Last Week's Games: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest, Magic Labyrinth, Ninja Dice and Dungeon Roll

I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons, hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.

Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter.

One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven, or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!

Where are the walls?

Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience, but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a 6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won the game by collecting five treasures!

I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least...

We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play (she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for a four-year-old!

Last Month's Painting: Completed the Space Hulk set

Finally... the set is complete

This week I finally came to the end of my journey to completely paint my Space Hulk set. For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know the story already: I obtained Space Hulk when I worked for Games Workshop in 2009, and even though I opened it and played it a few times with my mate Dave, I never got around to painting it. The reason for this is that I played the vast majority of war games in what was then Games Workshop, and what is now the Warhammer stores (though I’ve yet to play a game in one of those!) where there is a certain expectation for your models to be painted, or at least have some sign of progression, if you use them in the shop. The problem is that Games Workshop stopped supporting Space Hulk after the month it was released, so as I wasn’t going to play any games in the shop, it wasn’t a priority to paint them – not at the point where I perpetually had a tonne of Chaos Space Marines, Empire and Haradrim (one army from the three core game systems that it was expected I would have as a member of staff) that I needed to be painting! Dave, of course, didn’t mind the models not being painted, so even though we’ve really enjoyed playing the game in the past, the models remained unpainted for eleven years.

All the Terminators were very highly detailed...

That all changed when Lockdown began, and I found myself with a little (though surprisingly not much) more than the usual amount of spare time on my hands. I’d painted all the Chaos Space Marine Raptors I had for the Black Legion army I was working on, and while I did get some more eventually, I didn’t see any sense in going to any of the hobby shops to buy them while we were in lockdown. I had some of the old boxed sets in the loft of the flat I used to live in and decided to get the Space Hulk set down and paint them. I started with one squad of Terminators, then painted the twelve Genestealers that looked the most straightforward to paint. Both appeared in previous editions of the blog. I then painted the remaining squad of Terminators – including the dead one – and the leftover Genestealers, these didn’t make it on to the blog because I didn’t know what to say about them without repeating myself.

...and the Broodlord was a lot of fun!

Moving on, I painted the Librarian and the Broodlord. Both presented an additional challenge for me: As most folks who play 40K know, a Librarian’s armour is always blue no matter what chapter they’re attached to so that was a break from the red I’d been painting hitherto. I also went into a lot more detail with the weapons, face and armour than I did with the other models, as this was the “centrepiece” of the Terminator force in Space Hulk. With the Broodlord, this was much the same as the Genestealers I’d been painting up to that point but with an extra layer of colour on the flesh and carapace. There was also a lot more than the usual number of skulls and Terminator helmets that needed painting, and it took me a while, but I’m pleased with the result.

The finishing touches.

Finally, I painted the last little bits – the Artefact and the C.A.T. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on these, but it was a lot of fun doing the jewels on the Artefact.

I’ve bought quite a few “build and paint” games in the last 10-12 years and this is the first time I’ve managed to do both with a complete set, so I’m pleased with that. Both factions presented a fresh challenge: The colour I painted the Blood Angels Terminators was the same as the colours I’d been painting my Word Bearers, but with more of an emphasis on the gold than the silver. The Genestealers were an altogether different experience, as I haven’t painted Tyranids many times before, and when I have, it’s never been in any significant numbers. Space Hulk is a great set, and I’m glad to have completed it.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Last Week's Games: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Injustice 2

This week I was delighted to return to the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I had to stop going for a while due to childcare issues, but currently neither Kirsty nor I are going to work in the usual sense so it’s not the issue it very often can be. The lockdown situation has caused a lot of restrictions on a great many aspects of life, but ironically in this case it’s freed me up a little.

This is what my character
will look like eventually...
or something like it.

So, it was a pleasure to be welcomed back, and I joined a Dungeons and Dragons game with the Odyssey of the Dragonlords setting. While the published player’s guide is quite insistent that it’s not based in Ancient Greece, that’s clearly where it’s drawn some of its inspiration. I created a female human ranger called Halia with the intention of making her into an Amazon later down the line; this happens at level three. At character creation, I like to roll up random personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws from the Player’s Handbook, and also the background information from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything – this creates some instant background for the character which is surprisingly easy to tie into a motivation for becoming an adventurer. In this case, Halia was raised in a conclave, but at some point, was wrongly accused by an adventurer of a smuggling and assault, and did a year’s time before escaping with the assistance of another adventurer. This means she is wanted in one of the key cities of the game. Also, since I put charisma as her dump stat (currently at 9) I decided that during her incarceration she was badly burned on the side of her face and now has burn scars that she hides with her hair when she isn’t fighting. She’s also quiet, withdrawn and overeats (I rolled up a surprisingly high weight for her) so there’s some personal issues there, which I’m hoping will be addressed and maybe even resolved during the campaign. As for the adventure itself, it took a while to get going, but we ended up hunting a giant boar which had the potential to wipe any one of the party members if it managed to connect an attack. Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem that 5^th edition very often runs in to – action economy. As it’s only one giant boss monster against five characters, chances are we’ll drop it before it has a chance to do any significant damage, which we did at very little harm to us since when it managed to connect an attack, our Dungeon Master rolled spectacularly low on his damage roll. But we levelled up to second level, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

These provided more of a threat than the boss...

I ran into the same problem when I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords over the weekend. We’re in the fifth chapter out of six, and the dungeons in the adventure should be terrifying my players, but as they’re almost all hysterically overpowered, very little is presenting a challenge for them anymore. Yesterday, they fought what was supposed to be the hardest boss in the dungeon, but because of a combination fire snakes and some disgusting fighter feats, they dropped the boss in two turns and wrapped up the entire combat in three. I speak no exaggeration when I say the party have done more damage to themselves than I ever have!

In video games, I had a go with Injustice 2 on the PS4. It’s a fighting game featuring some DC Superheroes, a couple of Netherrealm’s characters, and whatever other major properties they license. I played the original game on the Xbox 360 and I really liked it; this version has more mechanics and strategies added – not necessarily a good thing for me because I’m awful at it – but I did note one of the most crucial improvements I’ve ever seen in a fighting game: The tutorial and training modes offer the option to view a training video to give a much better idea of what those moves and combos are supposed to look like, and give a better idea of the required timing! They require very fast presses though – I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get there.

Last Week's Games: Speculating on the merits of luck vs skill in tabletop games.

I found myself thinking about luck vs skill when it comes to hobby games, in the light of some of the things that have been happening in my house and in the wider gaming community. The argument is as old as games themselves but for those of you who might not know: In almost every game you play, there is an element of luck. Traditionally this is done through dice or cards, and lately certain games have mobile apps that can handle a lot of the random number generation those items provide. The games that are reliant on luck – Snakes and Ladders, for example – are usually easy enough to play, but they’re often less engaging in the long term (or even to the end of the game!) because the players never really feel like they’re in control of what’s going on. On the other hand, games that rely entirely on skill – Chess is probably the most obvious example – are potentially more engaging but as the player base is highly skilled, it also has a higher barrier for entry which makes the game hard to access in any enjoyable way. 

This came up in the news this week where I noticed that SteamForged games are bringing their support of their game Guild Ball to an end – a game that’s been going for six years that I meant 

Apparently these two are called
Ox and Shark. I never knew.

to try at some point but never got around to giving it a go. Since I never played the game, I’m going mainly on what they’ve said in their blog that covers it, but a lot of the problem was that Guild Ball relies almost entirely on the skill of their players to play the game. To echo the article, this created a situation where you would win your first game – the ones that the developers showed you how to play – and lose your next hundred, as you faced off against player after player who had been playing the game a lot longer than you, knew exactly what they were doing and what they needed to do to win. There was nothing in between; no lower class of players that would happily have a casual game you could just enjoy. You learned to play, and then you were in with the big boys who would show no mercy. A high barrier to… not necessarily entry, but to play on any level that might be engaging or fun, doesn’t create a sustainable business model, and sadly now it’s reached the point where the creators of Guild Ball are calling it a day on what was otherwise an excellent game. 

The most obvious basis for comparison is Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl – a game far more reliant on luck, but with a loyal fanbase, if not necessarily indefinite support. But I’ve never played the tabletop version of it either. 

Presumably some forest, or other. One that's Enchanted.

The game I’ve been playing is The Enchanted Forest with Jessie and Kirsty. This game relies almost entirely on luck and won Game of the Year in 1982, though from what I understand that wasn’t a great year for board games. As I said last week, it’s not a particularly well-designed game, we can’t really play it to the conclusion written into the rules as Jessie gets fed up with it before then once the initial novelty has worn off. But it’s easy for her to play, she’s even getting the hang of moving pieces on their movement squares, and understands what she needs to do to win – even if she hasn’t quite worked out that you’re not supposed to share that information with the rest of us. This game is nearly 40 years old and still being printed to this day, not many games can say that, and the ones that can is mainly due to the fact that their barrier for entry is far more broad than those games that rely on skill.

Last Week's Games: Not Tonight and Enchanted Forest

This week I’ve played a new game on my Switch: Not Tonight. I’ve been playing it for a while now; it’s left me with a few things to say, and be warned: some are political…

Here we manage a guest list
and a regular line...

It’s a difficult game to describe, but if you could imagine a point between Papers Please and Brexit: The Game, that’s about where we are. In a version of the UK that had left the EU by 2018, a second-generation European immigrant has been confined to poor living conditions and has been forced to take a job as a bouncer in order to raise the £2500 per month needed to prevent him from being deported. You take jobs from some venues in the local area (beginning in the South West of England,) and the aim of the game is to manage the queue to get in to allow a certain number of people into the venue in roughly four hours of game time. You’ll be checking people’s ID – against their age to begin with, but the game soon escalates with guestlists, fake IDs, prejudice against people from certain countries, and the pressing need to keep on top of your own finances. This results in you having to micro-manage two queues and dealing with a horribly short time limit to get everything done – but get it done you must, or you will lose the game.

Even the title screen is sneering at Brexit...

Not Tonight is an odd game. The mechanics work well enough and make for an interesting and engaging experience. But beyond that, it seems to have a lot to say as an art form – or at least, how the developers thought a post-Brexit Britain might look like. As a British-born European on the edge of being deported, you’re treated with the upmost contempt from higher authorities than you, regular contempt from your bosses who are relying on you to make their night work (even the more friendly ones can’t resist a bit of Euro-baiting condescension,) a certain amount of grudging respect from people who are waiting in line to get in to their chosen venue, and the only people who treat you as equals are the other European people who are in a similar situation. It’s not without a sense of humour: even if Britain had left the EU as soon as the referendum result came in, the earliest it could have done so would have been roughly half-way through 2018, not at the beginning of it when the game starts, and even the most capricious racist is unlikely to be as open about it as the game suggests, so it’s obviously not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem for me is that as I sit on the pro-EU side of this situation, and I’m genuinely concerned for what Brexit is going to mean for my future for reasons I’m not going to go in to now,[1] some of the intended humour was lost on me. In a way, playing Not Tonight was a bleaker experience than Papers Please, as at least I’m a long way from the political situation the latter was purporting to represent. But ultimately, it is an uncommon experience that I’m glad I’ve had. Let’s hope I can see it through to the end!

The treasure is under the trees - who will find it first?

Beyond that, I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick – mainly because I’ve started a new painting section to the blog that I run alongside this, and I wanted to be able to say I’d painted something in the month of July! (Here’s the first edition, erroneously titled Last Week’s Painting.) For that reason, I spent a lot of my free time last week painting rather than playing games, but I did have a go with Enchanted Forest, a game about hunting for fairy-tale treasures in the titular forest. It’s OK – it appeals to my daughter because she likes fairy tales and treasure hunting, but the mechanics aren’t particularly well-designed, and it can get very one-sided towards the end of the game. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it while it lasts and will probably play it again.

---

[1] Mainly because trying to explain my concerns to people who voted leave has the same general effect as trying to headbutt a rhinoceros to death.

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat (last time, I promise!) Dobble, Disney's Villainous

I’ve been banging on about the original Mortal Kombat game for a few weeks now. I’m sure there are some people who never want to see me talk about Mortal Kombat again, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; this has gone on for a while! But the whole point of this blog is to offer my opinions and experiences in video games and others, and I came to the end of my journey last Sunday night when I finally beat the game with all seven characters, so yes, I’m going to talk about that! I’ve put up a review which will be released next Friday, but those reviews tend to be sweeping overviews of the game as a whole, whereas in the blog I cover the specific details of my experience if I can spare the room.

Here's Daniel Pesina doing the motion capture for Scorpion...

The thing is with Mortal Kombat, I’ve had a great time with the game, but I’ve rated it quite low. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it as a stand-alone game when later iterations have done what it does far better. But that detracts from the huge amount of fun I’ve had with it, working out the best attack patterns, playing each character’s special moves (or at least, those I could do!) to my advantage, and feeling like an absolute champ every time I beat Shang Tsung at the end. Why is that?

Funnily enough, only Sonya has any substantial
difference to her colours in a mirror match...

I think Mortal Kombat’s flaws make the game, to be honest. The plot of a centennial fighting tournament safeguarding Earthrealm from invasion is ludicrous, and the developers know it – but at least there was something at stake, both generally and for the characters. The move set was almost identical between the seven characters, apart from their special moves – but that made you appreciate the very subtle differences between their speed and reach.  Digitized fighting games wouldn’t look good if we tried it now, and if we’re being honest they didn’t at the time of release either – but we’d never have known until we tried, and as I said in my review, if we weren’t pushing the boundaries, we’d never know where the boundaries are! Arguably, Mortal Kombat’s biggest contribution to gaming was the formation of the ESRB to regulate age-appropriate games; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it was, but it’s brought to the table a list of controversies bigger than anything Mortal Kombat has been blamed for!

Ever the villain...

It’s also worth noting that I played this game quite a lot when I was younger on the Sega Megadrive, and I spent quite a lot of time with the DOS version I’ve been playing noticing the differences between them. Presumably due to memory constraints, there was a lot more variation in the voices you hear during the fights; I certainly don’t remember the nonsense coming out of Raiden’s mouth when he does his Torpedo move! The final endurance fight takes place in Goro’s lair, and he arrives straight after you win – but in the DOS version, the screen shakes and you hear roars as he stops and screams off camera, which was a nice touch. Kano’s ending was different as well – presumably the text was the same, I can’t remember, but the picture in the second part depicts Kano holding a machine gun, which apparently was too much for home consoles!

Noticing those differences and adapting to the clunky but enjoyable game mechanics created an enjoyable experience for me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending the game expecting anyone else to find the same.

Elsewhere, Kirsty received some games for her birthday, and we’ve been having a fine old time trying them out. Dobble is a great game; a more elaborate version of Snap but we have a lot of fun playing it and can even engage Jessie with it to a certain extent, though we need to be careful on how quickly we’re moving through the game. Also, we’ve been playing Disney’s Villainous, which took a few goes to understand but once we did, we had a great time trying to outwit each other between Ursula from the Little Mermaid, and Prince John from Robin Hood! We’re looking forward to trying both games with more players.

Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.

Last Week's Games: Jenga, Dominoes, Snakes and Ladders, and Happy Salmon

I’ve had a lot going on this week. Some of you may remember that I had a massive stack of board games piled up in my spare room. Well, it was never going to take long for my daughter to take an interest in it, and suddenly I found myself having to find some games within that collection that are suitable for a three-year-old to play. We found four in the end, all of which she enjoys to a certain extent but for entirely different reasons…

This is the version of the game we have.

The first game we tried was Jenga, where you must take a block from a tower of 54 blocks, putting the piece you took off onto the top creating an increasingly unstable tower. Strictly speaking, you’re only allowed to use one hand, but we weren’t too pedantic about that as Jessie only has small hands. She showed a surprising amount of dexterity and care as she checked for loose blocks and put them on the top of the tower. We’ve had a few goes with this and I generally win, but for one round I deliberately decided to go for the harder blocks – more to make me feel like I deserved it if I won again, as much as anything else – and after a long and tense match, Jessie was delighted to win one!

Fun fact: I pulled this picture from the Taken 2
Movie website - which now links to gambling.

Then we had a go at Dominoes. This one was probably the one she took the most from in terms of her own development, as she was identifying how many dots were on her dominoes and matching them up on the board. It reminded me of the first time I played this game as a child, where the dominoes were pictures of animals rather than the usual dots; that probably would have been preferable, but Jessie still had a good go. She tends to win by luck rather than judgement, as she usually has the smaller number of dots by the time we run out of moves, but she enjoys it. Probably as importantly, I’m encouraging her to keep her eye on both sides of the board, which should train a sense of situational awareness!

Picking things up and moving them around.
What could be better?

I bought Snakes and Ladders from the Black Country Museum with the intention of introducing it to Jessie at some point. This was an odd one: The debate about whether theme or mechanics are more important can fill entire books, but with both snakes and ladders being something Jessie can recognise, she finds the game a lot more engaging than the abstract puzzling of Jenga and Dominoes – at least initially. But the thing about Snakes and Ladders is that there’s no skill involved – you roll the dice and you move, and if you land at the bottom of a ladder or the top of a snake, you move to the other end. The first to get to the 100^th square wins, and that’s all there is to it. Without truly realising why, Jessie gets bored of that long before the game has finished. Still, it’s a simple enough game for us all to play and that’s probably main benefit: It’s a nice game to play with your family.

Absolutely mad, but a great game!

Finally, we had a go with an absolute gem of a game I picked up at the UK Games Expo a few years ago: Happy Salmon. I haven’t played this yet as you need two things: At least three people, and a safe environment to make a lot of noise. I almost always fall short of at least one of these things. It’s basically a mad version of snap: Everyone has a coloured deck of the same twelve cards with an action on them for two people to do. You frantically search for the person with the same card, do the action then drop the card. The first person to drop all their cards is the winner. We had a great time playing it, and me and Kirsty recognised that this is probably one of the most accessible games I own. That’s worth an entire blog at some point, but for now I’ll say that the fact that Jessie can’t read yet didn’t hinder her enjoyment at all!

So, a nice week of board games, in all!

Last Week's Games: Forbidden Island, Dominoes, Misty, New Super Mario Bros U

This week I have been sorting out some thing with the new house; it’s an ongoing project and has left very little time for playing games! Most of the games I’ve played this week have been board games, which is just as well really, since as you all saw last week, I’ve got quite a few to get through…

There's just something about that tin...

The most significant one for me and Kirsty was Forbidden Desert, which we played a few nights ago. This is a game in which you play a team of explorers who have crash-landed in a city buried by sand, and have to race against time and the weather to find the four parts of a flying machine that can get you to safety. Once we’d figured out the game mechanics, how to find the various parts and what to do with them, we beat the game on its easiest setting – though not before an extremely tense moment where we would both die of thirst if we drew one more Sun card!

I’m a fan of Matt Leacocks’s board games, and the very distinct style of mechanic that comes with them. I also like the co-operative nature of the games, as I often find with board games that the winner comes down to the level of experience a player has with a game – not so when it’s a shared objective. As we played Forbidden Desert for the first time, we found ourselves making the comparison with Pandemic, and realising that we were probably enjoying the Forbidden series more. Are the Forbidden games better than Pandemic, which since its release has spawned a second edition, two Legacy games and several spin-offs including the obligatory Cthulu version? That’s a matter of opinion. But where Pandemic can be a stress-inducing headache where you never have quite enough in the tank to do everything that needs to be done to stop a global pandemic, (not to mention that the subject matter of Pandemic is a little on the nose these days!) the Forbidden games appear to be more of an Indiana Jones-style pulp-adventure. There’s not quite as much at stake; you’re finding lost relics, and if you don’t manage to do it then you have little to blame but your own hubris in looking for them in the first place. Game mechanics are important of course, but I think in this case, the theme of the Forbidden games may prove a more enjoyable experience for us.

Watch how you're spelling Dominoes, by the way.
Otherwise all you'll get is pizza.

One of the other games we’d played, that I’d not played for a good long while, is Dominoes. We’ve all played Dominoes, but it had been a while since either me or Kirsty played it; we had to look up the rules online because our version of the game was missing the rules. (They were probably there at some point but had been lost in the mists of time.) It was an interesting experience, depending as much on luck as anything else. I won two games and Kirsty won one, but it came down to drawing the right tiles! An enjoyable game, if a little short.

We also had a go with Misty; the simple card drafting and placement game Kirsty bought me for Valentines’ day. It’s an easy enough game to play and understand but there’s a definite strategy for winning – making sure all your moving cards are placed well and go in the right order – which I’ve figured out, but Kirsty isn’t quite there yet. Also, I suspect that playing the game with multiple players would be a very different experience – hopefully we’ll be able to find out in the not-too-distant future!

You can only save at Castles, funnily enough...

Finally, when I did manage to get one of my consoles working, I had a go at New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. This competently-designed and gentle platformer is always a good one to pick up and play, and, as with many of the later Mario games, enough going on to satisfy the completionists among us! Right now, I’ll be happy to get to the end of the game, which at this point I’m not too far away from.

I also bought a new Xbox 360 so we’ll see what happens with that…

Last Week's Games: Moving House and some other bits of faff...

Despite some major positive changes happening in my life lately, this blog will take on a mainly negative tone. None of it is all that bad, in the grand scheme of things, but there are some inconveniences which have meant I haven’t had all that much time for playing games over the last couple of weeks.

Yeah...

The most significant thing that has happened to me in a few years, then, is that I bought a house. This was something that we had to organise quite quickly. Kirsty and I had been planning to move out of our flat and into a house for a little over a year at that point; for various reasons we didn’t manage it until now. We viewed the property back in January and offered on it, then Covid-19 happened which bought with it all sorts of confusion with the solicitors doing the conveyance. By the time we’d got a straight answer and a date for completion, we had about six days to pack down our entire home and move it into a house – thankfully not far away, but it was a confused mess and we couldn’t count on much help! Part of what this meant was that I had to move my entire collection of board games, and this very afternoon I managed to arrange them all against the same wall our spare room, taking the picture you see on your right while conceding that I really do have problems with obsessive hoarding.

Apart from the time it takes to move to a new house and get everything fixed and tidy there, which is still an ongoing process, we couldn’t use our TVs for a while either. The landlord of the flat we moved out of cut the plugs off our TVs and wired them up straight into the mains so that we didn’t have wires trailing everywhere.[1] The problem was of course that with the lockdown, he couldn’t put them back on again, and because the plugs they came are sealed, neither could we. So, we had to wait for a convenient moment to go and buy some plugs to plug the TV in before I could use any of the consoles! Of course, there was always the Switch or my Laptop, but time was not on my side this week, so I didn’t get to play them too much.

I tried to come up with some sort of snide remark about
where I'd like to stick that sniper rifle but it just came
out really rude.

One game I won’t be playing again is Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any of it, but it’s cost me a lot more than it was worth. Basically, my account got hacked, and a certain amount of money was spent on it. I won’t say exactly how much here; it was more than a takeaway, less than the deposit on my house. I’d never had a problem with this before in a year of owning the Switch and came across it within weeks of sharing information with Epic Games, so in addition to changing my password, I’ve deleted Fortnite off my Swtich and I won’t be playing it anymore. I’m currently having some email dialogue with Nintendo to resolve the situation, so hopefully I will get my money back, but this has left a rather bitter taste in my mouth as you might imagine!

I tried to have a go on my Xbox 360 – I was hoping to beat Sonic Generations, and I’ve been able to see my games for the first time in a year and a half (they’ve been in the loft hitherto) so I was hoping to try those of them I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. Two things got in the way of that – first, the HDMI cable wasn’t plugged in, and second, it’s doing that thing again where the controller won’t connect to the console. This is the second time it’s had this problem this year, and it won’t be going away – it might be time for a new one. I’ll try and order one in the next few days; if nothing else I’ll get an extremely helpful new hard drive to download some free games on to!

Until next week…

---

[1] It’s alright, he’s an electrician; he knows how to do it.

Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2

I’ve slowed down on the painting since last week. I made a start on six of the Terminators from the Space Hulk set, but after the third rather thin layer of red paint I put on, I didn’t take that any further. I probably will this week – but I struggled to find the inclination last week. There were a few different reasons for that, including the fact that I was enjoying playing some other games in the evenings!

Not looking good for Europe...

At one point me and Kirsty had another go at Pandemic so that we could try to beat it again with proper regard to the rules this time. Some of you may remember we tried the game a few weeks ago but got two rather important points wrong: you’re supposed to draw two infection cards after an Epidemic, and for that reason, we didn’t get a single Outbreak; and you’re only allowed to give or take a card if you’re in the city of the card you’re trading, unless you’re the researcher which neither of us were. So, we tried again with those rules in place and the game beat us this time; we arrived at the end of the Outbreak track but there were only two cards left in the draw deck so we would have lost the following turn anyway. It didn’t help that we’d got a particularly harsh draw at the start of the game and an early Epidemic; both New York and London had three infection cubes on them and as they’re next to each other, when those cards came up again they were a part of a triple outbreak across Europe and North America, and the blue cubes even found their way to South America.

The Shadow Beast.,,

I spent a couple of evenings playing Arcania on the PS4. One of the problems I run in to when I’m blogging long-form RPGs is finding things to say about it without repeating myself; if you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that by the standards of most of what you can buy for the PS4, Arcania is pretty poor. And yet this is the game I’m sticking with! I’m not far away from the end of the game now (the target level for the end of the game is 30 and I’m at 25,) and I think that, for all its faults, Arcania does have some positive qualities. I’ve never particularly liked Crafting systems, for example, so it’s nice to play a game where I don’t necessarily feel obliged to use it. But I think the main benefit for me is the linearity. This is no open world game where you can wander around the map becoming hopelessly lost and confused; it’s always obvious where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. The dungeons are challenging in their own way, and often quite fun. And while there are side quests, there are not too many of them – they don’t necessarily distract from the main storyline. Sadly, the main storyline is also marred by the cutscenes not working properly, and I missed some crucial pieces of information – thankfully you can read the finer points of these in your quest log – but there are some redeeming qualities. The voice acting, for example, while far from great, somehow manages to convey the urgency of your mission. And the unnamed lead character, while a complete doofus in many situations, has a B-movie-like self-awareness – almost as though he knows he’s in a video game. I might even get to the end of this one!

Just done the bit with the Golden Mask...

Contrast that with the other long-form game I’ve been playing a lot of lately: Assassin’s Creed 2. While this game is far more competently put together, Ubisoft were finding their stride in creating huge open-world sandbox games, with plenty to do in them, yes, but a lot of it feels like it’s padding out the game. I guess it represents good value for people who bought this game new and that might be the only one they buy for three months, but for me there’s quite a lot of unnecessary faffing about in Assassin’s Creed games. Still, I’m close to the end of it now!