Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!

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!

Last Week's Games: Rayman Origins, Dark Souls, New Super Mario Bros and Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes



A kid's game it may be, but there's
something Lovecraftian about these villains...

After the rather intense experience of playing Max Payne 3 all the way through in a single weekend, I felt I needed something light to lose myself in for a while, so I tried Rayman Origins. Rayman is a franchise that I thing I should have given more time to than I ever really did; it came at a point where 3D graphics were becoming the standard, and a 2D platformer was not what I was expecting of the 5^th console generation. It was my loss, really, because Rayman was a very good game, one I currently own for the Playstation and hope to return to at some point. I haven’t played any of the games in between, but Rayman Origins is a very competently-designed action platformer. It’s addressed some of the issues presented by the first game – the difficulty appears to be reduced, you have unlimited lives etc – and this makes for a very fun game. You run and jump across some beautifully-drawn and colourful words, trying to free the Electoons (Little pink blobs,) punching bad guys, and capturing Lums (the game’s equivalent of coins.) Occasionally there’s a shoot-em-up style mini-game with a mosquito which breaks up the action nicely. I’m enjoying my time with it so far, I’ve got to the second ‘World,’ and I mean to carry on. As the achievements are all earned in-game and none of them are tied up in online multiplayer as far as I can see, this is one of the few games I have a hope of 100% completing; it’ll be an interesting journey if nothing else! 

Strewth...

It will be worth remembering how much fun I’m having with Rayman, because the other game I’ve been playing this week is Dark Souls. I’ve started this game a few times and never got very far; all the rumours about the games difficulty are absolutely true. You play as an undead fighting your way through the land of Lordran, to… actually I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve, other than avoiding spending eternity locked in the Undead Asylum you escape from at the beginning. You fight your way through other undead and demons, each and every one of which wants to see you dead. Which is for the best, really, because you’ll be obliging them on multiple occasions before you’ll get anywhere. Dark Souls has a very technical combat system, and you have to work out the function of each of your moves. A light attack does some damage, a strong attack does more damage and can breaks defence, which is its primary purpose. You can do a jumping attack for the same purpose and to close some distance, while a front kick will knock enemies back; great if you’re fighting near a sheer drop. If you have a shield you can block, and also parry attacks. The latter is almost mandatory for getting through the game, but requires precise timing to pull off. I’ve been playing it a lot over the last week and had to look at a Wiki to find out what I was doing wrong; quite a bit as it turns out. Also it was far from the first time I’ve tried to play through this game and this time I found the lower section of the Undead Burg I’d missed completely for the first time! I think I might have to restart again and follow the Wiki. Is that cheating? Possibly, but even armed with that information, Dark Souls is a very hard game.

Oddly compelling...

When it was convenient for me to be playing on handhelds, I kept on at New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS. I’m enjoying it, but I like being able to put this one down now and again. For some reason, playing through this one knowing I’m almost certainly going to have to do so again to unlock everything isn’t filling me with a determination to do so. On my Kindle Fire, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes. I’ve been enjoying that; it’s a Match-3 but with an element of strategy to it. Can I beat it without spending any money? I hope so, but it’s a bit of a grind!

No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!

No Game New Year: Dark Souls

It hasn't escaped my attention that my blogging has been somewhat inconsistent of late. Usually the reason for this is that I haven't had time to write a blog about what games I'm playing. So to counter this, all subsequent No Game New Year posts - or indeed anything I write on the subject of getting through video games - will be 700 words or thereabouts.

With that in mind...

Dark Souls

So for the past couple of days I’ve been playing Dark Souls, a game of some renown amongst the so-called “Hard Core.” For the rest of us, Yahtzee sums up the core of the game quite well: “[You] must best a series of castles, dungeons and bosses by doing the equivalent of firing yourself from a cannon at them an infinite number of times.”

It’s true; the game is very hard. Horribly unforgiving, it doesn’t suffer fools or their mistakes. This action/horror RPG is frustrating to play, depressing to experience and has probably by now caused several cases of advanced delusionary schizophrenia.

And do you know what? I love it.

 

I’ve played most of the RPGs for the Xbox360 and a significant number of them for the Xbox and other systems. The high-fantasy swords and sorcery basically-the-same-plot-each-time-but-with-slightly-different-controls are enjoyable enough for the first few hours but get a bit samey after a while, when you realise you’ve been playing for two hours and made absolutely no progress in the game.

Dark Souls is different. Its setting is of a dying world largely populated with undead, lending itself to its dark, oppressive atmosphere straight away. There are no elves, dwarves, orcs or equivalent: Here you’re a former human, now an undead soul, trying to battle your way for something remotely resembling a purpose. I say this because I know no better. There’s not much exposition that explains the plot, and such that there is comes from talking to the VERY small number of NPCs you happen across on your travels. It actually is your story.

It also does away with a lot more of the common RPG tropes, which is very refreshing. For a start, the Tutorial - such as it is - explains the game mechanics and that is it. No button prompts, no hand holding. It will take you up to the first boss, and then you’re on your own. There’s also no village you use as a home base. Sure, there are bonfires, which is about as good as it gets for the purposes, and there are NPCs and Merchants scattered around the gaff, but nowhere you would feel safe or even free from the imposing environments. There’s none of this tedious mucking about with crafting, no lore explained to you in 24-page long books you can’t be bothered to read, no ‘relationship’ mechanic. It does a good job of keeping the focus where it needs to be: On the aforementioned Castles, Dungeons and Bosses.

Yes, this caught me out first time...

On that subject, there’s plenty going for it here as well. A lot of the regular enemies are easy enough to kill but can still make very short work of you indeed if you are careless. Anything tougher than a regular hollow man (who makes up the majority of enemies in the earlier section of the game) really does need thinking about in order to come up with strategies for beating them. The fact that I’m playing The Sorcerer adds to this, since I’ve got to decide whether to use my very limited magical resources for an easy kill, or risk attacking up close with my melee weapons and taking more damage. Dying – which I do a lot – sends you back to your last bonfire without any souls (awarded after you kill enemies, and brilliantly used as both currency and experience points) and though you do have a chance to recover what you’ve lost if you manage to get to the same point on your next run-through, it does shut down anybody who thinks they can get through the game by scum-saving.

So while it is perfectly possible to play this game for two hours and not get anywhere, it’s not because the game is designed with faffing around in mind. If you die, it’s because you’re rubbish. Or you’re careless, which is the same thing. Or it could be because you haven’t analyzed the attack patterns of the enemies yet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s something very old-school about this – and a welcome change of pace from the games I’ve been playing for the 360 this year!