Last Week's Games: Sonic Transformed, Catan, Exploding Kittens, Eternal Crusade and 911 Operator...

This week was busier than I expected!

Let's not worry too much about why a Hedgehog who is
the fastest thing alive needs a car...

My new game for this week was Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, recently downloaded for the Xbox360. This is a kart racing game with the usual line-up of Sonic characters, plus another several characters from Sega’s other properties such as Alex Kidd, Super Monkey Ball, Shinobi and, bizarrely, Wreck-it Ralph. I was expecting to play a few rounds of this and then put it to bed, but I was astonished and delighted by how much fun this game is! I’m working through the World Tour at the moment, which is great for introducing the game’s modes – racing, battles, time trials, drift challenges, that sort of thing. The races are pretty easy – you don’t need to win the race to beat the level; you only need to come third – but some of the other challenges are pretty tough. The drifts, in particular, require a lot of precision. I initially chose Sonic for my play through, because you don’t buy a Sonic the Hedgehog game not wanting to play as Sonic, but when I’d levelled him up as high as he’ll go and couldn’t progress him any further, I tried playing as Danica Patrick, who handles very well. I wondered what Sega game she was from and was surprised to discover that she is, in fact, a real person! I’ve got to the end of the World Tour – just the Bonus levels to do now – but the game still has a lot to offer and I’m nowhere near fed up with it yet, so I’ll keep going for a bit longer!

It’s a little strange how that works out as I tend to prefer games with storylines. Or, at least, I think I do. But a competently-designed racing game has a very addictive “just one more go” mentality that is proving every bit as fun as an engaging plot. I enjoy having a nice balance between the two.

A mixture of non-sequitur and smarmy self-reference
often mistaken for comedy by the same sort of people
who describe themselves as "random..."

Later in the week I had a Wednesday afternoon in Warlords and Wizards, and played an enjoyable game of Catan with a couple of the lads in there which I was very pleased to win! I also had a go with Exploding Kittens; it’s a card game where you have to avoid picking up certain cards from a blind draw. The art is amusing, though very much “of its time,” and the game mechanics work even though it is based on luck. But to be honest I didn’t think much of it. It’s far too reliant on luck for me, and the theme doesn’t lend itself to a compelling plot or reason to be doing what you’re doing. The kids in the shop enjoyed it, and if someone got it out at a party I’d join in, but I won’t be spending any money on Exploding Kittens. A change of schedule means that my regular visits to Warlords and Wizards on Wednesdays have now come to an end, but I will still pop in when I can. It’s a great little shop!

I had a few rounds of Eternal Crusade; what I’ve started doing with that is trying to progress with one character until I’ve reached a Requisition Points Bonus; there are usually three available bonuses worth 1500 points each, and once I’ve achieved one I’ll move on to the next character. The reason for this is that the one you’ve won takes a while to be replaced, and could be replaced with something you could have been working on while you were playing. It also lets me have a go with some of the other factions, which is always nice.

The level I'm stuck on, funnily enough.

Finally, I continued playing 911 Operator, which I originally tried way back in February (I had to go back through my blog to find that out.) It’s odd to play games about going to work, but I really enjoy the core gameplay loop! I think the campaign could have done with fewer cities and a bit more time to develop in each city, as the improvements you make usually only occur once before you have to move on. The map doesn’t make much difference to what’s going on.

Let’s see what I’ve got time for next week…

Last Week's Games: Split/Second, Eternal Crusade, X-Wing, Catan, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Pathfinder

Quite a bit to get through this week…

Get ready to blow stuff up!

My new game for this week was Split/Second, a racing game recommended by Metal Jesus in one of his Hidden Gems videos. It’s an arcade racing game with a TV show-like aesthetic, where you drive in various challenges to compete for enough credits to advance to the elite races – and hopefully the next episode! What I like about this is that this is purely an arcade racing game; there’s no micro-managing your vehicle, no sense of realism in the game. It’s just you against the cars and the environment.

Oh yes, the environment. The main gimmick of the game is that you can, once you’ve drifted enough and been on someone’s tail for long enough to build up your power meter, trigger certain parts of the environment to cause problems for your rivals. More often than not, these come in the form of explosions that throw them off the track, but there’s some fun ones as well. In one of the earlier tracks, triggering a certain point causes a digger to swing its shovel around that creates an obstacle. It works for a couple of reasons: Firstly, you can’t just press the button to ruin someone’s day; it needs precise timing and knowledge of the track in order to make it work effectively. Secondly, certain of these trigger points change the entire layout of the track, so chances are you won’t be racing on the same bit of track on the next lap!

I played Split/Second for a couple of hours and I was really enjoying it so I’ll definitely be playing some more!

I carried on with Eternal Crusade, there’s a live campaign running over the next few days where you have to win five battles for a large reward of Rogue Trader Credits. These are used to buy weapons and armour that affect the character aesthetically. They’re no better or worse than the equipment you can buy; they just look different. This is the Micro-Transaction element of the game; you can pay money for these things but since it wouldn’t increase my level of enjoyment of the gameplay, I certainly won’t be spending money on them! But if I can get enough RTC to get an upgrade for one of my guns, I might do that. Otherwise they’ll just sit there gathering e-dust!

I found myself with a little more time to be out and about than I normally do, and on Wednesday I went in to Warlords and Wizards and had a game of X Wing with my old friend Mason. I’ve known Mason a while and his collection of Imperial ships has grown in that time! I took on his force with my Trenchrunners, and had a run of good luck in the beginning of the game. However, the ferocious abilities of Quickdraw, as well as the support provided by a local shuttle, meant it was a very hard game that I eventually lost. Great fun though, cheers Mase!

Then on Friday I had a game of Catan with a couple of young lads who go to the shop. They’re getting quite in to it now and with that comes a certain amount of skill. I got off to what I thought was a good start by heading straight for the ports, but they managed to break up my Longest Road, and one of the lads won the game on at least three bought victory points. Well done!

All sorts of different roles...

We also had a quick game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf; I had the app on my Kindle Fire and we sat down for a four-player game. I was the Werewolf with one of the other lads, and I tried to bluff it to claim to be the seer; they saw through it eventually but time had run out by then and we all voted for the Troublemaker. Great fun!

Finally on Sunday I continued Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords with Dave, Victor, Morgan and Ian. For the first time, I’ve run a campaign all the way up to level 8, and the lads were happy to level up!

I’m expecting a quieter week next week, so see you then!

Last Week's Games: Divine Divinity, UK Games Expo 2018

I had a very enjoyable weekend at the UK Games Expo, I got to play a lot of new games and had a fantastic time. I’ll give an overview and the highlights here, but some of it will need to go in a separate blog. Even so, there’s lots to cover here, so this blog will be a little longer than usual:

Having had most of this week off work for the half-term holiday, I had time to play some video games; I cracked on with Eternal Crusade, but I played a new game as well: Divine Divinity. It’s an action-RPG in the style of Diablo. Indeed, it starts in pretty much the same way; you find yourself in a small town plagued by some misgivings from the local area, and after some initial fetch-questing, you descend into the dungeon to sort it all out.

Down in the Dungeon...

What I like about this game is that there’s no hand-holding; no easy first level, no tutorial. It’s you vs the game almost straight away, and I am fine with that. One of my pet peeves of video games is having to play it for an hour before the actual game starts. But in Divine Divinity, once you’re in the dungeon, you’re on your own. And I had a really good time; I chose the Wizard class, I managed my resources, killed enemies, got the treasure and went back to the town to take breaks when I needed to. I’ve noticed that with some RPGs, the dungeons are designed to give a sense of realism and pacing, and while the latter is crucial for a good game, sometimes the need to stop playing the game to advance the plot makes it feel somewhat artificial. While plot can add to a game, developers should never forget that the core of the game is the gameplay, and when it’s done as well as this, I could happily spend the entire game dungeon-bashing without any semblance of plot. I’ll be coming back to this one!

I make an effort to return to the UK Games Expo every year! It’s very often the highlight of my year. Here’s how it went down:

Yep, it was as rickety
as it looks...

On Friday, I had entered two tournaments: Catan and Dominion. It had been a long time since I’d played in tournament, and in previous years I felt I’d missed out on some of what the expo had to offer by avoiding them, so I signed up to play some games. I never expected to do very well, which is just as well because I didn’t, but I played seven games in a day which is more than I think I’ve ever manage in my life!. I’ll cover what I can remember of the details in a new semi-regular blog series titled Tournaments and Tribulations, but at this point I’d like to say that the atmosphere was almost the complete opposite from what I expected from tournaments. I’ve played with so-called hard-core players before, and I’ve struggled to enjoy it. I didn’t know the games very well so I expected to have a rough time, but the vast majority of people I played were very nice, patient and helpful, and that made my day as much as anything else.

Adam and Chloe - Showing me a new way
to play Hey That's My Fish

 

On Saturday I met up with some old friends from Swindon: Adam, Chloe and Tom. After going around the expo for a while we went to the gaming hall; I was happy to introduce them to Hey, That’s My Fish! We played a couple of games, and I won both of them. Chloe made an interesting observation: She suggested that we play the second game blind, with the tiles upside down. This would have been covered in playtesting, but it made a remarkable difference to the game. Without being able to call our moves based on the number of fish we’d get, we instead played a lot more aggressively, blocking each other off, and making sure we had a long run of tiles to collect when we were blocked. We also borrowed Riff Raff from Thirsty Meeples; a game in which you aim to be the first to put all of your wooden pieces of cargo on a rickety ship without them falling off – if they do, you need to catch them. Adam and Chloe won that between them. Finally, we played A Fistful of Penguins; a gambling game in which you compete for money by rolling different combinations of animals on dice, and using penguins to re-roll or add dice. I can’t remember who won those games but it was a good laugh!

A Fistful of Penguins.
Penguins are purple.

Tom stayed for Sunday and Kirsty was there as well, so we watched a couple of shows. Dark Room was excellent; John Robertson was exhausted after what must have been a long weekend for him, but his improvisation and crowd interaction was spot-on. We also saw Knightmare Live. I’ve now seen the show three times, and it was good to see some different rooms being developed. The team guiding the dungeoneers was the best I’ve ever seen it; they were from Shut Up and Sit Down. The two lead actors, however, weren’t quite as on it with their improvisation as they usually are, and I think there was a presumption that the vast majority of people had seen the show before. This blunted their usually excellent performance, but it was a very funny show nonetheless.

You can see the pattern emerging in our
preferred choice of gaming animal...

 

 

 

Earlier I’d bought Ice Cool, and Tom showed Kirsty and me how to play. It’s a really good game about flicking penguins through the halls of a school to get fish, while one penguin tries to stop them. It takes about ten minutes to play, and is meant for children, but it’s great fun and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I won the first game, and Kirsty won the other by being very good at catching our penguins!

So, a brilliant weekend, and I while my bank balance can certainly wait for the next one, I can’t! See you next year.

 

Last Week's Games: Kill the Bad Guy, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Catan

This week, I played two new games…

Splat!

The first was Kill the Bad Guy on the PC. It is a puzzle game where you have a “bad guy” taking a pre-determined route in a city-like setup; the objective of the game is to kill him and make it look like an accident. You can drop a piano on their head, start a car so it goes flying in to him, make a power line fall on to water that he’s walking in etc.

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how well it’s pulled off. It’s not a good-looking game; the environments are deliberately designed to be very drab. It’s pretty easy, at least in the earlier levels, to work out what to do; the challenge is in timing and force. For example, one of the stages involves launching a car over a ramp and in to the bad guy. Do this with too much force and the car will go straight over his head, but too little and the car won’t go far enough to reach him. How much force to use is precise, and the build-up metre is very sensitive; it takes a second to fill the whole thing. There are other objectives too, such as finding a passport hidden in the environment, and catching a tooth that comes flying off the bad guy when you kill him. Secondary objectives add to the way you kill someone, but that’s usually described in very vague terms and not easy to work out. I’ll give it another go, but I hope I can find a bit more fun in it than I currently am.

Monkey is performed by the
always-excellent Andy Serkis

The other new game was Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This is a Post-Apocalyptic action-adventure; you play an agile but brutish thug called Monkey, who escapes slavery with a vulnerable but tech-savvy young woman called Trip. Trip binds Monkey to her using a slave headband, and he now has to guide her home, initially through what was once New York. First impressions of the game are good, because it breaks out of the usual desolate wasteland that forms the basis of most post-apocalyptic adventures. The adventure occurs roughly two hundred years after the apocalypse, and nature is starting to reclaim what was once modern New York City; traces of civilization are still there but the environment is surprisingly lush and green. The game plays well; less fluidly than I’m used to but it better contributes to the idea that the stunts and combat moves that Monkey pulls off are quite difficult to do. I’ve got a little way into the game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it!

And I continued playing Eternal Crusade; I’m still enjoying playing the game. I’ve played multiplayer shooters before like Gears of War and Gotham City Imposters; arguably better games but I suspect I’m enjoying this one a lot more for the 40K setting!

Always a pleasure to play this...

I went in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and played The Settlers of Catan with a couple of the people there. I’ve often described this game, borrowing a quote from Yahtzee, as the game to play “if you’re a bit strapped for cash in the run up to Christmas and you need to lose three friends as quickly as possible.” A harsh description, and one that doesn’t necessarily fit the nature of the game about settlements where no one gets killed. But it’s very competitive, with the trade mechanic being almost entirely a matter of personal choice and establishing how one can benefit from a deal. I like it because it is a self-contained game; you don’t have to micro-manage optimal army lists or paint models to play. You go in with the materials that the game gives you, and your wit and experience which you have to earn – there is a lot of skill involved!

I signed up for some tournaments; one of them is Catan. This will be happening at the UK Games Expo in June, and I’ll be playing Dominion there as well, which I haven’t played yet, but I like deck builders! I’ll be playing X-Wing at a tournament in Stafford in July, but more on that later…