Last Week's Games: Heroquest, GTA: Vice City, Chaos Space Marines

Hmm, naming the Wizard Gandalf...

It’s been something of a quiet week for me on the games front. Early on in the week I had another go with Heroquest, and played the first two missions again with the Barbarian before dying on the third. This was, in part, due to not knowing about certain of the game’s mid-long term facets: Your health (body points) carries over between missions, but any healing potions you pick up do not. So I didn’t heal my character before the second mission ended, meaning he was going into the next level under-powered and with no means of healing himself. By the time I realised this I had a run of bad luck with some of the encounters and died in a battle I hadn’t got a hope of winning. Disheartened, I moved on.

On Friday I went in to Get Gaming in Lower Gornal to see if they had any Xbox 360 games I wanted. As it happens they did, but not enough to make up an offer so I left it alone. I also had a look at the PSP, as they have a system and some games in, including the two Grand Theft Auto games: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. I thought about buying the system and the games, but then I remembered that I already own three games in the GTA3 canon, and so far have only beaten the first. I’d like to own a PSP and even a PSVita, but when my chief motivation for buying one is currently open-world games in a series of which I haven’t even played through the previous games, it didn’t seem such a good idea.

A big part of this game was the Florida Haze...

So I checked out the 360 back-compatible list, found the GTA3 games on there, dug my old games out and had a go at Vice City. I had somehow forgotten how rough the handling was in those early GTA games! But it was a fun experience nonetheless, and now that I’m more familiar with slang terms for certain demographics (Guido’s, for example,) I can enjoy some of the cut scenes more now I know what in the world they’re talking about! As we’re still in the point where there were secrets in the form of hidden packages, rampages and insane stunts, I’m trying to alternate between doing the missions and at least one of the extras. I’ll never 100% it – but I’ll get what I can out of it!

I also visited Warlords 'n' Wizards for the first time in a while and bought a Necromunda gang, the Orlocks. I added it to my ever-growing pile of models I have yet to build, and decided to make a start on some of them. I’ve had a box of Chaos Space Marines lying around for a while that I think I originally intended to convert to Thousand Sons, but now that Word Bearers are my flagship Chaos army, I fully intend to paint them in those colours. As I’ve had the box for a long time, they’re still on small bases, but I’m not going to worry about that or they’ll never get built!

I built five of them including the heavy bolter and sprayed them black. One of the things I find when I’m painting armies is that as the bulk of it is made up of rank-and-file models, it’s easier for me to stay engaged if I paint five at a time, before moving on to a different model. Ten at a time would get them done more quickly but I get fed up painting the same model over and over again; with five it’s easier to see the progress I’m making. I paint very slowly anyway, and I’d rather make small and regular progress rather than get fed up and paint nothing for weeks, which very often happens! I didn’t get any further than the undercoat due to time constraints, but with a couple of weeks off work I’m hoping to make some progress with them.

And so we move on into the next week, where, for the first time since I’ve been doing this blog regularly, I’ve had a request to cover a game. We’ll see what happens with that!

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!