Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII and Spelunky

I found the original Mortal Kombat trilogy on sale on GOG and remembering how much fun I’d had with those games in the past, I bought them and downloaded the first game. The first thing I noticed was that it handles quite a bit differently to the Sega Megadrive version of the game I was used to…

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

There’s no point in being polite about this; the controls are incredibly clunky, even for a Mortal Kombat game. The game was released for DOS and runs on DOSbox, which doesn’t support the game controller I have. This being a fighting game, I’d rather be using a controller, but from what I understand, that wouldn’t be much better: As PC controllers at the time weren’t expected to have more than four buttons anyway, whichever configuration of the controller settings you used would have meant missing out on at least one of the necessary buttons. I ended up rebinding and using some of the keyboard for the game. It works… but it’s very fiddly to remember what key does what button, and often I find myself pressing buttons that do nothing at all.

Elsewhere, the game is closer to the Arcade game than the console ports that came later. The music is different to how I remember it from the Mega Drive, but some of the tracks were used in the Gameboy port of the game! The fights work well enough, if you can get past the controls, and it would be churlish of me to suggest I’m not enjoying it at all, but there are better fighting games than this now.

A very sad moment of the game...

With the corona virus gripping the country and a lot of my work put on hold, I have spent quite a bit of time playing Final Fantasy VII on my Nintendo Switch. This is another game that, objectively speaking, hasn’t aged particularly well, but is always a joy to play, nonetheless. At the time of writing I’m in the Corel Prison, (I got game over-ed in the fight against Dyne; I’d forgotten how quick he reacts!) which means I’m past the point I reached the last time I attempted a complete playthrough. I’d be surprised if any of you remember this as it was over five years ago, but I tried playing through the PlayStation version of the game which sadly stopped working en route to Corel. Whether I’ll see this through to the end I don’t know, and with the remake due out in a few weeks, I may not have to – but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

I carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2 when I could spare the time, and I’m working my way through the missions in Venice. Funnily enough there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much side activity to do in Venice as there is in the other cities in the game; maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the game wants to move the story on a little more quickly now.

Intense...

Then, when my daughter turned up, I had a go with Spelunky on the Xbox 360. This is a bit of an odd game for me as I played it after playing Rogue Legacy, and I didn’t think Spelunky was as good. But it is one of the better pick up and play games I own on the 360, and the controls are simple enough for my daughter to at least give it a go! It’s a very difficult game, but we have fun in the mines. In my case that means getting through as much of the game as I possibly can, in her case it means trying to get to the end of the level before the ghost gets her!

I also managed to finish painting my second squad of Chaos Raptors for my Black Legion army and bought another box of them. My intention is to get three six-man squads plus a Chaos Lord to make up a 500pt army and see how I feel after that. But I’m painting these models more quickly than I’ve managed in a long time, so while this would normally take me close to a year, this year may prove a different matter entirely.

Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Last Week's Games: The Horus Heresy: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Lemmings

I spent the vast majority of last week enthralled with the Horus Heresy: Legions. I mentioned this last week so if you want to know what kind of game this is have a look at that, but for now I’m going to mention my progression. I’m getting quite good at the game now, and I can often hold my own against all but the toughest of decks. I built a few decks around Garviel Loken and whatever the daily mission objective was, but then it occurred to me to build a deck out of Loken and a larger percentage of Chaos Cards – the latter can be applied to any faction, as no legion involved with the Horus Heresy escaped corruption! This works reasonably well, if not particularly consistently. The Chaos Cards have some powerful effects but the higher level cards are also quite unpredictable, and some are as likely to do some damage to you as well as your opponent. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying the deck!

Garro has a cool healing ability, but the rest of his
force will need to hit pretty hard to win...

I also built a deck out of Saul Tarvitz and the Mechanicum. The Emperor’s Children has been an interesting faction to run since their benefits are usually tied to perfection – while powerful in their own right, the Emperor’s Children cards often have a special bonus applied when they use all of your remaining energy to play them. Tarvitz’s effect of lowering the energy you need to play a card by one makes this more flexible, and combined with the Mechanicum, who have some very powerful machines at their disposal, they are a force to be reckoned with. It doesn’t make much difference to my win:loss ratio, but it’s a refreshing change of pace that I need sometimes.

I rarely give a free-to-play game much attention, but I’ve put more time in to Legions than a significant number of games I’ve actually paid for, so it must be doing something for me!

One of the best In Medias Res beginnings I've ever seen in
a video game. You don't even know the hero's name at this point.

On the Switch, I continued with Final Fantasy VII, getting to the point where you leave Midgar after rescuing Aeris from the Shinra building. I’ve really enjoyed playing it again, and even more so now that I’ve been playing pen-and-paper role-playing games for a while and have a much better idea of a class-based system. This isn’t used obviously in Final Fantasy VII, but it’s helpful to remember what everyone is supposed to be doing and, apart from a couple of times when I’ve made a mistake with regard to what materia everyone has when I have the option to change it, I’ve been doing quite well.

Who's done Lemmings before?

Finally I’ve been playing a game that was among the first video games I ever played and has now been updated to a mobile port: Lemmings. I had a great time with this game when I was very young – to this day, I still remember my Dad laughing at the first level without really knowing what to do – and I’ve missed playing it ever since the Acorn Computer we played it on stopped working. This mobile port is not a re-make of the original game. Instead, it is an updated version of the game to bring it in line with mobile gaming. It is, for example, no longer possible to give instructions to individual lemmings. Instead, the game works on a grid-based system, where you click the square you want to affect with an instruction, and the first lemming to get there will do it. For example, if you want a lemming to dig through a square, you touch the square and press the button when it comes up. The lemming will either dig across it, or down it, depending on where it happens to be in relation to the square you’ve clicked.

It works quite well, though it lacks some accuracy that would be useful. There are certain situations where you have to work to avoid traps, and it would be really helpful to just get one lemming to where you need to be. The only way to really do this is to block the other lemmings, and you have to time it exactly right or you’ll let more through than you meant to.

So, a fun-filled week this week! Let’s see what next week brings…

 

Last Week's Games: Horus Heresy: Legions, Ultra Street Figher 2, Final Fantasy VII

In my quest to play all the Games Workshop licensed games, I downloaded and played The Horus Heresy: Legions. This is a collectable card came based around the Horus Heresy era of the Warhammer Universe, and was free to play so I thought I’d give it a go.

Who can play the better hand?

I’d never played a collectable card game on the computer before. I know Hearthstone is the standard but I’d never been tempted to play it. I’ve played the real thing – I used to play Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. I don’t anymore, because I don’t have the financial structure to keep up with the ‘meta[1]’ of the games, and even if I did, I don’t play often enough for it to be a worthwhile financial investment; I intended to do another blog in this later. So I had some expectations, which I had to shift to accommodate Legions. Your first card on the table is always your Warlord, and they come with their own abilities you can use in the game. Legions kicks you off by giving you Garviel Loken; the hero of the first Horus Heresy books. After that, the game works on an energy-based system: Each card is worth a certain amount of energy (1-10) that you need to play it, and you can only play as many cards as you have energy for. Your energy for the turn increases each turn you play, up to a maximum of 10. The idea of the game is to reduce the health of the opposing Warlord to 0, at which point the game ends and you win.

Apart from that, the main difference between video games and their table-top counterparts is the health system. Each card that represents a fighting unit has two numbers: Left is how much damage each unit does, and right is how much damage it can withstand. The number on the right goes down cumulatively to the attacks it takes, and when it reaches 0, the unit dies. This is different to the table-top games, where it is usually necessary to hit a unit hard enough to eliminate it entirely or it loses no defensive power at all – and rightly so, or the game would get bogged down while the players try to keep track of it. But I expect the whole point of playing games like this on a computer is to have the CPU make those calculations for you!

I’ve been having fun with Legions so far; I win about as many games as I lose. I don’t intend to spend any money on it, and I’m not sure how much more time I’ll want to put in to it, but for now it’s doing what I need!

I had another go at Ultra Street Figher 2, getting through most of the game with various different people and beating it with Dhalsim, of all people! He’s not the easiest character to use, however it becomes a lot easier once you remember that you have other options than to use his most powerful attacks – the lighter ones are often easier to aim. I also played Street Fighter with my daughter, which was lovely. She’s only 2 at this point, but she found it engaging! I think the thing with fighting games is that it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to be doing – beating the other guy up. There’s no tricky platforming, no levelling up or looting; you just press a button to make a thing happen which she enjoyed. I let her win a few times – I wanted her to enjoy it – and called time after 10 minutes. I guess for her, it’s about winning, but it’s also about doing something with her Dad, and with video games being a large part of my life, it’s great to be able to do that!

Beautiful...

Finally, I’ve been enjoying Final Fantasy VII again on the Nintendo Switch. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, except that it really does look good on the Switch! Let’s see if I can beat it this time!

---

[1] The system by which you’ve only really got a chance if you keep on top of the latest releases

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)

No Game New Year part 10: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and some Temptations...

Right then, first thing's first, I've recently become aware three games that have brought me ever closer to failing the challenge. I haven't given in, but here they are, and the reasons why:

Temptation 2: South Park: The Stick of Truth

This one's a bit of a mystery to me. Am I a South Park fan? Not really; I kind of lost interest as it got ever-more ridiculous. Am I an RPG fan? Yes, and I've got plenty of those games and I know it. But everything I've seen on the new South Park game looks so good that I really wanted to give it a try. I've seen Angry Joe's review, and Total Biscuit's WTF is... video on it, and it really does look like a game I would enjoy playing. Apart from anything else, it's about time someone put out a decent South Park game!

Temptation 3: One Finger Death Punch

Another one from Total Biscuit, this simple-but-intricately-timed brawler looks like an absolutely amazing way to fill a few hours. I'd love to download it onto my Xbox, (there's no way it would happen on my laptop!) but I'm keeping it quiet for now.

Temptation 4: Final Fantasy VII.

An old friend put me on to this. I think this game is as good as Final Fantasy ever was or ever will be, and I've owned it on the PC and the Playstation. Sadly, there's no way on God's Green Earth that any computer we have in our house will run a game ported to PC in 1998, and I've lost my copy of the game for the Playstation (we suspect it was stolen.) Then my friend put on Facebook a picture of him playing the game on the PSVita, and if I ever get one of those, that will be the reason - so I can play Final Fantasy VII again. Trouble is, dropping at least a tonne on the Vita and buying a game I already own will come dangerously close to breaking the challenge, so in its spirit, I will wait until it is over before I do this.

And now on to what I've been up to this week...

Actually, not a lot. Apart from the fact that I've been busy most nights this week, I've also been quite ill with the back-end of a cold. I've had headaches, I've been dizzy, and I've been unable to regulate my body temperature - three things that are not conducive to having a particularly good time when I've been playing video games. Plus my girlfriend was up this weekend so my PS2 has remained off. So most of these notes actually cover what happened last week...

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

So I spent quite a lot of time last week talking about how I think we came to have such a game on the PS2, and why a relatively poor addition to the otherwise-excellent Fallout franchise came to exist at all. If you missed it and are wondering what Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, here's a quick re-cap: The game is a top-down Dungeon-Crawler action title, with some very basic RPG elements based on the Fallout setting (post-apocalyptic 50s style.) The idea is that you are an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel - about as near as the Fallout series gets to having a 'good' faction - sent on a quest to find some of the brotherhood. Naturally, things don't go to plan, and you end up fighting your way through Radscorpions, Raiders, Ghouls and Super Mutants.

There are quite a few aesthetic differences between this game and the other games in the Fallout series that are worth mentioning straight away. First, you do not 'create' your character in the usual sense; you choose from a choice of three (and later six:) Nadia, Cyrus and Cain. Nadia is the 'quick and nimble' archetype who moves slightly faster and has the ability to use dual weapons. Cyrus is a heavy-set man, tougher than Nadia who can't use dual weapons but can use heavy weapons. Cain is a Ghoul, neither tough nor particularly quick but can use all the weapons and also has the advantage of being immune to radiation. This difference will put off a lot of the more traditional Western RPG fans, but it does have the advantage of being able to put you in the action more or less straight away. These, by the way, are the only differences between the characters. The dialogue options and the way each character handles certain situations never changes in the slightest.

The other change of course is the music. The background music during the game, when present, evokes a feeling of hopeless defeat and laziness, synonymous I think with Fallout. We do have an ironic 1950s track that plays at the start (uncredited, but probably called 'Nuclear Blast.) Most significantly though are the inclusion of tracks from a number of notable Metal bands of the time, including Slipknot, Messhugha and Chimaira. These generally appear during boss battles, and there is nothing like shooting the shit out of the devious mayor of the local town while listening to a vocal-free mix of The Heretic Anthem. It is a little out of style with the usual music you might expect from a Fallout game, but as I mentioned last week, this game was to cater to a very different demographic.

The graphics aren't amazing, in fact for a 6th gen console game they're actually quite poor. The character models only look a little bit better than something you might find on the PS1. Generally, they didn't have to be much better than that, as most of the action is coming from the top-down so you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of view that would give rise to that kind of detail. But you really do notice when you talk to characters and the quality of their models and animations are... repetitive, to say the least. The voice acting is done well enough, but the script sounds like it was written by a teenager with a very limited vocabulary.

Then we get to the gameplay itself. It is pretty standard stuff; running around, hacking and slashing and shooting at various enemies that will do nothing but try to kill you. You eventually pick up a balance of Ranged, Melee and Grenade-style weapons, and as you can equip up to three weapons I guess it's the best balanced option to pick all three types. With Melee weapons, there's usually not a lot of difference in how they handle; a Hammer is only marginally quicker than a Knife, for example, but does more damage. The difference, then, is that certain characters can't use the larger weapons. With ranged weapons, there's a little more variety between single-shot, automatic, shotguns and all sorts really, though certain characters can't wield two at the same time. The aiming is rubbish: you press R1 to aim a shot; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Finally there are the grenades, and I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when their functionality was designed. You have to hold down the button to throw them, and then a little glowing light moves steadily ahead from you to represent your shot power. You then let the button go and they're thrown in more often than not a random direction as it gets stuck on a piece of scenery. Cover is limited to being able to duck, which I wouldn't have notices at all if I hadn't bashed all the buttons to find out, and even then it's hard to tell.

To be fair, I think all this was before controls in shooters were really standardised, so there are some differences to the controls and functionality which may have just been ill-educated guesswork. And there is some fun to be had in gunning and slashing your way through hordes of enemies. Why do you think we play Dynasty Warriors? However it gets repetitive very quickly and, despite the inclusion of three characters, doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs. This is about my fourth, though I've never reached the end of the game.

For this one, I chose Cyrus, and ramped up the difficulty to the maximum available, and here's where it starts to get interesting: You have to pick your spots carefully. Some enemies are better dealt with ranged weapons than others, but ammo is limited and so is your health, so you have to learn how each enemy attacks, how to avoid it and how to kill them as quickly as possible. You find yourself asking questions like: "Is it worth using a few rounds of ammo to deal with this Radscorpion who will poison me if I get too close?" "These raiders are pretty fierce and I'd love to shoot them but I know that some of them have got Flamethrowers, should I save my ammo for them?" "Is it worth taking a few hits to take down four guys at once with a grenade?" This is where the game comes in to its own, and almost becomes reminiscent of the old-school platform/run and gun style games where you'd have to memories enemy types and attack patterns to survive.

The problem is that the old games it emulates were generally over in an hour and a half. With this game, it takes about that to get through a single section of the game, and there is a LOT of it. The plot isn't particularly compelling either. Currently I'm at the end of the first chapter out of three. I'd love to get to the end of this title simply to say that I have, but I have a feeling I will be tired of the overly-repetitive gameplay long before the game is.

We'll see where I am with it next week, though if my eye doesn't stop twitching, I won't be playing much of anything...