Last Week's Games: Fire Warrior, Hotline Miami, Shinobi 3, Golden Axe, Takenoko

I’ve missed the last few weeks of this! Sorry about that…

In the last few weeks, I’ve played and beaten a couple of games. One of them was Fire Warrior on the PC, and I’ve posted the review for it here. I have a few additional remarks to make here: Many of you will have noticed by now that I really enjoy games based in the Warhammer / Warhammer 40K universe. However, I rarely make the argument that they’re good games, and Fire Warrior is no exception. A lot of what eventually became first person shooters were being standardised during the period where Fire Warrior was released, and in many respects, the game fell short of the mark.

Wouldn't it be great to order one of
your squad-mates to cover you?

It is also worth remembering that the Tau were in their infancy in the 40K universe when this game was released, and with almost two decades under their belt, they have become quite a distinctive force in their own right, rather than the “new kids on the block,” so to speak. I don’t know how well they work in the most recent edition of Warhammer 40K, but certainly as far as 7^th edition, they relied on their squads working together more than almost any other army in the game. That got me thinking: What if a 40K game was made with Tau as the player characters, but instead of a standard FPS game, it became more of a squad-based game like SOCOM and Star Wars: Republic Commando? A rather odd comparison for me to make, since I’ve played neither, but I understand the general premise of those games and having an FPS game with a team of Fire Warriors with different abilities could be something very special indeed. Could it happen? Let’s hope so…

Get used to the game telling you you're dead
'cause you'll be seeing it a lot!

I also played Hotline Miami on the PC, getting to the end of it. I’ve got a review for that coming out on Friday, but I might as well tell you now, I really enjoyed the game. It takes a certain rhythm to get into it but once you have, you can have a lot of fun with the trial-and-error gameplay – as long as you don’t take it too seriously. There’s a lot to be said for being good at what you do. By the time I reached the end of the game, I was still having fun and wasn’t quite ready to get off my crazy horse quite yet, so I downloaded Hotline Miami 2 and I’m playing my way through that now.

These will go down in one hit if you
know what you're doing...

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been once again getting some enjoyment out of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I’ve often spoken about my fondness for Streets of Rage 2, but funnily enough I didn’t even touch that this time. I came back to my old sparring partner Shinobi 3, running, chopping and, er, shuriken-ing my way though the seven stages, and even though some of the platforming is frustratingly difficult, it is always a fun game to play. The furthest I managed was the final level on the flying airship, because as with many platforming games I died to falling off it more than anything else!

The platform sections of Golden Axe
were never great...

I also played Golden Axe with my daughter. This is one of the first games I ever played on the Megadrive, and some of you may remember I beat it several years ago. I had no intention to return to it, but I thought it was a simple-enough game to explain to Jessie, so we gave it a go! It went reasonably well until Jess forgot what button she had to press to continue the game when she died and locked herself out of the game. I managed to reach the end of the game but lost to the final boss.

Everyone loves cute pandas.

Finally, me and Kirsty played Takenoko – a board game where you must grow a garden and feed a hungry panda. Kirsty will play just about anything with cute animals in it, and she managed to win it this time by taking a lot of the panda-feeding cards and scoring points that way. It’s a great little game, about the right balance of luck and skill for us, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again soon!

Last Week's Games: 221B Baker Street, Ultra Street Fighter II

Last week me and Kirsty tried a board game out for the first time – 221B Baker Street.

The smell of freshly-printed
card was curiously absent...

This game, as you might expect, is built around the Sherlock Holmes property; not something either Kirsty or I have much investment in but from what I understand, Sherlock Holmes was the progenitor for a lot of how certain kinds of modern fiction were developed – detective stories, of which I’ve enjoyed many even if I can’t remember many of them, and also the “buddy cop” trope where the protagonists are polar opposites in terms of personality and approach, and this variation is often what leads to the results. The actual game presents you with a murder mystery, and the gameplay loop revolves around visiting different places in London to find different clues – some are word games that point to the solutions, and others are background information to support the given facts.

Now, there’s two ways you can play this – competitive or collaborative. The former involves up to six players using a die to move around the board, arriving in different locations and receiving their respective clues. You can also play a “Scotland Yard” card to block players from visiting certain areas, and a “Skeleton Key” card to remove the blocks. If you think you know the answer – usually the name of the murderer, the murder weapon and the motive – you travel back to 221B Baker Street, reveal your answer, and if you get it right, you win the game.

A board game without dice may seem a little odd,
but the visual representation helped.

However, Kirsty and I chose to play it in the collaborative way, where we travel to the different locations finding the clues and try to solve the mystery in as few moves as possible. You’re graded on how many turns it takes – a maximum of 14, and a minimum of 1, and you need to get between 1-5 to get the highest grade of Master Detective. Straight away this presented some mechanical differences – we eschewed the die, as there was no need to randomly determine how long it would take us to get to a location once we’d agreed where we were going. We also managed without the Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key cards as well, since there was nobody competing against us to block off. Finally, we saved ourselves a lot of time – the instructions were talking about roughly an hour and a half for one game, we managed it in 30 minutes. Instead, we focussed our attention on the clues themselves, trying to work out what they represent and working out the answer. The first case, we didn’t do very well – we got the worst possible grade of Watson, but we were struggling with the motive and it didn’t become clear until we’d gone around all the locations. The second case went much better; I think we were more familiar with the gameplay by then!

Straight away, Kirsty began wondering whether we can run this game online – if you’re reading this in the future, either when Covid-19 has been eradicated or when it’s caused the downfall of the entire human race and the ants have taken over, we have limited social contact in these times and much of it is over Zoom. We have done a few social deduction games with some friends and family, but a collaborative effort like this might make a nice change. Not bad given that the only reason we bought the game was because we’d accidentally bought each other two copies of the same games for Christmas 2019!

Fei Long's quick attacks make him
absolutely nails...

Elsewhere, I played Ultra Street Fighter 2 with Jessie. This was one of the first games I had on the Nintendo Switch, and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’d been doing Street Fighter for about 25 years at that point, and there was nothing new in there other than Way of the Hado. Playing it with my four-year old daughter was… interesting. Of course, I could have flattened her straight away if I’d wanted to, but that wouldn’t have been fun for either of us. Instead, I held back a bit and found Jessie’s unpredictability a refreshing challenge on the game! We didn’t need to play it for very long, but we enjoyed the time we had nonetheless.

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: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest, Magic Labyrinth, Ninja Dice and Dungeon Roll

I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons, hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.

Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter.

One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven, or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!

Where are the walls?

Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience, but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a 6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won the game by collecting five treasures!

I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least...

We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play (she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for a four-year-old!

Last Month's Painting: Completed the Space Hulk set

Finally... the set is complete

This week I finally came to the end of my journey to completely paint my Space Hulk set. For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know the story already: I obtained Space Hulk when I worked for Games Workshop in 2009, and even though I opened it and played it a few times with my mate Dave, I never got around to painting it. The reason for this is that I played the vast majority of war games in what was then Games Workshop, and what is now the Warhammer stores (though I’ve yet to play a game in one of those!) where there is a certain expectation for your models to be painted, or at least have some sign of progression, if you use them in the shop. The problem is that Games Workshop stopped supporting Space Hulk after the month it was released, so as I wasn’t going to play any games in the shop, it wasn’t a priority to paint them – not at the point where I perpetually had a tonne of Chaos Space Marines, Empire and Haradrim (one army from the three core game systems that it was expected I would have as a member of staff) that I needed to be painting! Dave, of course, didn’t mind the models not being painted, so even though we’ve really enjoyed playing the game in the past, the models remained unpainted for eleven years.

All the Terminators were very highly detailed...

That all changed when Lockdown began, and I found myself with a little (though surprisingly not much) more than the usual amount of spare time on my hands. I’d painted all the Chaos Space Marine Raptors I had for the Black Legion army I was working on, and while I did get some more eventually, I didn’t see any sense in going to any of the hobby shops to buy them while we were in lockdown. I had some of the old boxed sets in the loft of the flat I used to live in and decided to get the Space Hulk set down and paint them. I started with one squad of Terminators, then painted the twelve Genestealers that looked the most straightforward to paint. Both appeared in previous editions of the blog. I then painted the remaining squad of Terminators – including the dead one – and the leftover Genestealers, these didn’t make it on to the blog because I didn’t know what to say about them without repeating myself.

...and the Broodlord was a lot of fun!

Moving on, I painted the Librarian and the Broodlord. Both presented an additional challenge for me: As most folks who play 40K know, a Librarian’s armour is always blue no matter what chapter they’re attached to so that was a break from the red I’d been painting hitherto. I also went into a lot more detail with the weapons, face and armour than I did with the other models, as this was the “centrepiece” of the Terminator force in Space Hulk. With the Broodlord, this was much the same as the Genestealers I’d been painting up to that point but with an extra layer of colour on the flesh and carapace. There was also a lot more than the usual number of skulls and Terminator helmets that needed painting, and it took me a while, but I’m pleased with the result.

The finishing touches.

Finally, I painted the last little bits – the Artefact and the C.A.T. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on these, but it was a lot of fun doing the jewels on the Artefact.

I’ve bought quite a few “build and paint” games in the last 10-12 years and this is the first time I’ve managed to do both with a complete set, so I’m pleased with that. Both factions presented a fresh challenge: The colour I painted the Blood Angels Terminators was the same as the colours I’d been painting my Word Bearers, but with more of an emphasis on the gold than the silver. The Genestealers were an altogether different experience, as I haven’t painted Tyranids many times before, and when I have, it’s never been in any significant numbers. Space Hulk is a great set, and I’m glad to have completed it.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Last Week's Games: Speculating on the merits of luck vs skill in tabletop games.

I found myself thinking about luck vs skill when it comes to hobby games, in the light of some of the things that have been happening in my house and in the wider gaming community. The argument is as old as games themselves but for those of you who might not know: In almost every game you play, there is an element of luck. Traditionally this is done through dice or cards, and lately certain games have mobile apps that can handle a lot of the random number generation those items provide. The games that are reliant on luck – Snakes and Ladders, for example – are usually easy enough to play, but they’re often less engaging in the long term (or even to the end of the game!) because the players never really feel like they’re in control of what’s going on. On the other hand, games that rely entirely on skill – Chess is probably the most obvious example – are potentially more engaging but as the player base is highly skilled, it also has a higher barrier for entry which makes the game hard to access in any enjoyable way. 

This came up in the news this week where I noticed that SteamForged games are bringing their support of their game Guild Ball to an end – a game that’s been going for six years that I meant 

Apparently these two are called
Ox and Shark. I never knew.

to try at some point but never got around to giving it a go. Since I never played the game, I’m going mainly on what they’ve said in their blog that covers it, but a lot of the problem was that Guild Ball relies almost entirely on the skill of their players to play the game. To echo the article, this created a situation where you would win your first game – the ones that the developers showed you how to play – and lose your next hundred, as you faced off against player after player who had been playing the game a lot longer than you, knew exactly what they were doing and what they needed to do to win. There was nothing in between; no lower class of players that would happily have a casual game you could just enjoy. You learned to play, and then you were in with the big boys who would show no mercy. A high barrier to… not necessarily entry, but to play on any level that might be engaging or fun, doesn’t create a sustainable business model, and sadly now it’s reached the point where the creators of Guild Ball are calling it a day on what was otherwise an excellent game. 

The most obvious basis for comparison is Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl – a game far more reliant on luck, but with a loyal fanbase, if not necessarily indefinite support. But I’ve never played the tabletop version of it either. 

Presumably some forest, or other. One that's Enchanted.

The game I’ve been playing is The Enchanted Forest with Jessie and Kirsty. This game relies almost entirely on luck and won Game of the Year in 1982, though from what I understand that wasn’t a great year for board games. As I said last week, it’s not a particularly well-designed game, we can’t really play it to the conclusion written into the rules as Jessie gets fed up with it before then once the initial novelty has worn off. But it’s easy for her to play, she’s even getting the hang of moving pieces on their movement squares, and understands what she needs to do to win – even if she hasn’t quite worked out that you’re not supposed to share that information with the rest of us. This game is nearly 40 years old and still being printed to this day, not many games can say that, and the ones that can is mainly due to the fact that their barrier for entry is far more broad than those games that rely on skill.

Last Week's Games: Not Tonight and Enchanted Forest

This week I’ve played a new game on my Switch: Not Tonight. I’ve been playing it for a while now; it’s left me with a few things to say, and be warned: some are political…

Here we manage a guest list
and a regular line...

It’s a difficult game to describe, but if you could imagine a point between Papers Please and Brexit: The Game, that’s about where we are. In a version of the UK that had left the EU by 2018, a second-generation European immigrant has been confined to poor living conditions and has been forced to take a job as a bouncer in order to raise the £2500 per month needed to prevent him from being deported. You take jobs from some venues in the local area (beginning in the South West of England,) and the aim of the game is to manage the queue to get in to allow a certain number of people into the venue in roughly four hours of game time. You’ll be checking people’s ID – against their age to begin with, but the game soon escalates with guestlists, fake IDs, prejudice against people from certain countries, and the pressing need to keep on top of your own finances. This results in you having to micro-manage two queues and dealing with a horribly short time limit to get everything done – but get it done you must, or you will lose the game.

Even the title screen is sneering at Brexit...

Not Tonight is an odd game. The mechanics work well enough and make for an interesting and engaging experience. But beyond that, it seems to have a lot to say as an art form – or at least, how the developers thought a post-Brexit Britain might look like. As a British-born European on the edge of being deported, you’re treated with the upmost contempt from higher authorities than you, regular contempt from your bosses who are relying on you to make their night work (even the more friendly ones can’t resist a bit of Euro-baiting condescension,) a certain amount of grudging respect from people who are waiting in line to get in to their chosen venue, and the only people who treat you as equals are the other European people who are in a similar situation. It’s not without a sense of humour: even if Britain had left the EU as soon as the referendum result came in, the earliest it could have done so would have been roughly half-way through 2018, not at the beginning of it when the game starts, and even the most capricious racist is unlikely to be as open about it as the game suggests, so it’s obviously not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem for me is that as I sit on the pro-EU side of this situation, and I’m genuinely concerned for what Brexit is going to mean for my future for reasons I’m not going to go in to now,[1] some of the intended humour was lost on me. In a way, playing Not Tonight was a bleaker experience than Papers Please, as at least I’m a long way from the political situation the latter was purporting to represent. But ultimately, it is an uncommon experience that I’m glad I’ve had. Let’s hope I can see it through to the end!

The treasure is under the trees - who will find it first?

Beyond that, I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick – mainly because I’ve started a new painting section to the blog that I run alongside this, and I wanted to be able to say I’d painted something in the month of July! (Here’s the first edition, erroneously titled Last Week’s Painting.) For that reason, I spent a lot of my free time last week painting rather than playing games, but I did have a go with Enchanted Forest, a game about hunting for fairy-tale treasures in the titular forest. It’s OK – it appeals to my daughter because she likes fairy tales and treasure hunting, but the mechanics aren’t particularly well-designed, and it can get very one-sided towards the end of the game. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it while it lasts and will probably play it again.

---

[1] Mainly because trying to explain my concerns to people who voted leave has the same general effect as trying to headbutt a rhinoceros to death.

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat (last time, I promise!) Dobble, Disney's Villainous

I’ve been banging on about the original Mortal Kombat game for a few weeks now. I’m sure there are some people who never want to see me talk about Mortal Kombat again, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; this has gone on for a while! But the whole point of this blog is to offer my opinions and experiences in video games and others, and I came to the end of my journey last Sunday night when I finally beat the game with all seven characters, so yes, I’m going to talk about that! I’ve put up a review which will be released next Friday, but those reviews tend to be sweeping overviews of the game as a whole, whereas in the blog I cover the specific details of my experience if I can spare the room.

Here's Daniel Pesina doing the motion capture for Scorpion...

The thing is with Mortal Kombat, I’ve had a great time with the game, but I’ve rated it quite low. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it as a stand-alone game when later iterations have done what it does far better. But that detracts from the huge amount of fun I’ve had with it, working out the best attack patterns, playing each character’s special moves (or at least, those I could do!) to my advantage, and feeling like an absolute champ every time I beat Shang Tsung at the end. Why is that?

Funnily enough, only Sonya has any substantial
difference to her colours in a mirror match...

I think Mortal Kombat’s flaws make the game, to be honest. The plot of a centennial fighting tournament safeguarding Earthrealm from invasion is ludicrous, and the developers know it – but at least there was something at stake, both generally and for the characters. The move set was almost identical between the seven characters, apart from their special moves – but that made you appreciate the very subtle differences between their speed and reach.  Digitized fighting games wouldn’t look good if we tried it now, and if we’re being honest they didn’t at the time of release either – but we’d never have known until we tried, and as I said in my review, if we weren’t pushing the boundaries, we’d never know where the boundaries are! Arguably, Mortal Kombat’s biggest contribution to gaming was the formation of the ESRB to regulate age-appropriate games; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it was, but it’s brought to the table a list of controversies bigger than anything Mortal Kombat has been blamed for!

Ever the villain...

It’s also worth noting that I played this game quite a lot when I was younger on the Sega Megadrive, and I spent quite a lot of time with the DOS version I’ve been playing noticing the differences between them. Presumably due to memory constraints, there was a lot more variation in the voices you hear during the fights; I certainly don’t remember the nonsense coming out of Raiden’s mouth when he does his Torpedo move! The final endurance fight takes place in Goro’s lair, and he arrives straight after you win – but in the DOS version, the screen shakes and you hear roars as he stops and screams off camera, which was a nice touch. Kano’s ending was different as well – presumably the text was the same, I can’t remember, but the picture in the second part depicts Kano holding a machine gun, which apparently was too much for home consoles!

Noticing those differences and adapting to the clunky but enjoyable game mechanics created an enjoyable experience for me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending the game expecting anyone else to find the same.

Elsewhere, Kirsty received some games for her birthday, and we’ve been having a fine old time trying them out. Dobble is a great game; a more elaborate version of Snap but we have a lot of fun playing it and can even engage Jessie with it to a certain extent, though we need to be careful on how quickly we’re moving through the game. Also, we’ve been playing Disney’s Villainous, which took a few goes to understand but once we did, we had a great time trying to outwit each other between Ursula from the Little Mermaid, and Prince John from Robin Hood! We’re looking forward to trying both games with more players.

Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.