Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Last Week's Games: Regicide, Kingdom Hearts, Chaos Cultists

First of all, sorry I’m a bit late with this one. I didn’t get much sleep on Sunday night and had a very long day on Monday, when I would normally write these. By the time I got home I was exhausted and I knew I’d find it very difficult to focus, so I decided to put it off for a day, get some sleep and come back to it in the morning. I guess, if I was writing for a magazine with a deadline, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that, but this is somewhat different. I have a fair amount of people reading these blogs, but the majority of them come in long after I’ve published them – they sort of trickle in off search engines. I doubt anybody reading this in a month, six months, a year, or several years (it happens!) is going to care that I didn’t put this one out on a Monday, but they will probably notice if my writing is below my usual standard. So here we are. 


Orks, mate. They'll blow you up.

I carried on with Warhammer 40K: Regicide, I was hoping to beat it last week! It wasn’t to be, sadly; I got to within the last couple of levels of the Space Marine campaign to find that the secondary objective for the penultimate mission is, once again, to kill – not capture – all the Ork pieces. Regular readers will remember that this gave me some problems a few weeks ago with the final mission of the second act, but at least the playing field was somewhat level for that one! Here, you are outnumbered by quite a lot, and you will lose if either your Librarian (Queen) or Captain (King) are eliminated. Not being allowed to capture the pieces makes the game very difficult in that regard; I haven’t quite managed it yet but I’m sure I’ll get there if I tackle it hard enough!

Not to judge Square characters by
their fashion sense, but...

Elsewhere I played Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting through the Agrabah level. Here, I noticed something a little odd about the platforming sections of the game – you don’t die from falling off the platforms. Instead, you fall to the bottom of the screen, or when appropriate, a different screen altogether. I’m not suggesting that it requires a suspension of disbelief, as quite frankly playing as a 14 year-old boy running around with a giant key, a one-piece swimsuit (I think) over a short jacket, shoes that are far too big for him and accompanied by Goofy and Donald Duck allows you suspend it enough to ignore the potentially harmful effect of gravity. But consider – when you lose all your health in the game, you click Continue and go back to the start of the screen you’re on. When you fall off a platform, you have to climb all the way up again, and if you’ve fallen into a different screen, this is actually quite a bit more faff than simply restarting the section. I don’t know, it may seem meaningless, but I think it’s a clever little bit of game design – they didn’t make it too easy to keep repeating the same parts over and over again in order to practice the platforming sections, so it gives a better incentive to concentrate.

Then on Monday, when I was having some work done on my car, I spent some time in Phoenix Games in Stourbridge painting my remaining Chaos Cultists. I used to go in to the shop quite a lot, and even ran a Dungeons and Dragons game for them for a couple of years. I don’t go in so much anymore, mainly due to family and work commitments, but Brett and Steve are always happy to let me sit down and paint while my car is being fixed. And it was nice to see Emile and Matt, who were previously in the DnD game, having a game of Konflikt 47.  I didn’t get my models finished; I wasn’t expecting to as I take my time with my painting. But I got a good way in to it and I might even pick them up again in the week while I’m off work!

I’ll see what I can get done next week!

Last Two Week's Games: Wet, Streets of Rage 3, Roll the Ball, Chaos Cultists

Normally I keep these blogs to 700 words; that’s roughly a side of A4 and about as much time as anyone’s got for anything I have to say about video games! However, as this blog has to cover two weeks rather than one, this will be a little longer.

Mordheim Mercenaries.

My time last week was somewhat limited but I did manage to get a few games in! I had my usual go through Mordheim: City of the Damned, and I’m not sure what’s going on with my warband but I seem a lot more susceptible to injuries than I ever did before. There have been a few characters I’ve had to prematurely retire before I’ve got as far as the campaign missions, which is slowing my progress down somewhat and I hope that the game doesn’t bug out on me when I get there!

My new game for this week was supposed to be N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, a game I’d bought for £1 from CEX a few months before. Having tried it, I’m not sure they checked the game when it was traded in. My Xbox 360 wouldn’t read the disc, and when I took it out of the machine to find out why, I noticed a white ring burned into the silver side. Knowing it would never work in a million years, and not having had the foresight to keep the receipt, I put it in the bin. CEX, you done messed up.

A typical action scene...

So the new game that was actually my new game was a game I’d bought in the same purchase, funnily enough: Wet on the Xbox 360. I know that it hasn’t got great reviews, but I bought this one on the strength of it appearing in one of Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos. He admitted it wasn’t great but there was some fun to be found in it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find he was right! It is a third-person action adventure, with an emphasis on combo kills and style. For example, you get more points for taking out an enemy while sliding on your knees, which is brilliant. Not the standard for games these days, but it’s always nice to see games doing things just a little bit different. I had a decent time with the arena battles particularly, where the enemies constantly respawn until you shut down the respawn points. I also really enjoyed the section where there’s a big car chase and you’re combining precision-shooting with quick-time events; the latter are rarely welcome but I’d have enjoyed actually having to jump between cars a lot less.

Unfortunately the game is let down by slightly wobbly controls; in certain situations the buttons take the lead character, Ruby, in unexpected directions. This is rarely a problem in the main section of the game, because I don’t mind having to figure out which jumps you can make and which you can’t. It takes me back to the old Tomb Raider games! But I don’t like it on the Assault Course stages in-between the levels, because you’re on a timer and can ill-afford to make mistakes because the controls are letting you down. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the game, and saw it through to the end. A Backlog Beatdown review is on its way!

New enemies, new character models,
new gameplay mechanics...

I had a go through Streets of Rage 3; the only game from the main series I never beat. I’d played it before and never seemed to like it quite as much as Streets of Rage 2. Nonetheless, I’ve been having some fun with the game, although it’s an interesting new take on the mechanics. Some of the moves were re-balanced, throws do a lot more damage, Max has been replaced completely by Zan, and there are environmental hazards to contend with as well. Also Blaze had a re-vamp; her character is better than ever! I’m finding her a lot easier to control than I did in SOR 2. My quest for all the achievement points is going to be a tough one, since the game contains a system where you have to max out your Blitz attack, and the only way to do it is to score 120,000 without dying even once. This is ferociously difficult and I’m going to run in to a lot of problems doing it but apparently there is a cheap trick you can employ on level 6 to make it happen. I haven’t got there yet though!

Puzzling...

My new game for the second week is Roll the Ball, something I downloaded on to my phone. It’s a puzzle game where you have to arrange tiles to roll a ball into a target square. There’s usually some parameters; a certain set of squares you have to go through, a target number of moves, and even a mode where the ball is moving as you complete the puzzle and you have to move the squares – often with the ball in it. It’s a nice distraction when I have a few moments to kill, and there’s a lot of levels so it will keep me going for ages.

The tile they're standing on is what I
use as a pallet, by the way,

Finally, I completed a hobby project: I finished painting my Chaos Cultists. I had the flesh and the base left to do, and once I’d done that and tidied it up a little bit they actually ended up looking quite good. I haven’t done a massive amount of justice to them with my camera phone but they are looking OK at the moment. I started my next project, a Dark Apostle, and I’d forgotten how much I dislike building resin models, as they barely hold together and fall apart if you so much as breathe on them too hard. I only managed to get the undercoat on before I dropped it and the leg fell off! But I’ll fix it and try again in the week.

A reminder – no Last Week’s Games blog next week; I’m on holiday. But I’ll try and do a blog covering both weeks for the week after.

Last Week's Games: Sonic Transformed, Streets of Rage, Midnight Wanderes

What's it like to drive with no tyres?

As I resolved to play one new game every week, I tend to do that at the start of the week to make sure I’ve done it and give the game a chance to engage me. I didn’t do that this week, starting with a game I’d been playing a few weeks before: Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. I had a fine time with this a couple of weeks ago but had left it alone for most of the previous week; it took a few goes to get back into the rhythm of the game. I had a go at the final section of the World Tour, and chose Vyse for this part of the play through as one of the achievements are tied up in his lap times and I wanted to level him up. However, after a few races, it became apparent that I’d got as far as I was going to get by playing through on Normal difficulty. I tried switching to Expert and got utterly destroyed, so I settled for Hard difficulty and played through the first few races again to earn some stars. This is going to take a while but it’s the sign of a good game that I’m willing to come back to it!

The three original heroes. Shame Adam
didn't appear in any more games!

On Wednesday night Kirsty and I had a go with the original Streets of Rage on the Xbox 360; I downloaded the compilation trilogy when it became free on Gold. I chose Adam for the play through and Kirsty played as Axel. It was good fun going through the game and hearing Kirsty come up with names for the enemies: Stabby McGee, Streetwise Prince Harry, Purple Zombie Dude, Yellow Turtle Guy and He-Man were some of my favourites! We actually did quite well; we got as far as the last stage but we fell down to the Big Ben bosses. The game is re-balanced to accommodate two players, and when Kirsty ran out of lives and continues, I couldn’t handle two of the Big Bens on my own with Adam as he moves quite slowly. It didn’t help that I kept forgetting not to throw them in this edition of the game!

Metal Slug with a crossbow...

So what was my new game for this week? Well, a while ago, I watched one of Metal Jesus’ videos, Discover HIDDEN GEMS in Game Collections and Compilations, which he did with his friend John Riggs. In that video they talk about some excellent games that were part of compilations, and Jason (Metal Jesus) was often surprised to hear John talk about a game he didn’t realise that he owned on a compilation! The same applied to me when John talked about a game that appeared on Capcom Classics Collection vol. 2: Midnight Wanderers: Quest for the Chariot. This was actually hidden in a multi-game, called Three Wonders, so wouldn’t necessarily happen across it. So I gave it a try. It is a platform/shooting game similar to Metal Slug in gameplay, where you control a hobbit called Lou on a quest apparently taken on a whim to find a chariot. I gave it a go and it’s a pretty decent game; I like the way it plays, the jumping feels a little off but it very often did back in the early 90s when jumping mechanics weren’t standardised. The enemy design is really good as well. I didn’t get too far with it since I didn’t have long, but I had a decent amount of fun and I’ll probably come back to it at some point – although, it has to be said, that compilation has a lot of other good games on there that I should probably check out too!

I managed to find time to go to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards and continue to paint my Chaos Cultists. I’ve done the vast majority of them now; I just need to do the flesh and the base and we’re away. I’ve got another ten to paint after this, and I’m hoping to get a Dark Apostle done after that. That will be 500 points of Word Bearers painted, so I might move on to something different after that; I was inspired to paint Blood Angels by Regicide after all!

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.