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.