Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide, XCOM, 8-Ball Pool, Crossword, Sniper 3D Assassin

An interesting week this week. Six games to talk about!

I progressed with Kingdom Hearts, beating the Deep Jungle and making it as far as Agrabah before I stopped. At this point you have to do some back-tracking to allow the Gummi Ship to fly to other worlds, but I’ll take this opportunity to talk about an element of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 that wasn’t in the original – The Gummi Missions. This takes the form of certain objectives when flying the ship between worlds; like scoring a certain number of points, or taking out a certain number of enemies with a particular kind of gun equipped. I consider this an improvement, as previously there was no real reason to do the Gummi flights other than to get to the next world. It gives something extra for the completionists, and I would love to unlock them all.

This took me a few goes!

I also continued with Regicide, finally beating the end of Act 2 that I had been stuck on for ages! I progressed several missions in to Act 3 as well, the game being good at promoting the “just one more go” mentality, and it was quite late into the night before I realised I should stop! The screenshot was one I did myself (normally I pull them off Google Image Search,) because of something going on with Facebook over the weekend. I’m in a group called Gaming Dads, which given the levels of nastiness that can plague the internet is a really nice group to be in. Sadly, one of the members recently lost his partner after an illness, and her funeral was on Saturday. To show our support, we were supposed to upload a screenshot of what we were all playing over the weekend, with the tags: #tucker #wegotyoubrother. I chose this game because it was most convenient to do it on my laptop; I’m glad I finally found a use for Dxtory in the end!

I was ill on Thursday and had some time off work, and I played a bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I continued a game I’d started in November, and it didn’t go very well. In the space of a few missions I’d lost some of my best soldiers. It might warrant yet another restart but I’d been doing pretty well up until then, and I’d had to deal with a massive setback during the one time I beat the game so you never know.

An old picture but does the job!

But I was very interested in the games I’d been playing on mobile devices! I’ve been playing 8-Ball Pool a lot this week, and I think of all the games I downloaded onto my Kindle Fire 7, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most, simply because there’s a measure of skill involved rather than just clicking on things until you can’t click on things any more.

I downloaded onto my phone a couple of other games: Crossword, which is as it sounds – crossword puzzles. I’ve never been much good at this but I’m sticking to the easy puzzles for now, and the game does help you: The clues you solve correctly lock and have a beige colour on them so you know, and you can ask for a hint. You have a limited number of these but you get three every time you beat a puzzle so that’s not a major issue. Sometimes I use a website to solve the clues, which might be considered cheating, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to find different ways of saying things. It might help next time I play Scrabble!

Also I’ve been playing Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Shooter. This is a game where you’re given a target to shoot at, and you have to kill them with a sniper rifle or suitable weapon. I’ve been having fun with it but I’ve reached the point in the game where I have to start paying for things in order to carry on, as I need to buy a new weapon which I can only do with diamonds. I’m not sure how long I’m going to put up with being forced to watch ad after ad in order to keep enjoying it!

So, a busy week!

 

Last Week's Games: Early August

Hi, it’s been a while since my last regular blog, so I thought I’d do an update for you with the games I’ve been playing over the last few weeks. This isn’t me ‘resuming normal service’ in the usual way; things are still very up in the air at the moment and I can’t give a timetable to a weekly blog for another couple of weeks at least, but I can give you an idea of what’s been happening. 

Mack the Knife. Also known as Stabby McGee.
Thanks Kirsty!

I’ve cheated a bit with playing new games over the last few weeks, as most of them were on the Capcom Arcade Classics Collection Volume 2. This was a disc I bought for the Playstation 2, I think I was still at University at the time so it would have been anything up to twelve years ago. I bought it mainly on the strength of the original Street Fighter which was featured on the disc, and didn’t touch any of the other games on there. That was a shame, as Street Fighter is arguably one of the weakest games on there,[1] and I missed out on some gems! A lot of them were old late 80s/early 90s arcade games, where the arcades where at their peak of featuring scrolling beat-em-ups you were never going to be able to beat without spending at least £10 on continues, but I’ve had a lot of fun with them. Kirsty and I got through Captain Commando, and there’ll be a Backlog Beatdown on that one soon!

Well that's a bit presumptuous. I don't remember being friends
with Susan and Brian. I'm sure they're very nice people.

Elsewhere I’ve been playing 8 Ball Pool on my Kindle Fire. This is a top-down pool game that is played against various people around the world, including at least two people I know! I’m doing reasonably well with it, I win about two thirds of my games, although I’d suggest that at least half of those are to do with the connection going on the other side of the match! Once you get past the novelty of playing pool on your tablet, it’s an unlock-fest really, and one that is not shy about advertising its micro transactions, but as long as you keep your wallet under control it’s possible to have a good time with games like this!

Also I’ve been trying to get through the original Castlevania on the WiiU. As anybody who has played this game will tell you, after a deceptively easy first level, the game becomes brutally difficult, and the only way I’m making any progress is to scum-save each part of the levels and hope for the best when I get to the boss. Thankfully, the structure of the WiiU allows you to do this, or I wouldn’t have a chance. I’ve always really enjoyed the Castlevania games, but apart from beating Super Castlevania IV in 1997, I’ve never beaten another one. Might be time to play through some more!

I haven’t had much time for hobby gaming over the summer holidays for various different reasons, but I’ve continued to run Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords for Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve also started to run Dungeons and Dragons again at the Black Country Role Playing Society, where I’m running the Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts path from the D&D Adventurer’s League. I had a starting line-up of players worryingly similar to the Falcon’s Hollow saga I ran years ago, but I should have some new players join up next week.

I should go to the Nashkel Mines next...

Perhaps as added inspiration I started a new campaign on Baldur’s Gate as a Sorcerer. I’ve played through probably the first third of the game many times, and have never been able to see it through quite until the end, however this time is different because I allowed Khalid and Jaheira, and certain other party members to be killed off and will recruit new party members as I’m going along. I almost never do this as canonically they both survive until the end of the game, but I thought I’d see how I get along with the core line-up!

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[1] Yes, I know it paved the way for the massive gaming entity that the Street Fighter Franchise eventually became, but the first game in the series just wasn’t there yet.

Last Week's Games: Shadowrun Returns, Cooking Fever, Mordheim, Co-Optional Podcast

A rather interesting mish-mash of games for me this week:

Beautiful game, but not running too well...

I started this week with my new game for the week, which is Shadowrun Returns. This is an RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate or one of its sequels, and has you create a character to perform ‘runs,’ a series of missions in a cyberpunk world that go outside of the mega-corporations controlling it. The combat works very similar to XCOM, and the couple of hours I played of it were more enjoyable than the awful multiplayer-only shooter on the Xbox 360 by some considerable distance.

Unfortunately my laptop really doesn’t like running Shadowrun. It crashed a few times during the time I was playing it and I had to restart the computer. I don’t know whether the game is poorly optimised or whether this is one of those games my laptop would rather not be running, but I’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how that’s working out before I put many hours into the game.

So many sausages...

I’ve become rather engrossed in a game on my Kindle Fire called Cooking Fever. It’s a game where you create various dishes to serve to customers in a set amount of time. For a game that’s supposed to be a time-waster, it does a fine job of hooking you in and convincing you to play just one more level, and I’m having a good amount of fun with it so far. You serve customers to earn money, and serve them quickly to earn tips. You then spend that money to upgrade your equipment and eatery so that the customers will wait longer, tip higher, and your cooking efficiency improves. It has micro-transactions in the form of diamonds that have to be used to unlock some upper tiers of food production, customer satisfaction and more restaurants. These can be earned in-game via an experience point system, but I can see this becoming a grind in the later stages of the game!

I finally finished painting Angron. This was a Forge World model that my mate Dave asked me to paint ages ago in exchange for some dwarves. I got so far in to the project and then left it for literally years; by the time I give it back I will have had that model for nearly five years. I definitely won’t be accepting any more painting commissions, as I have little enough time and patience to paint my own models, and it looks pretty poor to accept a job and then not do it for nearly five years. I was far from pleased with the final result; I know I can do better. But Dave told me he needed the model back, so I did the best job I could in an evening and I’ll hand it back next time I see him.

Ogres are amusing, but will need levelling up
before they're much use!

Finally, I started another campaign on Mordheim: City of the Damned with Mercenaries again. This time I’m doing them all as Nordland Pirates, who have their skills in ambush attacks. It will work or it won’t! It’s a special game that I run in to so many bugs with, yet enjoy enough to keep coming back to it!

I also watched the Co-Optional Podcast #222 featuring Sky Williams. I’m mentioning this because he gave an interesting piece of gaming discipline that I thought I might try: He said that he’d got bogged down playing the same two MMOs and not really doing anything with his other games, so now he’s trying to beat one game a month. I’ve got a long list of games I’ve yet to even played, never mind beaten, so I think I might try that over the next few months to see how it goes. I’ve certainly not done a Backlog Beatdown blog for a long time!

On that subject, the blog posts may be a little erratic over the next few weeks due to holidays and a very busy week on the horizon! I try to get these posts out on Monday but that isn’t always possible. In particular, I will almost certainly miss Monday 6^th August, though I will probably try and publish something later on that week.

See you all soon!

Last Week's Games: New Super Mario Bros, Diggy's Adventure, Hey, That's My Fish!

This week, I’ve been very pushed for time with work, gigs with the bands, playing video games took something of a back seat for me! But I managed to get some games in.

This happened quite a bit...

The first one was, to my surprise, New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I happened across someone who had the same game and we had a go with the multiplayer mode; Mario vs Luigi. In this, you have to collect five stars before your opponent does, using power ups and platforming to hamper your opponent any way you can. There’s a lot of fun to potentially have with this mode, however I should point out that the person I was playing against is very young and there was something of a disparity in skill level, so we didn’t play for very long!

The Dark Angels...

I continued my eternal crusade on, er, Eternal Crusade in those evenings where I had a bit of time. I’m still enjoying it, and I’m becoming a lot more familiar with the different classes now. I’m still absolutely hopeless at it, typically finishing somewhere in the bottom third of the leader board, and against players who have been playing since launch I haven’t got a chance. I’m also starting to notice the fact that there’s not really that many maps. It could do with a few more, to vary things up a bit! But on those times where I manage to sneak up behind someone and one-shot kill him, or capture a control point, or take out three guys at once (the latter happens at very infrequent intervals!) it’s really good fun, and I think this will see me through a long time yet.

With a chin to rival
Buzz Lightyear...

My new game for this week was Diggy’s Adventure on my Kindle Fire. This is a game where you have to make your way through a top-down cave by digging through collapsible squares of sand, gravel and the like. Each dig takes a certain amount of energy, and if you run out, you either need to manage your resources to make it last longer, or buy some more in micro payments! It’s competently-designed, doesn’t take itself too seriously (either that or the developer’s writing team had the week off!) and was a nice enough way to fill half an hour. But there’s not much challenge in the game that I’ve been able to see, apart from a couple of lever puzzles that are easy enough to work out. I guess later on there’d be an element of resource management in there, where you dig just far enough to achieve your objective and come back and clear the level later (the game rewards you for clearing the entire level.) There’s nothing wrong with Diggy’s quest, but like with most mobile games, I’m not sure how long it will keep me engaged.

Damn that robber!

I went in to Warlords and Wizards again and had another game of Settlers of Catan, where it got very competitive! We had to call the game early due to time allowance, but it was a pleasure to play again and I’m looking forward to the UK Championship at the UK Games Expo! I’m not expecting to do very well, but it will be interesting to play some different games with some different people. I also continued painting some Chaos Space Marines, I’ve nearly finished them now which will bring me up to 20.

Brutal but fun!

Finally, I had a few games of Hey! That’s My Fish with my Mom and my girlfriend Kirsty. It’s a really nice game to play because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, the rules take about a moment to work out (apart from working out what order to place the penguins in, I didn’t need to refer to the rules even once,) it’s really good fun and surprisingly tactical. I won the first two games and my Mom won the third. We helped her out with a move at one point near the end which turned out to be the deciding point, but as long as everybody is having a good time, it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses. I know that sounds like a very wishy-washy thing to say but it is absolutely true!

Last Week's Games: Heroquest, Dark Souls, Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes and Open TDD

Near to the start of this week I found myself wondering about the video games that have been put out under a Games Workshop license. I’ve owned, borrowed and played some of them in the past and for the most part I enjoyed them, but there are more out now than I’ve played. I downloaded some of the earlier games now classed as “Abandonware;” games that are no longer supported by their publishers and, provided no one else has the rights to it, are available to legally download for free. I toyed with the idea of trying to obtain them all, and do a whole series of blogs on Games Workshop-licensed video games, but one thing at a time!

Those slightly-differently textured floor tiles
are rock falls. Who knew?

So the first game that I tried was the DOS version of HeroQuest. Games Workshop are known these days for their flagship franchises, Warhammer and Warhammer 40000, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were producing all sorts of games and this was one of them. I never played it since it had been and gone long before I started showing any interest in the hobby, but I had a look at the video game to see if it was any good. First impressions are of dungeon-bashing with a dice mechanic. You’re on a grid of squares featuring rooms and corridors, and you roll a twelve-sided dice to see how far you can move on a turn. You’re allowed one action per turn, during which you can attack an enemy if one is there, which uses a six-sided dice system, or search the room for treasures and secret areas. The latter is necessary to get through certain sections of the game. You can play as a Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf or Mage, the idea being that you can have up to four players playing at the same time as per the board game. I’m unlikely ever to touch the multiplayer functionality; because even if I could find three other people willing to play a DOS game released in 1992, for some reason DOSBox will only run in a window about an eighth of the size of the screen – and I’m playing on a laptop.

I’ve enjoyed games like this in the past, and I feel I should be enjoying Heroquest a lot more than I am. There’s nothing wrong with it, and to be fair I shouldn’t necessarily expect all that much from a 1992 Dos game. But for games with random number generation mechanics to work, they really have to make sure the stakes are high when it happens, and offer meaningful consequences for success and failure. I’m not saying Heroquest doesn’t do that – but I haven’t seen it yet.

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Dark Souls again. I’d got a way in to it as a Deprived, but I’d spread the skill points I’d acquired far too thinly, and I was stuck on the Bell Gargoyle without the mobility to deal with it. So I started the game again as a thief, and I’m actually doing a lot better, putting most of my points into Dexterity and playing with low damage, but high mobility and critical hits.

I’m continuing to enjoy Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes; there’s a lot of fun in finding out how each of the character’s powers work so that you know what you have to do to build up an attack. This is almost essential if you’re not relying on micro-transactions, because you need to know which characters can affect the enemies or the board as well as do the damage. Sometimes it can be frustrating but it’s more fun than simply throwing money at a game in order to get through it!

Great to have a cityscape like this...

Also on Sunday after I got snowed in I had a marathon session on Open TTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I don’t play this game very often but when I do, I get into the ‘just one more turn’ mentaility that often comes with playing games like Civilisation – and it’s not even a turn-based game. Seeing your transport network influencing the development of the world around it is a pleasure I find it very difficult to describe!

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



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

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

Strewth...

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

Oddly compelling...

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