Last Week's Games: Cities: Skylines, Super Smash Bros. Ulitimate, Fortnite

Strewth, I’ve been playing a lot this week! I beat Assassin’s Creed 2, you can read about that here, but I’ve talked enough about that game so here are some others:

Yeah, mine doesn't look that good.

On one of the nights in the week I had a go with Cities: Skylines, a city building game on the PC. It’s been out for a few years now and has been talked up quite positively as an alternative to SimCity. From what I’ve been hearing about the most recent iteration of SimCity, an alternative was needed, as many people weren’t happy with the always-online DRM (Digital Rights Management,) and the fact that it almost forced a multiplayer mode on what has been traditionally a single-player experience. Having not played a SimCity game since SimCity 3000, however, I went into Cities: Skylines without much prejudice; games like this have moved on since I last played one and I was willing to see what has changed since then.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised thus far! The zoning is much the same as I remember, but the roads can bend (not that I’ve been able to make it happen yet!) and while there are a certain set of utilities you need to make happen straight away like power and water, other public services – police, fire, healthcare – don’t actually come in to it until your town is big enough to give rise to the need for them. If I have any issues with it, I would say that once the game starts moving, it moves a little fast for my liking. This is arguably because I’m still trying to learn the mechanics, I can’t see the veterans of the game saying the same, and I know you can pause it, but I couldn’t help the feeling that the game was running away with me somewhat.

Absolute chaos for most of this!

I charged my Nintendo Switch and played a couple of games on that as well, namely Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. I bought this game a couple of months ago, and knowing the scale of the game, didn’t touch it for weeks. I’ve had a go with it now and I’ve quite enjoyed it; I’m not sure about the controls (Combining platforming with two-finger fighting is an odd one!) but they can be re-bound, so that’s ok. Fighting in arena battles with characters from major gaming franchises is fun, and with a lot to unlock it’s the kind of game I can dip in and out of and continue to make progress as I’m going along. I’m still getting used to the mechanics; getting your opponent’s damage to a certain point then knocking them off the edge of the stage is unlike any fighting game I’ve played before, but it’s an interesting challenge which I’m enjoying so far. If I get enough games to justify it, I might consider buying a subscription to the Nintendo live service – I haven’t yet, but I think with Smash I may always have the fact that I haven’t got a hope of unlocking any of the online achievements at the back of my mind…

Better get used to seeing this load screen...

Finally, I’ve had a go with Fortnite, the Battle Royale game that everyone’s been talking about, for better or worse. I had a go with it on the Switch; I don’t know how well that version stacks up to everyone else but that’s what I’ve chosen to play it on. It’s alright. Again, I’m finding the controls a little off, and I’m not sure how mapping some of the game’s key controls to the face buttons lends itself well to such a compact machine as the Switch. But as a shooter, it’s fine, I’ve played it for long enough to have an idea of its addictive qualities and have fallen into the trap of the “Just one more go” mentality. It is worth the hype? I don’t think so, but then again I haven’t bought the battle pass (and until I’ve earned enough, what was it again, “V-Bucks” in game to buy it, I won’t,) so I probably haven’t had much of the core experience yet. I don’t know how frequently I’ll come back to this, but it’s not like I’ve spent any money on the game, so...

Backlog Beatdown: Assassinating more Creeds with Assassin's Creed 2

I bought Assassin’s Creed 2 a few years ago, not long after beating the first Assassin’s Creed game. By all accounts the second game in the series was the better of the first two games, but I found when I played it that I wasn’t quite ready to come back into the rhythm of Assassin’s Creed games at that point, and left it for a couple of years. I came back to it with the intention of getting to the end…

The double assassination was a pretty cool move...

Assassin’s Creed 2 picks up the story of Desmond Miles from where the previous game left off, as he escapes from Abstergo’s laboratory. Teaming up with a group of assassins in a safehouse, he investigates the memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a charming but foolish young man. After witnessing his father and brothers being executed after being framed for treason, Ezio seeks out his uncle Mario who trains him in combat and sets him off on a quest to kill the men responsible for arranging his family’s death. On the way, Ezio develops new skills, finds new weapons, makes new allies, and is eventually inducted into the order of Assassins, who seek peace through freedom. But where do the motivations of the conspiracy truly lie? And what is at stake?

The initial run of Assassin’s Creed games were the early stages of what would eventually become the Ubisoft Open-World Sandbox game, and while Assassin’s Creed 2 was released before this kind of thing became the standard, many familiar tropes are here. Tall buildings to climb to unlock certain areas of the map, the side activities that involved racing and puzzle platforming, collectibles, assassinations, funnily enough, and the occasional story quest to keep the narrative of the game moving. Some changes were made to the handling of the character between the two games, but we know what we’re getting here – go around the cities, complete all the tasks, and find out what is happening in the long-running battle between the Assassins and the Templars. Talking about it in 2020 makes the whole thing feel a bit old-hat to be honest – but at the time, this was on the cutting edge of what could be done with video games.

This is some point early on in the game, judging
by the length of the health metre...

Assassin’s Creed 2 brings to the game a couple of differently handled sections. There’s a bit where you get to test out Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine, for example, and race a carriage. Probably the most significant addition to regular play are the assassin’s tombs that you can investigate, since they involve some puzzle-platforming that is quite challenging in places. Plus, there are a few new weapons you can play with; smoke bombs and poison. Some of these are more useful than others, but they add an extra dimension to gameplay.

The Assassin’s Creed games that I’ve played so far have always been good to look at, and this one is no exception. The cities you visit are cleverly designed and have their own feel to them, the character models are looking a little of their time now but do at least have expression, and the cutscenes are well-presented. The voice acting is fine; the characters are straight and serious when they need to be, and overblown caricatures for the one-shots, and the sound-effects are suitably visceral. And there were no incompetently coded bugs that I could see.

You know that look...

So, is Assassin’s Creed 2 a good game? I reckon it is. It can be to play and tells an interesting story, if a little contrived. It goes on maybe a little longer than it needs to, but sometimes I need to remember that these games are designed for people who would buy this game on launch, and that would be the only game they bought for about three months so there would need to be plenty to do to keep them engaged. I expect that playing the game constantly would get old after a while; I was determined to finish it and was playing the game past the point where I was having fun with it. I don’t expect I will get the DLC for it either, since it adds nothing to the overall plot, but Assassin’s Creed 2 was fun while it lasted.

Final Score: 3/5. Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2

I’ve slowed down on the painting since last week. I made a start on six of the Terminators from the Space Hulk set, but after the third rather thin layer of red paint I put on, I didn’t take that any further. I probably will this week – but I struggled to find the inclination last week. There were a few different reasons for that, including the fact that I was enjoying playing some other games in the evenings!

Not looking good for Europe...

At one point me and Kirsty had another go at Pandemic so that we could try to beat it again with proper regard to the rules this time. Some of you may remember we tried the game a few weeks ago but got two rather important points wrong: you’re supposed to draw two infection cards after an Epidemic, and for that reason, we didn’t get a single Outbreak; and you’re only allowed to give or take a card if you’re in the city of the card you’re trading, unless you’re the researcher which neither of us were. So, we tried again with those rules in place and the game beat us this time; we arrived at the end of the Outbreak track but there were only two cards left in the draw deck so we would have lost the following turn anyway. It didn’t help that we’d got a particularly harsh draw at the start of the game and an early Epidemic; both New York and London had three infection cubes on them and as they’re next to each other, when those cards came up again they were a part of a triple outbreak across Europe and North America, and the blue cubes even found their way to South America.

The Shadow Beast.,,

I spent a couple of evenings playing Arcania on the PS4. One of the problems I run in to when I’m blogging long-form RPGs is finding things to say about it without repeating myself; if you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that by the standards of most of what you can buy for the PS4, Arcania is pretty poor. And yet this is the game I’m sticking with! I’m not far away from the end of the game now (the target level for the end of the game is 30 and I’m at 25,) and I think that, for all its faults, Arcania does have some positive qualities. I’ve never particularly liked Crafting systems, for example, so it’s nice to play a game where I don’t necessarily feel obliged to use it. But I think the main benefit for me is the linearity. This is no open world game where you can wander around the map becoming hopelessly lost and confused; it’s always obvious where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. The dungeons are challenging in their own way, and often quite fun. And while there are side quests, there are not too many of them – they don’t necessarily distract from the main storyline. Sadly, the main storyline is also marred by the cutscenes not working properly, and I missed some crucial pieces of information – thankfully you can read the finer points of these in your quest log – but there are some redeeming qualities. The voice acting, for example, while far from great, somehow manages to convey the urgency of your mission. And the unnamed lead character, while a complete doofus in many situations, has a B-movie-like self-awareness – almost as though he knows he’s in a video game. I might even get to the end of this one!

Just done the bit with the Golden Mask...

Contrast that with the other long-form game I’ve been playing a lot of lately: Assassin’s Creed 2. While this game is far more competently put together, Ubisoft were finding their stride in creating huge open-world sandbox games, with plenty to do in them, yes, but a lot of it feels like it’s padding out the game. I guess it represents good value for people who bought this game new and that might be the only one they buy for three months, but for me there’s quite a lot of unnecessary faffing about in Assassin’s Creed games. Still, I’m close to the end of it now!

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII and Spelunky

I found the original Mortal Kombat trilogy on sale on GOG and remembering how much fun I’d had with those games in the past, I bought them and downloaded the first game. The first thing I noticed was that it handles quite a bit differently to the Sega Megadrive version of the game I was used to…

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

There’s no point in being polite about this; the controls are incredibly clunky, even for a Mortal Kombat game. The game was released for DOS and runs on DOSbox, which doesn’t support the game controller I have. This being a fighting game, I’d rather be using a controller, but from what I understand, that wouldn’t be much better: As PC controllers at the time weren’t expected to have more than four buttons anyway, whichever configuration of the controller settings you used would have meant missing out on at least one of the necessary buttons. I ended up rebinding and using some of the keyboard for the game. It works… but it’s very fiddly to remember what key does what button, and often I find myself pressing buttons that do nothing at all.

Elsewhere, the game is closer to the Arcade game than the console ports that came later. The music is different to how I remember it from the Mega Drive, but some of the tracks were used in the Gameboy port of the game! The fights work well enough, if you can get past the controls, and it would be churlish of me to suggest I’m not enjoying it at all, but there are better fighting games than this now.

A very sad moment of the game...

With the corona virus gripping the country and a lot of my work put on hold, I have spent quite a bit of time playing Final Fantasy VII on my Nintendo Switch. This is another game that, objectively speaking, hasn’t aged particularly well, but is always a joy to play, nonetheless. At the time of writing I’m in the Corel Prison, (I got game over-ed in the fight against Dyne; I’d forgotten how quick he reacts!) which means I’m past the point I reached the last time I attempted a complete playthrough. I’d be surprised if any of you remember this as it was over five years ago, but I tried playing through the PlayStation version of the game which sadly stopped working en route to Corel. Whether I’ll see this through to the end I don’t know, and with the remake due out in a few weeks, I may not have to – but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

I carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2 when I could spare the time, and I’m working my way through the missions in Venice. Funnily enough there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much side activity to do in Venice as there is in the other cities in the game; maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the game wants to move the story on a little more quickly now.

Intense...

Then, when my daughter turned up, I had a go with Spelunky on the Xbox 360. This is a bit of an odd game for me as I played it after playing Rogue Legacy, and I didn’t think Spelunky was as good. But it is one of the better pick up and play games I own on the 360, and the controls are simple enough for my daughter to at least give it a go! It’s a very difficult game, but we have fun in the mines. In my case that means getting through as much of the game as I possibly can, in her case it means trying to get to the end of the level before the ghost gets her!

I also managed to finish painting my second squad of Chaos Raptors for my Black Legion army and bought another box of them. My intention is to get three six-man squads plus a Chaos Lord to make up a 500pt army and see how I feel after that. But I’m painting these models more quickly than I’ve managed in a long time, so while this would normally take me close to a year, this year may prove a different matter entirely.

Last Week's Games: Age of Empires, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2, SSX World Tour and Painting Chaos Raptors

I’ve had all sorts on this week…

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.

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.

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.

Last Week's Games: Lumo, Planescape Torment, Assassin's Creed 2, Tekken 6

I’ve not been in the best of health this week; nothing worse than a cold but it’s knocked me about!

I like being able to change the colour of the character...

I’ve played some more of Lumo on the Nintendo Switch; the puzzling nature of the game makes it better enjoyed in short bursts, but I’ve been having fun with it. Collecting all the rubber ducks continues to be a challenge, but it became a lot easier once I’d gone online and found that you can hold down the jump button to jump as soon as you land. This isn’t usual for platform games but is a welcome addition here! There are other elements to the game too; a minecart level, and I’ve reached a rather odd section where you have a space-shooter mini-game, of all things – an odd addition to an already very surreal game, and I’m hoping it will all make sense by the time I get to the end! I’ve also found some measure of combat in the game, though currently this amounts to nothing more than shining a light on your wand and scaring spiders away.

The starting room. Grim.

On advice from my sister I gave Planescape Torment another go. I say another go, but it’s been nearly two decades since the last time, when I owned it on CD-ROM! This is a computer RPG in a similar style to Baldur’s gate, except that the setting for this is Sigil, the City of Doors – and is quite frankly bizarre. You play as The Nameless One, a human-like being of some considerable power but not much in the way of memories, as you journey through a morgue trying to find out who and what you are. This is about as much as I’ve been able to discern so far, both from the time I’ve spent playing it and what I can remember from playing the game all that time ago! It is a complex plot and a very involving game, and like many RPGs I will be surprised if I manage to see it through to the end, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

Managed to pull this move off the other day...

I continued my game of Assassin’s Creed 2, guiding Ezio through a few speed and assassination challenges. Assassin’s Creed games can very often feel like busy-work, and this is no exception, but I enjoy what I can in short bursts and progress through the game a bit at a time. That way, I enjoy what time I put into it – even if it isn’t very much! I particularly enjoyed the mission where I had to assassinate four guards without using my weapons. Three of them were easy – they were on top of buildings, I just had to push them off – but the fourth was on the ground level, and the way I had to beat them was to hire a group of mercenaries to do it for me. This may seem counter-intuitive because on the surface it seems like you’re paying a certain amount of in-game money for the game to be played for you, but it got more interesting once some of the other guards started to interfere – at that point, I could join in the fight, as I was allowed to kill the guards that weren’t my targets!

Boom!

Finally, Kirsty and I played Tekken 6 on the Xbox 360. Tekken has always been a good set of games and I’ve enjoyed each one I’ve played, whether in the arcade or on various iterations of the PlayStation. I downloaded this version off Games with Gold, and we had a fine time experimenting with the different characters, finding out who we liked and who we didn’t. I used the random generator to pick a different character each time, whereas Kirsty likes who she likes and tended to go for Panda, Jack and Eddy. Eddy is probably the best character in the game for button-mashing, and Kirsty has a track record of winning with the bigger lads by spamming a low kick attack. We played 11 matches and Kirsty won 6 of them; some of them were close calls! It’s a pretty good game, and I’m looking forward to getting more deeply in to it later on.

 

Last Week's Games: Aracania, 8-Bit Armies, Assassin's Creed 2, Trivial Pursuit, Codenames, Labyrinth, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Hey! That's My Fish

As I’ve been off on Christmas Holidays for the last couple of weeks, I’ve had more than the usual amount of time to play games! There’s been quite a few of them so I’ll be brief:

At least the guy begins the game equipped for his
supposed profession - shepherd.

On the PS4, I’ve been playing Arcania. This is a grim dark western Role-Playing Game, of little surprise to anybody familiar with The Witcher or the Elder Scrolls. This has been a mixed bag for me so far. There are some major flaws in the game, not the least of them that the cut scenes don’t work. I thought this was deliberate when I first booted the game and started playing as a King in the middle of a nightmare, then woke up a few minutes later as some rustic pretty boy whose name I don’t know and had no greater aspirations than to perform a few fetch quests and marry his sweetie-pie. But then, after going through what I presume was the magic tutorial in which I defeated a giant beetle-like monster, the game jumped straight to the adventure being on a different island altogether, a malevolent force (of Paladins?) having apparently invaded your home and killed everybody there. I didn’t see any of this. Also, by the standards of what I expect from roleplaying games, Arcania is very basic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it sustains under its own weight, but people who play these types of games may be expecting a little more. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I may see it through to the end!

On my laptop I’ve been mainly playing 8-Bit Armies. I beat another couple of missions on the Renegade faction. I like that the game is structured in this way, because it gives me a definite start-stop mentality; I can play it for a bit and then stop without necessarily having to carry on for ages. With a sometimes very busy schedule, this can be a blessing indeed!

The Ultimate Faffing About Franchise!

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2. I started this a couple of years ago and didn’t get very far. This was during the time where I was trying to play one new game every week; AC2 was my new game for that week but I don’t seem to have played it much beyond the first couple of hours. I wasn’t far off beating the first Assassin’s Creed game at that point and perhaps I was a little “Assassin’s Creed”ed out to put much time in to it’s sequel, but I’m enjoying it now. It’s a good game, hopefully I’ll see it through to the end as well!

Finally, we had a few Board Games! At Fran’s birthday party, we played a mixture of Harry Potter and Friends Trivial Pursuit. We didn’t have a board; we just asked each other the questions and I surprised a few people with my knowledge of Harry Potter! I didn’t even touch the Friends cards; I’m not saying I’ve never watched it, but I don’t know enough about it to be good at trivia questions. We also had a go at Codenames, which everybody likes; it’s a very simple concept – Word Association meets Spy Networks – and you can have a lot of people playing so everybody’s enjoying themselves!

I was so close! (Blue.)
But Kirsty (Red) was closer...

Later in the week we had our own games night around our flat with Fran and Phil, where we played a few games. Labyrinth is an interesting game where you must search for six treasures in a constantly shifting maze, then return to your starting block. It was a surprisingly competitive game, which Kirsty eventually won, but not before I’d embarrassed myself by playing the choral introduction to Inside by Stiltskin prior to making what I thought was the winning move – only to find out it wasn’t. We also played One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which was ok and put Fran in mind of a game she runs with her Youth Theatre group called Mafia. We rounded it off with Hey! That’s My Fish, which is an old favourite, if surprisingly competitive and is always a nice one to come back to.

I’m back at work next week, let’s see what I have time for!

 

Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate, OlliOlli, Pokemon Leaf Green, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Cultists

It’s been quite an eventful week for me in terms of playing games! I had a couple of highlights, not the least of them finally getting to the end of Hand of Fate after owning the game for nearly two years. You can read my full review here, but I’d like to re-iterate how much it adds to the game that there’s no real plot to speak of, no Jacobean tragedy of characters to keep track of and no need to restart the game in order to remember what in the world was going on. It’s just you and The Dealer, and even though none of it gets explained by the end of the game, I feel it would have ruined it the game if it had tried to resolve it. It is a hugely fun experience, worth more than the sum of its parts, and one that I would more than recommend giving a go.

My new game for this week was OlliOlli; a 2D skating game. I’m finding this one very difficult to get to grips with because the system for tricks and landings is completely different from what I’ve come to expect from the 5/6^th generation Tony Hawk-style games. With those games, the face buttons combined with the directions handled the vast majority of the tricks, and landing was as simple as pointing the skateboard the right way when you hit the floor. With OlliOlli, the tricks are done almost entirely off the left thumb stick, and the A button (on the Steam controller) handles the landing. It’s taking some getting used to, but then, so did Tony Hawk, so I might come back and give it another go if I’ve got a few minutes.

I carried on with Pokémon Leaf Green for a while, getting to the other side of Moon Mountain and into Cerulean City. I haven’t done anything there yet because I didn’t play the game for very long this week, but I’ll keep going at it whenever it’s convenient.

I also carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2, arriving at the point where you have the option to spend some money to rebuild the town. It does require a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that roughly two years have passed between arriving at the villa and the game’s plot progressing, and I’m not sure to what end you are re-building the town. Some of the buildings have obvious benefits, but for the rest of them, I’m not sure what the purpose is unless there comes a point later in the game where you have to spend a lot of money! I’m having a pretty decent time with it, but while it does seem to take control of its own plot more than the previous game, it appears to be less open than Assassin’s Creed as well for that reason.

Finally I spend some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton painting Chaos Cultists. I enjoyed painting them a lot more once I’d got the block colours done on the clothes, because at that point they started to look quite good. I probably put a little more effort in to them than was necessary for rank-and-file models that will die if my opponent so much as breathes on them too hard, but hey, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to complete the army!

I had a look at some of the options for building my Word Bearers army, and found that with the addition of 20 cultists and a Dark Apostle, I could build a Battalion formation in a 500 point army. This would give me six command points to spend on Stratagems, and I found a couple of interesting ones that relate to the army I’m trying to build. I could, potentially, remove a unit of cultists from the board and bring it back at full strength on any of the board edges I like; this is a bit of a gamble but it might pay off in objective-based games. Also the Stratagem that relates to the Word Bearers take some of the risk away from summoning Daemons, I will see how this effects the composition of the army as it grows.

Last Week's Games: Pokemon Leaf Grean, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Space Marines

What might lurk in the grass? Rattata probably.

So I had a request to play a game! I’d never got one before and I was quite excited to do it. Katie, someone I know from the open mic circuit, asked me to cover a Pokémon game, and I remembered I had Leaf Green on my Game Boy Advance so I was happy to oblige! I hadn’t played it or any Pokémon game for a long time, though I remembered it being basically being the same game as the original Pokémon games released in 1999. (I don’t remember anybody talking about it before then – and people talked about it a lot at school!) I enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far; I named my player character Katie after the girl who asked me to cover it, and the rival Boris because he keeps appearing to mess everything up, rather like our current Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson. I didn’t get very far because I started with Charmander, which is all but useless for the first two Pokémon gyms so I had to do some grinding with my other Pokémon to beat Brock. I’m currently at Moon Mountain, and I intend to keep playing! But I’m not going to go for 100% completion. Even if I could be bothered, the chances that I’ll find someone with a GBA and a copy of Fire Red to trade the necessary Pokémon with are slim indeed. 
 

Ezio before he becomes an assassin...

My new game for this week was Assassin’s Creed 2. You’ll remember from my previous blogs I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed when I played it last year, and I found I was missing large open worlds with things to discover and do so I gave the next one a go. It’s a good game; I haven’t noticed much difference between it and the first game yet in terms of how it plays but the Assassin’s Creed 2 seems a lot more invested in its own plot than the previous game was, which is making for a far more compelling experience. I’m a couple of hours in to the game and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next!

And my new game for last week – I did play one, but I forgot to put it on the blog – was Dynamite Heddy from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. This is an oddball platformer typical of the time, where you controlled a little puppet that could attack by throwing its head in different directions. It’s competently-designed, and fun enough, but I don’t have much interest in coming back to it simply because I’m not all that invested. If it had been a game I’d been playing since I was nine, it would be another matter, but having just picked up the game at thirty-two, I couldn’t honestly say it held my interest.

They grow ever more numerous...

Finally, in the space of about a week, I built and painted five Chaos Space Marines in Word Bearers colours. I was tidying around in my room in preparation for having new windows installed, and found a box of Chaos Space Marines I’d had for years but hadn’t built (it was my original intention to build them as Thousand Sons.) I enjoyed painting them, and the vast majority of that was done in Warlords and Wizards in Netherton where I had some great company as well! I’ll never be allowed to use them in a tournament because the bases are the wrong size (the rank and file of the current edition of 40K uses slightly bigger bases than previously, and unlike Age of Sigmar, 40K measures from the base rather than the model,) but I’m not bothered by that. I’m no tournament player, and I’d rather they were built and used than never touched again because someone was being funny about their base sizes!

I’ve built and sprayed some more models that I’m hoping to paint next week. I’ve also re-found the fun in micro-managing army lists, and I’ve found that I can fit two squads of Chaos Cultists into a 500pt army, so that’s where I’m going next. I’ve got an old box of cultists that I never touched, so I’ve built them now and I’ll try paint scheme that fits in with the Word Bearers!