Last Week's Games: Shadowrun Returns, Cooking Fever, Mordheim, Co-Optional Podcast

A rather interesting mish-mash of games for me this week:

Beautiful game, but not running too well...

I started this week with my new game for the week, which is Shadowrun Returns. This is an RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate or one of its sequels, and has you create a character to perform ‘runs,’ a series of missions in a cyberpunk world that go outside of the mega-corporations controlling it. The combat works very similar to XCOM, and the couple of hours I played of it were more enjoyable than the awful multiplayer-only shooter on the Xbox 360 by some considerable distance.

Unfortunately my laptop really doesn’t like running Shadowrun. It crashed a few times during the time I was playing it and I had to restart the computer. I don’t know whether the game is poorly optimised or whether this is one of those games my laptop would rather not be running, but I’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how that’s working out before I put many hours into the game.

So many sausages...

I’ve become rather engrossed in a game on my Kindle Fire called Cooking Fever. It’s a game where you create various dishes to serve to customers in a set amount of time. For a game that’s supposed to be a time-waster, it does a fine job of hooking you in and convincing you to play just one more level, and I’m having a good amount of fun with it so far. You serve customers to earn money, and serve them quickly to earn tips. You then spend that money to upgrade your equipment and eatery so that the customers will wait longer, tip higher, and your cooking efficiency improves. It has micro-transactions in the form of diamonds that have to be used to unlock some upper tiers of food production, customer satisfaction and more restaurants. These can be earned in-game via an experience point system, but I can see this becoming a grind in the later stages of the game!

I finally finished painting Angron. This was a Forge World model that my mate Dave asked me to paint ages ago in exchange for some dwarves. I got so far in to the project and then left it for literally years; by the time I give it back I will have had that model for nearly five years. I definitely won’t be accepting any more painting commissions, as I have little enough time and patience to paint my own models, and it looks pretty poor to accept a job and then not do it for nearly five years. I was far from pleased with the final result; I know I can do better. But Dave told me he needed the model back, so I did the best job I could in an evening and I’ll hand it back next time I see him.

Ogres are amusing, but will need levelling up
before they're much use!

Finally, I started another campaign on Mordheim: City of the Damned with Mercenaries again. This time I’m doing them all as Nordland Pirates, who have their skills in ambush attacks. It will work or it won’t! It’s a special game that I run in to so many bugs with, yet enjoy enough to keep coming back to it!

I also watched the Co-Optional Podcast #222 featuring Sky Williams. I’m mentioning this because he gave an interesting piece of gaming discipline that I thought I might try: He said that he’d got bogged down playing the same two MMOs and not really doing anything with his other games, so now he’s trying to beat one game a month. I’ve got a long list of games I’ve yet to even played, never mind beaten, so I think I might try that over the next few months to see how it goes. I’ve certainly not done a Backlog Beatdown blog for a long time!

On that subject, the blog posts may be a little erratic over the next few weeks due to holidays and a very busy week on the horizon! I try to get these posts out on Monday but that isn’t always possible. In particular, I will almost certainly miss Monday 6^th August, though I will probably try and publish something later on that week.

See you all soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Fantasizing about Sweets in Sweet Fantasy. No, really.

Right…

I was actually wondering whether I should bother to blog this one, given the potentially embarrassing subject matter and the fact that it is barely even a game, but if this online tracker of my journey to beat all my games is going to mean anything, I need to be showing the worst of this as well as the best. So yeah. I played, beat and yes, completed Sweet Fantasy. 

This was the first thing to come up on
Google Image Search...

This visual novel was brought to my attention by the Co-Optional Podcast hosted by TotalBiscuit, Dodger and Jesse Cox in the release section they do at the end. I enjoy the show and it is how I hear about a lot of games, and having heard a brief description of Sweet Fantasy I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never had a visual novel game before, so I don’t know if this one was a good one to get started on. It’s about a dryad called Pumpkin, who is hopelessly in love with her mistress, Ms Amethyst, and she’s trying to make a love potion in order to get Amethyst to sleep with her.

So the question is: Is it any good? And the answer is no. The idea is puerile, but it allows an unashamed exploration into a lesbian relationship between a dryad and an elf (I’m assuming Amethyst is an elf; her ears are pointed,) and had potential. But the characters are shallower than a petri dish and it’s not very interesting at all. Pumpkin is dozy and silly, Amethyst is stuck up and arrogant, and this doesn’t vary at all through the ‘plot.’ There are other characters in it, a snail and a mermaid, but they’re all ‘One-shots’ (only appearing in their scene) and don’t contribute much more. The plot is a mixture of a short journey and confused ramblings: you either find what you’re looking for to make the potion or you don’t; it doesn’t go anywhere else. Also the localisation wasn’t very as good; the text could have used an extra pair of eyes to check spellings and grammar. I know that sounds like a minor gripe but if you’re trading on the idea of being a visual novel, we could at least expect some competency in the text!

Your first task is to find these mushrooms...

As for the so-called gameplay, that comes down to a couple of decisions you have to make with regard to how to handle certain plot points. This reminds me more than anything else of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, and I guess fits in with the idea of a visual novel. But there’s no skill involved; no indication of what you’re supposed to be doing, or which choice is the right one. It is guesswork, nothing more; you either get it right or you don’t. The small amount of challenge comes from remembering what the wrong choice was, re-loading the game and choosing the other option. Any game needs to have an enjoyable process and a satisfying outcome, and unless you really like soft porn slideshows, this doesn’t have much of either.

So is there anything good about the game at all? Well, the art is very well drawn, I’ll give it that. Obviously an anime style, but it works. It’s clear that this is where most of the effort went in to development, perhaps to over-compensate for a lack of writing talent. There’s no game-breaking crashes or bugs that I could see, and it was designed competently enough to at least include a ‘skip’ button for parts of the dialogue that you’ve seen before. Very useful when re-playing sections for the better ending! And at least it’s not very long; I’d seen the whole game in roughly 40 minutes.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Matt,” you’re thinking, “what did you expect? It should have been obvious what this was; an over-sexualised piece of fan service. How could you have possibly thought this was going to be any good?” Well, in fact, I didn’t. It was a dip into a genre of game that I hadn’t looked at before, and I’d never have known until I tried it. Now that I have, I feel no need to do so again.