Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Backlog Beatdown: Rimming the Sky with Skyrim

 I bought The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the Xbox 360 way back in 2013. It’s been released on just about every major platform going since then, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade; I’ve owned the game for roughly eight years and I’ve only just gotten around to beating it so I don’t know what I was going to do with extra content and multiple copies of the game!

Hagravens are vile creatures...

Skyrim is a game that needs little introduction. After waking up as a prisoner on a cart and narrowly escaping execution, your character discovers an almost unique ability to absorb the souls of dragons. They find out they are the so-called Dragonborn, and that they alone can harness the power of the shout to stop the evil dragon Alduin from raising the dragons from the dead and conquering Tamriel. Along the way, they must learn to control their powers, contend with warring factions, and explore caves, dungeons, and constructs to build up their power, all building up to the final confrontation…

Ugh. Spiders.

I chose an Argonian for my playthrough and was going to go for a lightly armoured double-handed weapon fighter build, but as is very often the case when people play Skyrim, you end up as a sneaky archer. I managed to get somewhere between the two and was very glad of my ability to breathe underwater and heal quickly! I’ve played Skyrim several times already but as all my previous save files were on a different hard drive, I started a fresh character to see where a new adventure would take me.

The thing with Skyrim is that you really need to pace yourself. There’s no point going straight for the main quest; I’m sure a skilled enough player could speed run the game in about five hours but there’s a whole world out there to explore, and there’s little reason to miss out on the content on offer here. I levelled my character up to 50 and there were still outstanding quests to resolve by the time I’d finished the game – I’d refrained, for example, for taking a side between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. This was a choice I’d made in the game, as I couldn’t honestly say I supported either side. The Imperials were the invaders of the land, but such strongholds they had were being maintained reasonably well. The Stormcloaks had the home advantage but had a ruthless streak in them that made them very difficult to support. That I managed to beat the game without resolving this conflict goes to show how huge this game is! Do a quest here, clear a dungeon there, take a bounty somewhere else, sell your gear wherever you can. Set yourself some goals and play for however long you want to play.

Clavicus Vile is the exception
to the otherwise static voice acting...

The graphics work well enough for a ten-year-old game, and some of the scenery is beautiful; Skyrim feels like a living breathing world to get lost in. The music is great, and the sound effects are good, the voice acting is alright for the most part, if not particularly inspired. The game does suffer from a few bugs that can get in the way of beating certain quests, and I had to weather a few hard crashes, but nothing that stopped me from beating the game – not that I’d have realised I had, if I hadn’t known that this was the end of the main quest. It was only once I’d got to this point that I realised – there are very few cut-scenes in the game, and the ones that are there are interactive to a certain extent. All the exposition is done within the game. There’s no ending sequence, no credit roll, you just… win. I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down by that, but after sinking nearly 120 hours into the game, the journey made it more than worthwhile.

Skyrim is better than average and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’m not sure it’s the pinnacle of RPG experiences, but it does what it does well. I found a way of pacing myself so that it worked well for me – but don’t forget it took me eight years to get there!

Final Score: 4/5: Great game

Backlog Beatdown: Crashing into more Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot 2

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a game Kirsty bought as part of the N-Sane Trilogy when she first had the PS4. I play Crash every now and again, usually as some sort of intermission between long-form RPGs and open world games! Regular readers may remember I beat the first Crash Bandicoot nearly two years ago, and after coming back to Crash Bandicoot 2 I reached the end of that a few weeks ago. Here’s what I found:

Watch out for that plant...

Crash Bandicoot is abducted by Dr Neo Cortex and instructed to retrieve 25 crystals for him so that Cortex can harness their power to stop a cataclysm caused by an up-coming alignment of planets. Crash must traverse 25 levels in search of these crystals, and hand them over to Dr Cortex. However, all is not as it seems, as Crash’s sister Coco warns him against Cortex and his former assistant, Dr Nitrus Brio, contacts Crash with an alternate plan… which path will Crash choose?

The Mascot Platformer was declining in popularity during the mid-late 90s but given that Crash was flying that flag for Sony’s PlayStation, it shared a remarkable number of the same tropes as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. The groundwork was set in the first Crash game – the characters, the villains, the basic gameplay loop – and Crash 2 was more of the same but expanded upon in ways that made the game better. In addition to everything he could do in the previous game, Crash also acquired a power slide and crawl move, which came in useful for certain puzzling sections of the game. Late in the game, Crash acquires a jetpack, which is a little fiddly to use but shakes the gameplay up a bit. And the post-game content contributes to the end as well – the “alternate plan” I referenced earlier involves getting all the gems – much harder than the crystals – which affects how the game ends when you defeat the final level.

As a tribute to my Dad's recollection of a 
Monty Python sketch, I called these hedgehogs:
"Spiny Norman."

Most of the levels in Crash 2 are designed with the 2.5D sensibility that worked well for the Crash Bandicoot series at the time. You run from one side of the level to the other, smashing all the crates, spinning, or dodging the enemies, picking up the crystals – they’re always in the path of the level and are impossible to miss – and defeating the bosses once every five levels or so, which are quite a bit easier than the first game. The levels require some quite precise platforming, and while there’s nothing as irritating as the bridge levels from the first game, there are certain sections where jumping on platforms that are ahead of you require some trial and error! The levels where you ride an animal for extra speed make a welcome return, as do the levels where you’re running away from a much larger obstacle – a giant polar bear or rock! The latter are hard because you are running into the screen in this case, and it’s very difficult to see where you’re going. It wobbles on the line between satisfyingly challenging and frustratingly hard, so while getting to the end of the game is far from impossible, I find that Crash is better enjoyed in small bursts. Having reached the end of the game, I have no desire to go back and find all the gems – I haven’t got anywhere near as much investment in this as Spyro!

Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin...

The game is presented well; the graphics are fine, and the sound is good. The voice acting is in line with the larger-than-life cartoon characters of the 90s and works as well as it needs to. The plot is a little thin – it is obvious that a “betrayal” twist is on its way – but that’s hardly the point of a Crash Bandicoot game!

I enjoy Crash Bandicoot as a distraction from longer and more serious games, as I described above. But the frustrating difficulty makes it hard to enjoy as much as some other games I’ve been playing. Crash 2 is definitely better than its predecessor, and remains a good game, but for me, never quite reaches the levels of being a great game. I’ve enjoyed it – but that’s all I did.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.