Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Backlog Beatdown: Crashing into more Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot 2

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a game Kirsty bought as part of the N-Sane Trilogy when she first had the PS4. I play Crash every now and again, usually as some sort of intermission between long-form RPGs and open world games! Regular readers may remember I beat the first Crash Bandicoot nearly two years ago, and after coming back to Crash Bandicoot 2 I reached the end of that a few weeks ago. Here’s what I found:

Watch out for that plant...

Crash Bandicoot is abducted by Dr Neo Cortex and instructed to retrieve 25 crystals for him so that Cortex can harness their power to stop a cataclysm caused by an up-coming alignment of planets. Crash must traverse 25 levels in search of these crystals, and hand them over to Dr Cortex. However, all is not as it seems, as Crash’s sister Coco warns him against Cortex and his former assistant, Dr Nitrus Brio, contacts Crash with an alternate plan… which path will Crash choose?

The Mascot Platformer was declining in popularity during the mid-late 90s but given that Crash was flying that flag for Sony’s PlayStation, it shared a remarkable number of the same tropes as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. The groundwork was set in the first Crash game – the characters, the villains, the basic gameplay loop – and Crash 2 was more of the same but expanded upon in ways that made the game better. In addition to everything he could do in the previous game, Crash also acquired a power slide and crawl move, which came in useful for certain puzzling sections of the game. Late in the game, Crash acquires a jetpack, which is a little fiddly to use but shakes the gameplay up a bit. And the post-game content contributes to the end as well – the “alternate plan” I referenced earlier involves getting all the gems – much harder than the crystals – which affects how the game ends when you defeat the final level.

As a tribute to my Dad's recollection of a 
Monty Python sketch, I called these hedgehogs:
"Spiny Norman."

Most of the levels in Crash 2 are designed with the 2.5D sensibility that worked well for the Crash Bandicoot series at the time. You run from one side of the level to the other, smashing all the crates, spinning, or dodging the enemies, picking up the crystals – they’re always in the path of the level and are impossible to miss – and defeating the bosses once every five levels or so, which are quite a bit easier than the first game. The levels require some quite precise platforming, and while there’s nothing as irritating as the bridge levels from the first game, there are certain sections where jumping on platforms that are ahead of you require some trial and error! The levels where you ride an animal for extra speed make a welcome return, as do the levels where you’re running away from a much larger obstacle – a giant polar bear or rock! The latter are hard because you are running into the screen in this case, and it’s very difficult to see where you’re going. It wobbles on the line between satisfyingly challenging and frustratingly hard, so while getting to the end of the game is far from impossible, I find that Crash is better enjoyed in small bursts. Having reached the end of the game, I have no desire to go back and find all the gems – I haven’t got anywhere near as much investment in this as Spyro!

Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin...

The game is presented well; the graphics are fine, and the sound is good. The voice acting is in line with the larger-than-life cartoon characters of the 90s and works as well as it needs to. The plot is a little thin – it is obvious that a “betrayal” twist is on its way – but that’s hardly the point of a Crash Bandicoot game!

I enjoy Crash Bandicoot as a distraction from longer and more serious games, as I described above. But the frustrating difficulty makes it hard to enjoy as much as some other games I’ve been playing. Crash 2 is definitely better than its predecessor, and remains a good game, but for me, never quite reaches the levels of being a great game. I’ve enjoyed it – but that’s all I did.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

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: Crash Bandicoot 2, 8-Bit Armies, Army of Two

Not 100% sure I've got the right game here...

As you might expect, on Christmas week there hasn’t been a massive amount of time for playing games. I managed to have a couple of goes with Crash Bandicoot 2: the Wrath of Cortex on the PlayStation 4, as part of the N-Sane trilogy. Some of you might remember I played through the original Crash Bandicoot over the summer, and I knew I was going to be busy, so I didn’t fancy picking up another long-form RPG I wasn’t going to have time to beat! Crash Bandicoot 2 was a typical sequel of its time; same as before, but slightly better. In this case Crash has a few new moves: A power slide, a crawl and a belly slam attack. He is on a quest to find a selection of crystals for Dr N. Cortex, the villain of the previous game; I’m only up to the third set of levels so far but I don’t get the feeling that this association is going to end well! I’m having a decent amount of fun with it so far and will probably see it through to the end, frustrating though the difficulty can very often be, but I doubt I will go for 100% completion.

An army in luminescent green, if you can believe that...

I also played a game on my laptop that I hadn’t played for a good couple of years: 8-Bit Armies. I played this game in 2017, got a few levels in to it and for some reason didn’t touch it again after that, which was a shame because it was pretty good, if a little basic in delivery. It’s a real-time strategy game with an 8-bit aesthetic, which basically translates to: “All the models have blocky textures.” Each level is fairly short and has its own gimmick and objective, which suits me fine as it means I don’t necessarily have to be playing the game for hours before I get to the next bit! I particularly enjoyed the level where the two bases are separated by an erupting volcano, which your infantry will find it very difficult to survive. I therefore had to attack the enemy base using nothing but tanks and armoured cars, and the game moves quickly enough that I could send multiple waves of units in sequence. I might see this game through to the end, I might not, but I’m even less likely to go back through the game and try to obtain all the achievement challenges for it; it’s good, but not that good!

Not that easy to tell Rios and Salem
apart once their masks are down.

Finally I got to the end of a game I started in 2015: Army of Two. I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this particular game. I’m pretty sure the only reason I bought it was because at some point I’d downloaded one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold scheme and wanted to play the games in sequence. It was a war shooter that I didn’t find particularly engaging at that point in my life, and when a lot of things changed for me in a very short space of time, I wasn’t inclined to return to it. Then, over last summer, I thought I’d give it another go. I got up to roughly three quarters of the way through the game when my Xbox 360 broke, and I couldn’t get the controller to connect. So Army of Two was put to bed for a while, but I wanted to finish it off since I want to beat as many games as I can before the end of the year. I finally managed it late on Monday evening. I’m hoping to write a review about it that may or may not come out this Friday; it’s going to be a tough one to call though. Surely a game it took me years to find the time to beat shouldn’t get too high a score, but when I was playing it, I really enjoyed it. It has the interesting partner mechanics, tells a standard but workable story and the difficult sections weren’t too frustrating. I might come back to the game to beat it on a higher difficulty, but not just yet, I’ve got other games that need playing!