Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Mortal Kombat, Killer 7, Shinobi, Zaxxon, Orcs and Elves.

I’ve played quite a few games this week! Firstly, I finally beat Far Cry 2. It’s been a long journey to get to the end of that game and while I don’t see myself coming back to it, I’m glad I’ve played it. It seems to be the core experience of what modern open world games eventually became; the old games may not be able to match the new in terms of content, but it was developed at a time when the idea was new, fresh, and waiting to see what could be done with it.

After beating a long heavy game like Far Cry 2 I needed something light and playable to enjoy, and I left that task to my old sparring partner Streets of Rage 2. I’m getting quite far in to the final level before I lose all of my lives, but the boss rush on the seventh level still tanks most of them. I’m also enjoying playing as Axel more than I did before; as long as you time his moves correctly, he can be devastating.

I'd love to be able to play the BGM on classical guitar...

I went round to a friend’s flat who had a Sega Mega Drive console, and I played a couple of games with them including Columns and the original Mortal Kombat. Columns is as good fun as ever; I lost the game this time through being very tired (it had been a long day) and doing the cardinal sin with puzzle games, which is to try and be clever and look for combos. I’m sure, with more skill, this would be a great tactic. But right now, just trying to match three gems is good enough. Combos tend to happen by themselves. Mortal Kombat was a pleasure to play again. I found myself remembering some of the old moves that Johnny Cage and Scorpion used to do, and took no small amount of pleasure in using them against Kirsty and her friends who didn’t. It took me right back to when I used to play it at home and organise mini-tournaments with my friends; we’d knock each other out and the winner would get a sweet. Great times.

My new game for this week was Killer 7 on the Playstation 2. I bought it at some point last year thinking that this is a game of some reverence from the reknowned developer Suda51, and therefore must be a good game. It certainly succeeded in making me wonder what in the world it’s all about. I just about understand the shooting and I understand why it’s on rails, but I’m not quite getting the significance of the different characters, and why they’re being guided through the game by a guy in a red fetish suit who feels the need to constantly tell me I’m in a tight spot. Maybe I haven’t had enough time with it yet, and if I give it more time the plot might hook me in a little more. We’ll see how it works out but it’s not like I’ve got nothing else to be playing!

Very hard game!

I had a go with a couple of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I tried out Zaxxon, having heard it mentioned several times on Metal Jesus’ Youtube channel. It’s an isometric shooter that has you moving higher or lower, rather than up and down. It was probably phenomenal at the time it was released but I find it very difficult to aim like that; I guess I’ll get used to it if I persevere. Those games were designed to be hard! So too was the original Shinobi, apparently. You can respawn as many times as you like but it doesn’t help if you keep dying in the same place over and over again! But they were what I needed at that point, which was some mindless fun.

Also I played a bit more of Orcs and Elves; I’m enjoying it so far as the difficulty of the game is just about right for me. Also, as is becoming the case, I’m finding a lot more fun in the games where it’s ok to just pick it up and have a play, rather than immersing myself in a simulation.

Backlog Beatdown: Blessing The Rains Down In Africa with Far Cry 2

Yeah, I’ve been waiting nearly a month to make that headline joke...

All quiet at the moment, but there'll be soldiers
waiting behind those buildings...

Far Cry 2, then. It’s an open world First Person Shooter set in Africa, specifically a fictional (but probably based at least remotely on reality!) sub-Saharan country torn apart by civil war. Two factions have laid claim to the country, and your job is to assassinate The Jackal, the notorious arms dealer who armed both sides. On arrival, however, you contract malaria and end up barely conscious and face to face with The Jackal himself, who leaves you with a machete and a sidearm and leaves you to your own devices. After escaping the gun battle currently going on in the town, you’re picked up by one of the two factions, who sets you off working for them. Along the way, you rescue another foreign mercenary who becomes one of your stable of ‘Buddies,’ and make contact with the underground resistance, who are trying to move civilians out of the country and can give you medicine to treat your malaria if you do. After that, you’re on your own, and it’s up to you to find the Jackal and kill him. But as you get more deeply involved with the politics of the warring factions and your buddies, you realise that nothing is as straightforward as it might first appear, and that you potentially have the opportunity to end the conflict entirely. But with your health deteriorating and the chaos and devastation you cause, will there be anything left by the time all this is over? 

I’ve owned this game for a long time, and I had exactly the same problem with it as I had with Assassin’s Creed: I wanted to roleplay it in a stealth style. That meant sneaking through the undergrowth of the vast map, not killing unless I had to, and scout the items or mission objectives. It doesn’t work in this game, since most of the soldiers will attack you on sight, and while you have the option to use silenced weapons and camouflage later, I was having a lot more fun running and gunning the different areas. You’re not graded on the missions, so this is probably one of the only instances I’ve seen where “open-ended mission structure” means exactly that. You’re given various different missions by the factions, buddies, the resistance, arms dealers and even some intercepted telephone calls, and while they are all very similar, (take a thing to a place/blow up a thing/kill someone,) they each take about 20-40 minutes to do and some are actually quite challenging.

Whoever's in that car is in for a nasty surprise...

The Buddies serve a few purposes – you can pick up missions from them, or they will subvert the missions you’re already doing to make them more challenging with a higher reward. Finally, if you lose all your health, they will come to help you, but only once per mission – you have to visit a safe house to reset it. The arms dealers will offer you opportunities to attack convoys of weapons; doing this will unlock more and better weapons. The rest of the game is exploration: Searching for diamonds to buy the weapons, and for audio logs left behind by The Jackal.

I’ve had a good amount of fun with Far Cry 2 and for that reason I found myself more immersed in the story than I might otherwise have been. Some open world games are better paced, have more to do and have a clearer final objective, but the conceit of today’s open world games were very much in development when this was published in 2008, so it showcases the core experience of its genre. There are some glitches; nothing game-breaking but some of the soldiers suddenly appear on top of cars, and when I got to the second main area, the same audio log was coming up each time no matter how many I picked up. I won’t aim for 100% completion; the game took long enough to get to the ending, and most of the achievement points I’m missing are tied up in multiplayer modes with dead servers. But with a little patience, Far Cry 2 became a richer and far more compelling experience than I previously had.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Golden Axe Warrior, Zombie Dice, Hey! That's My Fish, Forbidden Island

This week I’ve been whittling away at Far Cry 2 whenever I get the chance. I’m making slow and steady progress through the game itself, although I did manage to unlock the achievement for unlocking all of the weapons. Part of my mission for the next few times I play will be to buy them all, as well as the manuals, upgrades and ammo packs!

This is where you start...

It wasn’t going to be long before the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection found its way back in to my disc drive, and my new game for this month was Golden Axe Warrior. This is one of the unlockable games, and was previously released on the Sega Master System. It’s a top-down roleplaying game, where you play as a warrior wanting to avenge the death of his parents and destroy the evil giant Death Adder. This being an earlier iteration of an RPG, there’s very little customisation or choice of path; you need to find nine crystals in various dungeons, and the game doesn’t appear too fussy about what order you do them in, but that’s about it. It’s all about the game, wandering around the world, killing enemies, looting money off them and occasionally finding items to improve your damage or armour. There’s a weird shielding mechanic in there as well, where if you’re hit just in the right place your shield will block the shot, but I can’t use it in any dependable way yet.

I actually enjoyed the game for the hour or so that I played it, and defeated the first dungeon. It’s hardly a great-looking game after all this time, and comparisons to the Legend of Zelda are obvious and not entirely welcome (of course Sega were going to try something similar when it realised how successful these kind of games could be!) but it’s good fun and a nice way to play a bare-bones RPG without having to worry about assigning points or morality. However, this style of game was very much in its infancy at that point, and some of the systems were underdeveloped. Not having the manual to it caused me some problems, as did the option to use quest items instead of handing them in. I got a quest from an injured dwarf to bring him the Golden Apple, which is said to heal any wound. I knew perfectly well that this was true, because I’d picked up the apple and, not quite realising what it did, used it about half an hour prior to that. At that point I gave up. I’m not saying I’ll never come back to it but I didn’t want to have to play through the first hour or so of the game to correct it. Maybe another time!

Mind those red dice...

I also played some games around Kirsty’s house again the other night! We played Zombie Dice; a push-your-luck style game in which you play as a Zombie chasing survivors for their brains. You roll three dice, keep the brains, keep the shotgun blasts, and re-roll the feet of the survivors who escape. The aim of the game is to get the most brains, and the game finishes once somebody gets to 13. However, if you take three or more shotguns, you lose all the brains you collected that turn. The mechanic is risk and reward, which sometimes comes off and sometimes doesn’t; Kirsty won that one.

She also beat me at Hey, That’s My Fish, but it was a close game this time and we enjoy playing it a lot!

Finally we had a go at Forbidden Island, a game that preceded Pandemic, and when you start playing that it’s easy to see the familiar mechanics and tense races against time. You play as explorers who go to the titular Forbidden Island to look for the mythical treasure said to be hidden there. Each character has different abilities that will help, but you have limited resources, and only a short amount of time to look before the island floods and you lose. We beat the game in the end through a combination of luck and teamwork, and there’s talk of me using this game in the future as a training tool for communication!

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2 and Hey, That's My Fish!

Apparently in Africa everyone has the same car...

This week, my video gaming consisted entirely of playing Far Cry 2. There’s not much more to say about that game that I haven’t mentioned in previous blogs, except that I’ve got to the second act now. As I understand it, the game is based on The Heart of Darkness; the book by Joseph Conrad that eventually became the movie Apocalypse Now. The central themes running through both of them are dehumanisation, and while a video game is necessarily removed from realistic violence, the theme is picked up here quite substantially. You’re sent to Africa to kill one man – The Jackal – but I’ve killed hundreds of people so far to get close to him, for money, information or weapons. Is the reward for killing this man worth this much death and destruction? I don’t know how the game ends, but I suspect not. From what I understand about the Far Cry games, this is a running theme: When you’ve killed enough people to escape and return home, will you be the same person you were, or will the experience have changed you entirely?

When I resolved to play a new game every week, I didn’t factor in time management, and presumed I’d have some time over the weekend that I didn’t really have as my calendar filled up. So I was set to break my New Year’s Resolution after less than one week; there just wasn’t the time! Thankfully, my girlfriend Kirsty saved it by playing a board game with me. No one said it had to be a video game!

The game we played was Fantasy Flight’s “Hey, That’s My Fish!” I wanted to collect the game and that’s the reason I own it, though I definitely had Kirsty in mind when I bought it as well. The game is about penguins stealing fish off each other, and Kirsty loves penguins. This was always going to be a winner.

"Have you ever seen
A penguin come to tea?
Take a look at me,
A penguin you will see..."

How you play: The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, arranged in lines of 7/8 to make a rough square. You place on the board your team of 2-4 penguins depending on how many people are playing. The tiles either have one, two or three fish on them, and on your turn you choose a penguin to move in a straight line towards the tile you want. After the penguin moves, you get to keep the tile you just left. You keep doing this until the penguins can’t move anymore, and whoever has the most fish at the end of the game is the winner. Kirsty and I played three games, I won the first two, but Kirsty got the hang of it after that and won the third.

This sounds like a fairly light-hearted game, but dig a little deeper and there’s a clever strategic element as well. The penguins can’t change direction during a move, nor can they move through other penguins (including their own team) or empty spaces. That means it’s entirely possible to plan moves around blocking other player’s penguins in, effectively taking them out of the game. It might seem like an unfair thing to do, but it lends a competitive element to the game, and the games rarely last long enough for one player to be eliminated entirely for more than a few minutes.

The best board games meld together their theme and mechanics well. At its core, Hey, That’s My Fish is a competitive Solitaire-like game, and as an abstract concept the game would function just as well. Slap on the theme of Penguins fighting for fish, however, and suddenly there’s a lot more at stake. It’s more fun to picture a penguin stuck on the ice, eliminated with but a single fish to eat, and the devious penguins from the other team sauntering off with armfuls of fish! Kirsty, in particular, had a good time naming the penguins Speedy, Greedy, Angry and Drunk. It’s not perfect – collecting the tiles without messing up the board can be difficult if you’re not careful, and mechanics designed around eliminating players is always a risky move – but we had a lot of fun with it and I’m looking forward to playing it with more players. 

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Orcs and Elves, Dungeons and Dragons

Happy New Year, people! I make the usual resolutions every year – eat more healthily, practice my music more, write more songs etc – and I very rarely see them through to the end. However, as this blog series is doing reasonably well (roughly 100 views every week, which isn’t much but it is consistent!) I thought I’d try a new resolution in to it for 2018, and that is: Play a new game every week.

This might sound expensive, but I’ve also got a massive backlog of games, many of which I’ve owned for years and never played. I’m missing out on quite a bit in my collection of games without having to buy necessarily buy any more of them! So I’ll try to find time to play a new one every week. It will be tough, not least because many of them are long-form games that need weeks or even months of play to beat, but I’m up for the challenge and I’ll give it a go!

Funnily enough, sniping's not really
my thing any more...

For the Christmas Holiday week I’ve mostly been playing Far Cry 2. As I mentioned last week, this is a game I’ve owned for years and I’ve got really now! Maybe I’m enjoying games at a different level these days. For example, I like the fact that the separate missions take roughly 20-40 minutes to beat; you can do them in small chunks and feel like you’re making progress. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with hunting for the diamonds. I like the shooting, and the certain sense of vulnerability you get from not quite being able to see due to the haze. I’m enjoying the Buddy system as well, where they give you alternative ways to complete missions, give you more missions and rescue you if you get hurt. Indeed, I was actually quite sad when Josip, one of the buddies who’d been with me most of the game, died because he’d got in to trouble and was too badly injured by the time I’d got to him to help. I find the campaign is moving very slowly, as there’s a lot of faffing about with side missions – but as there’s almost always a valuable reward for these, it doesn’t feel like filler. Open world games have arguably lost their way over the last few years, as there was only so far this could go without becoming bloated, but Far Cry 2 managed to create a compelling world with just enough to do that it keeps me coming back. Whether it’s enough for me to see the game through to the end is a bit of a, er, Far Cry, especially since I’m back at work tomorrow and won’t have as much time for games like this, but we’ll see how we get on. I’d like to see it through to the end after all this time.

The wand talks to you. Yeah,

I also got Orcs and Elves for the Nintendo DS for Christmas and I’ve been playing that when I’ve got a spare few minutes. This is a roleplaying game somewhere between Legend of Grimrock and Fatal Labyrinth; you play as the son of an Elf adventurer and you’re on a quest to find out what happened to the Dwarven King. It’s a roleplaying experience with, from what I can tell, all the fat chewed off: There’s no assigning points to level up, or min-maxing stats, or customisation that I can see. It’s all about dungeon bashing, and collecting loot. And I’m fine with that; it’s a simple enough experience and one that I think works very well on the DS. I’ve not played many games that meld pick-up-and-play with a compelling plot and good gameplay mechanics so well!



I might talk about the orange cover
if it's a slow week...

Finally, I’ve volunteered to run a Dungeons and Dragons game at the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I’ll be running Palace of the Silver Princess, a 1^st edition module converted in to 5^th edition for the purpose. This is a bit of a risky move for me given that I don’t have a lot of time to prepare and run sessions these days, but it’s a simple-enough adventure and I’m hoping to do a lot of the legwork in the run up to Thursday when I run the first session.

Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate and Far Cry 2

Fun fact: I originally opened this blog with some scathing, sarcastic remarks about how I have nothing better to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, (I normally put these blogs out on Mondays,) before appending that I’d actually written the vast majority of it the day before. The joke was on me in the end, as it turned out I actually had got better things to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, and ended up posting it two days late. Well done me. 

So, what have I been playing this week?

One of the best and most compelling characters I've seen...

I had a go with Hand of Fate, in anticipation of getting the second one at some point, most likely when it goes on a Steam sale. It’s a game that I was originally put on to by TotalBiscuit a few years ago. The idea is that you’re sitting across from ‘The Dealer,’ a mysterious Games Master-like figure who is using cards to take you through your adventure. It’s definitely inspired by a few different kinds of what I now call “Hobby Games;” there’s a board game, a deck-building card game and a role-playing game in there somewhere. The Dealer lays the cards out in a pattern, and you move your piece on to each card, which is then flipped to reveal the encounter. Sometimes it will be a quest, sometimes it will be a shop, sometimes it will be an opportunity to get some new gear or another bonus, with a random chance mini-game. Other times it will be a combat encounter, whereupon the game transports you into a combat arena and becomes a fighting game that borrows heavily from the ‘Arkham’ combat system. There are 3-5 ‘levels’ to each adventure, and each one culminates in a boss fight. If you win, you progress into the next adventure, and if you lose, you can try again as many times as you like.

It’s an intriguing prospect, however the game increases your engagement by adding rogue-like elements to it. You can beat the first few levels without trying, but the game becomes a lot harder later on. However, you don’t start with all of the cards in the game; you gain other cards as you go along. Some cards have tokens attached to them; each token has a set of new cards in there that you can add to the deck if you beat the encounter on the card. You get to keep all the cards you win, even if you lose the adventure, so there is a sense of progression in the game even if you don’t do too well.

The combat has been criticised for being too ‘clunky,’ but I don’t notice; my laptop doesn’t run especially high frame rates. I really enjoy the game – and I like being able to dip in to it every now and again and still feel like I’m making progress.

I'm enjoying it at the moment, but will it
carry me to the end?

I’ve also had a surprising amount of fun with Far Cry 2, a game I haven’t played since No Game New Year. It’s a first-person shooter set in sub-Saharan Africa, and the emphasis is on exploration and story progression. I struggled with it for the longest time; the game appeared to expect me to meticulously plan everything out and attack targets after spending ages planning and scouting, and when that invariably didn’t go very well, I lost a lot of the fun out of the game and gave up after not very long. It got much better once I threw all that out of the window and approached the missions from the angle of getting an assault rifle and killing everything that moves. I find I’m making a lot more progress and enjoying the game a lot more. I might even make it all the way through the game this time! Now that I’ve increased the pace of the game, and therefore decreased the time it takes me to get through the missions, I can play the game for roughly an hour and feel like I’ve made progress. It’s is a long game, but I’ll stick with it for a bit longer and hopefully have a lot more fun in between, whatever happens.

No Game New Year: A Brief Summary of the Last Month or so...

First of all, I must apologise profusely for not posting for the last few weeks. There’s a whole host of long and not very interesting reasons for it. A lot of it is to do with the fact that I’m a guitar teacher, and what I really ought to be writing is the 130 reports for the children that I’m teaching in the area. While I struggle to motivate myself to do it, I also find it very hard to justify doing anything else when I’m not doing it. So I haven’t been writing blogs because I know I ought to be writing reports – even though I can’t motivate myself to do it.

Anywho…

I’ve been playing a lot of games over the last few weeks, some I got further into than others but none have I managed to finish yet. In the spirit of the challenge I really ought to be getting rid of the ones that I’ve not kept at, but I can never really bring myself to do it; there’s a chance I might come back to it later. The main games are:

 

XCOM: Enemy Within

This is an updated version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love this game, I really do, but it is so hard to do on classic difficulty that to be honest I rarely get further into the third month of the game before I derail the whole thing by getting my entire squad killed and not having anything remotely resembling competent understudies.

 

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

I’ve tried this game a number of times and I’ve struggled to get in to it, but this time I decided that rather than play to a theme, play the character I want to play – in this case a sneaky Dark Elf thief – and I find that I’m enjoying it a lot more. But in an open world game where there is so much to do, I often find myself wishing I was playing something else after a few sessions several hours long where I don’t appear to have done anything to progress the game at all.

 

Far Cry 2

If there is ever a game I should have given up on it’s this. It is a good game, I’m not denying that, and I’m fairly sure has more to offer in its single player campaign than many of its contemporary modern-military shooters, but somehow I can’t motivate myself to keep going with it for more than a few sessions. I think once I’ve finished the game I’m doing now, I might give it another go, or later in the year… I kind of owe it a chance to finish!

 

Speaking of which…

 

Dragon Age: Origins

This is the game I am currently playing. I’ve had a few false starts with this but I’m enjoying it now. I’m playing a Dwarf Fighter character with a specialisation in two-handed weapons because I wanted to maximise damage output as a tactic, and so far…

Well, the fantasy setting is nothing if not generic, Elves and Dwarves, that sort of thing. Darkspawn – the games thematic bad guys – are from what I have seen so far a different version of the usual Orcs. And the idea of a specialist force of soldiers, in this game called the Grey Wardens, created for the purpose of keeping these Darkspawn at bay is certainly nothing new. Is it even an interesting spin on the idea? Well, no, not that I’ve seen so far. We’ve all done Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, early Final Fantasy games before. There’s nothing new here that I’ve seen so far after a good 20 hours of play.

That being said, it is done VERY well, which is something we can always rely on Bioware to do. I’ve played bits of the first Mass Effect game, but honestly I find myself reminded more of Knights of the Old Republic – with better interactions between the characters. The difficulty, which I rather foolishly set to Hard, is deceptively gentle at the start of the game, but becomes very hard later on – particularly with boss battles, which I rarely feel equipped to deal with. And the idea of recruiting an army to fight the Darkspawn is something I’m looking forward to finishing off, if only for a refreshing change from fetching… maguffins, I think, is the word, or quest items. The game play itself is fun, as are the quests and the feeling that, while there are things going on in the world that are bigger than you, they might all be relying on you to save them…

This is a little bit general but I’m going to be on this one for a long time so I might as well leave it there for this week. I’ll go in to specifics hopefully at the end of the week, where I can discuss things in more detail as I hopefully find out more about the game.