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| How many tokens can you get? |
This week I’ve had to balance being off work for half term
with having my daughter for a lot of the time in between. I’d had less time to
play games than I might have wanted, though she and I did get in a game of
Bubble Bath Bunny at one point. This is a great little game that is designed to
improve memory skills, and while I don’t know how much the game itself has been
conducive to that in the eight months that we’ve owned it, it’s great to see
that she’s getting better! We also had a go with Pop-up Pirate, Crocodile
Dentist and Burp the Baby; kid’s toys that rely almost entirely on chance but
they’re fun for the time we’re playing them, and it keeps them amused!
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| Cacodemons. Horrifying when you're low on ammo. |
I carried on with Doom, which suddenly got a lot harder once
I’d got on to the second chapter: The Shores of Hell. I found myself for the
first time ever (while playing Doom) worrying about conserving ammunition. As
with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was developed before it became usual to program ammo
dumps prior to finding yourself in a situation that needs it, and while it does
help you out in certain situations, for the vast majority of the time you’re on
your own if you burn through your ammo carelessly. This has created an extra
level of challenge that I’m not used to with Doom and means that I’m going into
certain sections of the game severely under-powered. I might need another run
through the chapter in order to get it right, but it hasn’t stopped the game
from being very good fun to play.
Nonetheless, high-octane action isn’t always the experience
I’m looking for, and when I found myself preferring to take my time, I returned
to my old sparring partner Mordheim: City of the Damned. People who read this
blog regularly may remember that I became stuck on the third campaign mission
of the Mercenaries campaign, as Luthor – the Dramatis Personae who, as a win
condition for the mission, cannot be killed – was the only member of the
warband who wasn’t reduced to a gibbering wreck at the sight of a Daemon. So, I
rallied my troops, trained up an Ogre, took some skilled archers and gave my
troops items that would assist them with fear and terror tests. I won the
mission without suffering too much damage to any of my men, though I had some
close calls!
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| Glad to have cleared this one... |
The next mission is going to be one that haven’t done yet,
and I’m wondering exactly how I’m going to approach it and whether to take the
Ogre. Obviously, he’s useful against the enemy’s impressive characters, which
they almost always use on campaign missions. It’s just that I haven’t forgotten
the mission in the Cathedral with the Possessed warband – the Impressive
character you have to fight there (the one that relates to the Sisters of
Sigmar; I actually don’t know what that is called because I never recruited
one) doesn’t appear until you’re several levels higher, which even if I had
taken a Chaos Spawn, he’d never been able to approach.
It doesn’t help that completing those missions takes a fair
amount of time that I can’t always guarantee that I have. If you don’t know
what you’re supposed to be doing, it takes a couple of hours to explore the
levels and find what you need to do – which, between work, family and the
occasional need to have a rest, isn’t always possible.
But hey, I’m ready to tackle it when I’m ready, and until
then I’m busying myself collecting Wyrdstone for when the inevitable requests
come in. Although it is possible to have your warband all but destroyed, the
only actual lose condition for the game is when you fail to complete those deliveries
four times – I’ve been running this warband for so long now, and the requests
becoming more and more demanding, that failing the delivery may be a distinct
possibility if I don’t watch what I’m doing. But for me Mordheim is a game
that’s always kept on giving, and I’m glad that nearly five years later I’m
still finding new challenges.
