Pickups and Trades #3

This month, I’ve had to slow down with buying games, since I don’t have much money at the moment, and the small amount of money I do have was perfectly capable of spending itself without any help from me.

It's OK but my lack of know-how is slowing
me down at the moment!

I downloaded Heroquest, Space Crusade, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk from myabandonware.com, meaning to check out some of the earlier Games Workshop licensed games. As this is abandonware I didn’t buy the game the usual sense; just downloaded it and made it work in DOSbox. I’ve already tried Heroquest and will try the other three when there’s time.

I deleted Ascend: Hand of Kul from my Xbox 360 hard drive. This was a game I’d downloaded from Games with Gold nearly five years ago now; it is a game in which you played a huge creature called a Caos warrior fighting across a grim fantasy land to defeat the Titans. Or at least it was. I had a look on the Wikipedia page and it turns out its servers were shut down in late 2014. I was more upset that it took me this long to notice, to be honest! I enjoyed it at the time but it’s been taking up space on my hard drive I could ill-afford for three years.

On Steam, I bought a few games when I got paid. They were:

88 Heroes, an interesting-looking pixel-art platformer where you have the titular 88 Heroes to get through the game,

Guacamelee Gold/Super Turbo Championship Edition, A Metroid-Vania style platformer where you play as a Lucha-Libre wrestler, I’ve seen this talked up several times over the last few years, even though it’s been years since release. I look forward to seeing how it all works!

OlliOlli: So Olli they named it twice, this is an odd 2D skating game that I’ve seen TotalBiscuit talk up so I thought I’d give it a go.

This looks exactly like my thing...

Renowned Explorers – International Society: It’s been a while since I’ve seen any coverage on this game, but if I found it interesting enough to put on my wish list it’s worth a go!

Torchlight: A fantasy RPG that again I saw TotalBiscuit cover a while ago. I do like my RPGs, so this one’s worth a look!

I meant to get The Banner Saga as well but I had some confusion over the sale dates and missed it. Not to worry, it will go on again!

Last Week's Games: Heroquest, Dark Souls, Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes and Open TDD

Near to the start of this week I found myself wondering about the video games that have been put out under a Games Workshop license. I’ve owned, borrowed and played some of them in the past and for the most part I enjoyed them, but there are more out now than I’ve played. I downloaded some of the earlier games now classed as “Abandonware;” games that are no longer supported by their publishers and, provided no one else has the rights to it, are available to legally download for free. I toyed with the idea of trying to obtain them all, and do a whole series of blogs on Games Workshop-licensed video games, but one thing at a time!

Those slightly-differently textured floor tiles
are rock falls. Who knew?

So the first game that I tried was the DOS version of HeroQuest. Games Workshop are known these days for their flagship franchises, Warhammer and Warhammer 40000, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were producing all sorts of games and this was one of them. I never played it since it had been and gone long before I started showing any interest in the hobby, but I had a look at the video game to see if it was any good. First impressions are of dungeon-bashing with a dice mechanic. You’re on a grid of squares featuring rooms and corridors, and you roll a twelve-sided dice to see how far you can move on a turn. You’re allowed one action per turn, during which you can attack an enemy if one is there, which uses a six-sided dice system, or search the room for treasures and secret areas. The latter is necessary to get through certain sections of the game. You can play as a Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf or Mage, the idea being that you can have up to four players playing at the same time as per the board game. I’m unlikely ever to touch the multiplayer functionality; because even if I could find three other people willing to play a DOS game released in 1992, for some reason DOSBox will only run in a window about an eighth of the size of the screen – and I’m playing on a laptop.

I’ve enjoyed games like this in the past, and I feel I should be enjoying Heroquest a lot more than I am. There’s nothing wrong with it, and to be fair I shouldn’t necessarily expect all that much from a 1992 Dos game. But for games with random number generation mechanics to work, they really have to make sure the stakes are high when it happens, and offer meaningful consequences for success and failure. I’m not saying Heroquest doesn’t do that – but I haven’t seen it yet.

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Dark Souls again. I’d got a way in to it as a Deprived, but I’d spread the skill points I’d acquired far too thinly, and I was stuck on the Bell Gargoyle without the mobility to deal with it. So I started the game again as a thief, and I’m actually doing a lot better, putting most of my points into Dexterity and playing with low damage, but high mobility and critical hits.

I’m continuing to enjoy Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes; there’s a lot of fun in finding out how each of the character’s powers work so that you know what you have to do to build up an attack. This is almost essential if you’re not relying on micro-transactions, because you need to know which characters can affect the enemies or the board as well as do the damage. Sometimes it can be frustrating but it’s more fun than simply throwing money at a game in order to get through it!

Great to have a cityscape like this...

Also on Sunday after I got snowed in I had a marathon session on Open TTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I don’t play this game very often but when I do, I get into the ‘just one more turn’ mentaility that often comes with playing games like Civilisation – and it’s not even a turn-based game. Seeing your transport network influencing the development of the world around it is a pleasure I find it very difficult to describe!