most basic Arial font on Microsoft Word. It doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t look bad – it just looks wrong. And I guess it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game. Neither does the sound, which works well, if a little repetitive. Even the dialogue, which presumably is a cringe-inducing American interpretation of what Olde English sounded like, works. But with a little re-working, polish and consistency, this version of Dragon Quest could have been so much more.

Dragon Quest is a good game, if a little grindy and lacking in polish. I don’t feel any particular need to return to it – but I would very much like to see where it’s going in its sequel…

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.