The Tenth Year Anniversary of my Gaming Blog...

The thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: “Strewth, I’ve been doing this blog for 10 years!”

My coverage on Batman Begins
remains my most-read blog...

For ten years, I’ve been talking to you about games I’ve been playing, wins, losses, video games, my thoughts on game design, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a long time to keep something going, and while the return isn’t necessarily representative of what you might expect for someone who spends that long on the internet (at the time of writing I’m coming up on 60,000 views across the entire ten years and 325 blogs, and it’s never represented any financial reward) I’ve enjoyed it, people I share it with enjoy it, people I don’t share it with enjoy it, so in some capacity or another, I’ve kept doing it.

My speculation on the 6th edition of 40K was
probably my biggest blog for comments...

Mind you, it did take me a long time to come up with a regular format for the blog that I was happy with. My original intention was to document the games I was playing in Games Workshop, as it still was at the time. I did it for a while, but I didn’t go in regularly enough to blog it in a consistent routine, and even when I did, it sucked some of the fun out of the games knowing that I was going to have to write about them later. The same applied to when I tried to create a journal for the Roleplaying games I was just starting to get involved with; documenting my first character’s journey through Pathfinder’s Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv was entertaining at first but quickly became a lot more work than fun. It didn’t help that I was trying to do the same thing with a music blog every time I did a gig, which meant I was doing a lot of writing! Funnily enough, even though more people I knew in person read my music blog than my gaming one, my gaming blog was engaging a far wider audience. I kept writing on and off about some hobby games I was playing, and some video games I managed to beat, even writing about a game of pool at one point, but it took a long time before I found a format that I was happy to do regularly.

I covered Lego Star Wars in the
original No Game New Year...

Then in 2014 something happened: I came across a Youtube video from a guy called Brian Castleberry who had been talking to his friend Norm Caruso a.k.a. The Gaming Historian about a concept called No Game New Year. The idea was that they had built up a huge backlog of games, some of which they rarely played, so they set themselves a challenge and invited others to join: Don’t buy any new video games for 2014. Instead of that, we were supposed to play through all our old games, keep the ones we liked, get rid of the ones we didn’t, and really try to tackle our backlog. There were roughly 30 people on board to begin with, but by the time the year ended, only a few of us remained, including me, though I had come close to falling off the edge by erroneously buying a new copy of Final Fantasy VII! I don’t know how much of their backlogs the other people involved in the challenge managed to clear, but what I did notice was that without permission to buy new games, they were actually playing games a lot less – and doing more things with their families. That can only be a positive thing! Part of the challenge of No Game New Year was that we were all supposed to update each other on how we were doing with either a video, blog post or even just a Facebook status, (we had a group for it which I still share even to this very day!) so I tried to do the blog in a weekly format. It worked for a while, but I eventually found myself with very little to say without repeating myself, so I changed the format slightly and only wrote about games when I’d beaten them. This is the format of what eventually became Backlog Beatdown, my longest-running series that I created after No Game New Year.

Age of Sigmar was a refreshing change...

I went through some significant life changes in the following few years. I’d taken up singing lessons, started a self-employed music business, became a regular at some of the open mics in Wolverhampton and became a Dad. I found a lot of my spare time was taken up with all of that, so I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in hobby shops as I had prior; most of the games I played were video games and while I kept the roleplaying groups going a little longer, I had decided not to write about those experiences anymore. The fact that I’d bought what was at the time a reasonably powerful laptop capable of playing PC games was also conducive to this, so I kept my blog going with Backlog Beatdown.

Mordheim's been one of my favourite games
of the last decade...

As part of my quest to try to play all my games, I found myself listening to the Co-Optional podcast while I played, featuring TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and a guest for the episode. It was a three hour show in which they would all talk about, amongst other things, the games they had been playing that week. And somewhere around September 2017, I found myself thinking “wow, people are actually interested in this!” and decided to have a go at it myself. Thus, I began my biggest and most popular series of blogs: Last Week’s Games.

Painting this boxed set was an achievement...

The idea was simple: write down what games I’d played in the week and find something to say about them. This usually amounted to two or three games every week, and if I found anything to say about the painting or hobby gaming I’d been doing that week, I’d write that down too. I’d try to release them on Mondays, (regular readers will know that it doesn’t always work out that way!) and run it as a weekly series that I’d share on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to include some of the hobby games, including the one Roleplaying group I managed to stay in. Quite quickly, though, I needed to put a restriction on how much I was writing, because I didn’t want it to become more work than fun. What I decided to do was keep the blogs to exactly 700 words each: this is about a side of A4 paper and is about as much time anybody has to read anything. I quite enjoy editing the blogs to fit in with the word counts, and I rarely stray from it. It was a challenge to do this every week without repeating myself, and I didn’t always manage it, but I did find a massive uptake in my readership – I was getting a lot more views with regular content than I had before. Most of them were from overseas, funnily enough; Russia and Italy are two countries that often have people reading my blog!

TotalBiscuit - Gone but never forgotten.

This carried on for about a year, up to the point when I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time. I found myself needing to re-balance what I was doing in my spare time, owing to the adjustments I had to make to accommodate both mine and my partner’s working patterns and my daughter, to whom I was able to provide a home for the first time. But in the new year of 2019, I started the blog going again and apart from a couple of wobbles where I found myself caught up in all sorts of things with little to say about gaming, I have kept it going ever since.

Murder in the Alps - an interesting, if
not-well-paced mobile game...

At this point I would like to interject that around 2014, as a result of No Game New Year, I created a list of all my Xbox 360 games. I’ve developed it to include all my systems and games and keep track of how many I own, have played, beaten and 100%ed on an Excel spreadsheet. The original plan was to share it on the blog; I never did this because looking at the numbers is frankly embarrassing. But it did give some structure to what I’ve been playing and when, rather than blindly buying and trying games every so often!

Pandemic became oddly prophetic...

All of this makes me wonder where to take the blog from here. I’ll keep Last Week’s Games going, I still enjoy that, and I’ll keep Backlog Beatdown going when I remember to do it! (At the time of writing I still need to write a review to Gears of War 2 which I played last Autumn.) But the way my life and hobbies have changed over the last couple of years has given me some different things to say. For a start, I don’t talk about painting on Last Week’s Games anymore; I put that in a separate blog called Last Month’s Painting – I don’t paint anywhere near enough to make it a weekly series!

Nice to let games become
a family thing...

Also, having huge stacks of games around my house is all well and good, but here I find myself with more to say about how that relates to my daughter. She was pre-school age when I first bought her a board game, and she enjoys playing with me. It’s very interesting to observe her level of engagement, and her enthusiasm for certain games over others developing as we’re going along, to the point where it’s something she wants to do to entertain herself, rather than something she wants to do with me specifically – though that’s still an important point. I’m at the age now where many of my contemporaries are starting families – in many cases already have – and they’re wondering how their hobbies and interests can relate to their children. It’s nice to be able to talk about my experiences in that area, and it may become something I focus on in the future, but I certainly don’t want to make a job out of playing with my daughter so I’ll approach that with a certain amount of care.

The UK Game Expo is a lovely opportunity
to see my long lost friends from Swindon...

There were some plans that fell by the wayside. I wanted to start attending tournaments and blog that, and I tried doing a blog series called Tournaments and Tribulations. Unfortunately, that never really got off the ground, as my week allows little time to rock up at tournaments and spend weekends playing games! My experiences in this area are mainly confined to games I’ve played at the UK Games Expo. I also wanted to do a series of blogs where I go through the campaigns of some of the Dungeon Crawling games that I own (Space Hulk, Descent etc.) That never happened either, though it would have been a mission to coordinate even before Covid-19 became a thing we were all going to have to get used to hearing about! I’d still like to try it out at some point though.

The Horus Heresy: Legions is a game that
took up a fair amount of my time.

It’s also been suggested to me that I record video footage of games I’ve been playing and put them up on Youtube or something similar. I have thought about it and even had a go at streaming The Horus Heresy: Legions at some point. The problem is that making videos takes a fair amount of work and time that I don’t necessarily have, and the equipment I own isn’t up to it – I can’t get a decent framerate out of my laptop if I’m running recording software on it; domestic laptops aren’t designed for that, and I don’t have the hardware necessary to record footage from my consoles either. I could address both of those issues, but that would be a large investment to make for not necessarily a huge return – most games I play are several years old, and common interest in them has waned.

And there’s the fact that somewhere, out in the world, there’s a small sub-set of people who still like to read the written word every now and again…

Last Week's Games: Lego Star Wars, Skyrim

 I knew it! I knew it was a good idea to hold on to Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I knew I’d want to come back to it eventually!

As regular readers will know, my daughter Jessie has recently taken an interest in Star Wars. She’s now watched all nine mainline films and a lot of the Clone Wars series, and last I looked she was going through the Lego Star Wars series as well. At some point, I asked her if she wanted to play Lego Star Wars with me on the Xbox 360. She did, and thus began my next trek through the Star Wars Saga…

We haven't even touched
Free Play mode yet...

In all honesty, this is one of the many things that Lego games were designed for – a safe, easy game aimed at younger players, but enough implied humour to entertain older gamers, and collections and achievements for the hardcore completionists. If you’ve been following my blog long enough you’ll remember that this is one of the few games I’ve actually managed to complete 100%, so there’s nothing left for me to do in the game now – except to guide my young daughter through the game. It will take a while before she builds up the skill and dexterity needed to handle games much more intense than this, but Lego Star Wars is designed almost perfectly. Jessie doesn’t like fights – at least, not ones where she doesn’t know she can win – and is happy to let me handle most of the enemies. Instead, she likes using the force on the build-its, and the droid characters to do their various utility functions in the game. She’s still got a role to play in the game, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the combat, which she can do when pressed and really enjoys piloting the vehicles. She’s less fond of the vehicle levels, and there’s some tricky platforming sections she had to drop out of the game to allow me to complete. She also absolutely refused to take part in the section from Revenge of the Sith where Anakin fights Obi-Wan. But ultimately gaming is and always has been a large part of my life, and it’s lovely to be able to share some of that with Jessie.

Hagravens start out tough, but can be
dispatched with a well-placed hit...

The other game I’ve been playing for far too long over the last few weeks is Skyrim, and I’ve reached as deep into the game as I’ve ever managed before. It certainly requires some pacing! I became briefly involved with a discussion on Facebook about the quality of the game; it’s obviously very good but some questions were raised about the fact that there is so much optional content to pursue. I understand what they were going for; the mainline quest is what you must complete to beat the game but at the same time there are other situations in Skyrim and other stories to be told. If the aim was to increase the immersion of the game though, it doesn’t really work, as it requires you to suspend your disbelief that the main quest is happy to wait around for you to do it while you look for ten bear pelts, or get involved in some other side quests that have absolutely nothing to do with it. I also find myself spending a significant amount of time trying to sell or store all my loot, so I don’t overextend my character’s weight limit! For these reasons, I tend to like Skyrim best when I can set myself a goal – clear out a dungeon, resolve this particular quest, that sort of thing – and can therefore keep the game going, rather than be overwhelmed by how much there is to do. In terms of scope, yes, Skyrim is amazing. But does a world really want to wait around for you to happen to it?

You may also have noticed that there was no painting blog for December. Sorry about that! Through all the things I had to do during that month, painting was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I have been working on something for this month which I’m hoping to finish in time.

And there’s a very special blog coming this Sunday…

Backlog Beatdown: Warring in the Stars with Star Wars: Starfighter

Recently, my daughter became interested in Star Wars to the point of watching all nine films in less than a week, and while I’ll happily concede that some of the films are better than others, I usually manage to find something to enjoy about them. Watching bits of Episode 1 back certainly piqued my interest enough to try out Star Wars: Starfighter, a game I’d picked up as part of a Humble Bundle purchase but hadn’t yet played…

Canyon runs need precision...

For a game that was released to fill a large space in the market for video games based on Star Wars while the prequel trilogy was in full swing, Starfighter seems to have its mindset firmly rooted in combining the game – a light fighter simulator – with what Star Wars is at its core: A character-driven story. You play as a Naboo Starfighter pilot called Rhys, a mercenary pilot called Vana and a pirate called Nym at various stages of the campaign, which tells a story of a run-up to the events of the Invasion of Naboo from the Trade Federation. Together with a non-playable mechanic called Reti, they are attacked, betrayed and otherwise set against the Trade Federation, and launch a guerrilla campaign against them in their fighters and bombers.

The inevitable comparisons to X-Wing and TIE Fighter come to mind but I found Starfighter to be a welcome break from that kind of simulation-style gameplay. Your guns either never run out of ammo or recharge, your shields recharge over time but there’s no faffing about re-distributing power, and your speed is managed through a simple speed up / slow down command. All the fighters handle the same but are played slightly differently depending on their armament; Rhys flies a standard N-1 Starfighter which is good for dogfighting, Vana pilots a Guardian Mantis that is good for disabling shields, and Nym pilots his Havoc which is primarily used for bombing runs. There are thirteen missions in the campaign, each one its own set of rules and objectives that must be completed to proceed, with additional objectives available to achieve if you wish.

The last mission takes place during the 
Battle for Naboo...

Starfighter is a good game, but you must be in the right frame of mind for it. The levels are varied and well-designed, and you’ll get past the first of them without trying, after which you’ll face a large difficulty spike where the objectives and threats leave more room for failure. And I can guarantee you’ll find fifty different things to hate about the game when you fail a mission over and over again – but when you finally work out what to do and manage a perfect run, you’ll feel a grin of excitement spread across your face as the Mission Complete screen comes up. Rarely have more modern games made me feel so good about beating a level! The last missions are absolute beauties, requiring knowledge of what’s coming and when, and managing your speed.

A quick note on graphics and sound: Apart from the Star Wars soundtrack which is always excellent, this game was released in 2001 and its assets are showing their age. The fighters and droid vehicles are functional enough, but even for the time, those character models were hideous, and the voice acting sounds cheesy even for a Star Wars game. It didn’t affect my enjoyment, just don’t expect it to be easy on the eye!

Nym's bombs take some getting used to,
but are a lot of fun!

Star Wars games often run into the problem of the stakes being relatively low. Either they’re following the mainline plot of the films, in which case you’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the films, in which case you don’t feel like you’re affecting the plot to any great extent because you know how it all works out. Starfighter is in the latter category. I don’t want to spoil the plot in the review so I won’t say if I was right – but I will say I wasn’t giving the game enough credit. I’ve described what I mean in the main blog so have a look at that if you’re interested.

I’d caution against spending any substantial amount of money on Starfighter, but if you can find it cheaply enough, it’s well worth your time.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Starfighter

Owing to my daughter’s newfound interest in Star Wars, I found myself playing a game I’d had for a while but never gotten around to playing: Star Wars Starfighter. I beat it as well, and the review for it is coming out on Friday. I’ve said most of what I want to say about the game there, but here I’d like to develop a point I made about the plot of Starfighter. Spoilers ahead, for whatever it’s worth!

Holding back the invading droids
was a huge amount of fun.

One problem that most Star Wars games run into is that they can’t really tell their own story without reducing the stakes. Most of the so-called Extended Universe has been declared Non-Canon now, presumably because Disney didn’t want to have to ret-con anything while they were making the new films, so that doesn’t help, but they still struggle either way. Of the games that are available, either they follow the mainline plot of the films, in which case they’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the mainline plot, in which case you never really get the sense that you’re affecting anything major since the key points of the Star Wars saga happened in a story you’re not involved in.

Starfighter was always going to run into this issue, but it never loses sight of what Star Wars is at its core – a character-driven story adventure. It handles it quite well: The plot is set during the run-up to the Battle of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. Through their own activities as fighters, mercenaries and pirates, the four pilots discover a droid production facility on one of the planets and must work together in order to blow up the facility. The threat is established by showing the duplicitous nature of the Trade Federation to two of the characters in the early game, and resolved by having them participate in at least some of the battle of Naboo in the later game – you really do get a sense of how worse it could have been for Naboo had the Droid army been at full strength, which if your characters hadn’t been involved, it would have been.

Flying around a hangar is
always a bit fiddly...

Where Starfighter lets us down plot-wise is in the final boss. The fight itself is fine and takes a lot of the skills you’ve been building throughout the game, if a little annoying when you don’t know exactly where it’s going. But the problem with any battle fought in the Separatist portion of the saga is that as your opponents are always droids, they lack the necessary levels of humanity influence the plot themselves. Starfighter tries to get around this by having the Trade Federation employ mercenaries to interfere with negotiations at the start of the game when you’re escorting Queen Amidala, Rhys’ mentor is killed by one of them and he turns up at the end as the final boss having not participated in the story at any point in between. First, it doesn’t make sense for the Trade Federation to have attacked Queen Amidala before she signed their treaty, and second, it very much felt like a final boss for the sake of having a final boss.

None of which spoils the experience of the game, you understand. It’s still a fun space shooter that I was happy to play, and it made a refreshing change for me to play a game I can wrap up in a few days rather than several months! But it did make me think about the reasons that the plot of most Star Wars video games is often its weakest point and realise that we can be thankful for those games that counter it with some very solid gameplay.

As an aside, the exception here – and probably why this game is so fondly remembered – is Knights of the Old Republic. This was set far enough away from the plot of the Skywalker saga that the galaxy would have had time to sort itself out whichever way it went, but also Bioware had a very talented writing team at the top of their game telling a fun story with twists, stakes and bitter struggles that many still hold as the standard of RPG storytelling to this day.

 

Backlog Beatdown: Assaulting Aliens with Super Mutant Alien Assault

I can’t quite remember when or why I made the decision to buy Super Mutant Alien Assault; most likely from the release sections of one of the Co-Optional Podcasts. I do remember the art style having a 2D “SNES” feel to it, and that would have engaged me as much as anything else. However, it was a long time between buying the game and playing it…

Super Mutant Alien Assault is an arena / roguelike game released in 2015.The premise is that aliens have taken over some space ships in three different galaxies, and you play as a security robot tasked with eliminating the aliens and saving the human race, or something along those lines. Let’s be honest, you don’t usually play games like this for the plot!

One of the boss battles...

The game is a fast and frantic platform shooter, with the roguelike elements linked mainly to progression – extra starting items unlock the more you play through the game. There are three galaxies and four levels per galaxy; each galaxy ends with a random boss battle and the other three levels are randomly generated as well. You must take on hordes of irradiated aliens, killing them quickly before they mutate into their upgraded forms, whilst completing the level objectives to move on, beating the boss on each level, until you clear the game on one run. No easy task!

A lot of frantic action is sometimes
hard to keep track of!

You start off without weapons, but can pick up a primary weapon on most levels – these start off with the fairly standard shotgun, uzi and rocket launcher, but later go on to include laser guns, plasma cannons, a handheld weapon of concentrated light that is definitely not a lightsaber, and even a chakram that holds exploding bombs. You also have secondary weapons – pistols, chackrams and a burst assault rifle. There are explosive weapons as well, ranging from grenades to trip mines to entire bomb packs. And finally, you have some special abilities as well – higher jumps, faster movement, plasma blasts. Play the game for long enough and you’ll find a combination of weapons and upgrade items that you like, but the game randomises the equipment drops so there’s no guarantee you’ll get the one you’re looking for – you get what you’re given, and it’s up to you to make it work.

Super Mutant Alien Assault works very well; the game has tight and responsive controls, challenges you at the right level and the levels are quick enough for an engaging experience that don’t require too much of a time investment. Killing aliens is always fun, but additional objectives in the missions, plus the game not always giving you access to certain kinds of weapons, and only allowing you to heal once per galaxy, lend a strategic element to the game that requires strategic thinking and forward planning. The graphics are nothing special, but they don’t need to be; they’re top end of 5^th generation 2D graphics and will still look as good in 20 years. The sound is good as well; the sound effects are marvellous, and the backing music is made up of dubstep tracks which are just old enough in 2021 to provoke a feeling of nostalgia.

In these levels, you must get the green capsules
up to the receptical at the top...

If there is a criticism to be made it is in the difficulty: It’s a little too easy to beat. I defeated the three galaxies and bosses quite easily and found most of the challenge in trying to get through the entire game – the advanced difficulty levels don’t unlock until you’ve done this. With Roguelikes, most of the progression is found in unlocking extra items and upgrades, but you really don’t need to be playing for very long at all to have found all of these. It’s not necessarily a problem for me as I wasn’t looking for a long experience, but people who like a tough route to progress through the game might expect a little more.

All in all, Super Mutant Alien Assault is a great game that I’d happily recommend. It’s a great introduction to this sort of game, plays very well and a lot of fun. Roguelikes aren’t everybody’s preferred style of game, and this game lacks exposition, but most people will have a good time with Super Mutant Alien Assault.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.