Last Week's Games: Aracania, Doom, Legions and Misty

Most of my gaming time last week was spent on Arcania; the not-very-good RPG I’ve been playing on the PS4. I’m not sure where I am in relation to my progress through the game but I’m in the area of the game that features a lot of swamplands, which has been curiously named Tooshoo. It’s not so much an open world RPG as several open questing areas chained together in a sequence, which is fine by me; I don’t necessarily like the whole world hitting me in the face at once! And I’m enjoying the game at least enough to overlook a couple of its major flaws:

That Stamina bar is a bit redundant...

First, the stamina bar. You have three bars on the bottom of the HUD, (Heads Up Display, if you don’t know!) one for health, one for mana, and one for stamina. You can increase these attributes as you level up. The problem I’ve run in to is that I’ve not been able to do anything that decreases the stamina bar. Nothing you do in open play seems to affect it, and even the moves that should affect it either doesn’t, or the move doesn’t work at all. I’d have thought dodge-rolling, at the very least, would be a way to exhaust it, but I’d be wrong apparently. Now, you’d think that this was a positive thing rather than negative, since what essentially amounts to unlimited stamina would make the game easier to play. And it does… but it also removes a lot of the challenge and makes some of the skill upgrades redundant.

The other glaring issue is feedback. Apart from your health dropping – and you’re not always looking at the HUD – the player character doesn’t react at all to being hit. There’s no hit animation, no cry of pain, nothing. Hit detection is a little off from the enemies as well, so there’s no telling whether the moves they have done have hit or missed. Often, you don’t know you’ve been hit at all until you’ve looked at your health bar or died. Again, it’s not impeding my progress in any major way, but it could have been handled a lot better than this. A shame, really, as there’s about 60% of a good game in there somewhere, but I’m finding it hard to recommend a game as mired in flaws as this.

He's invisible at the moment...

I’ve tried to play Doom as well, but I’ve found myself stuck on Deimos Lab. I’m having to be careful with my ammo as there are a lot of enemies in this section of the game and I am woefully unequipped to deal with the huge rush of them at the end of the level. I find myself running out of ammo before I can hit the relevant switches to open the end of the level, and even if I manage it, I won’t necessarily be in a good place to tackle the next one! I find myself wondering if I should be more careful in looking for the game’s secrets, as the increased difficulty setting that I’m playing on may require some extra work!

I also went back to the Horus Heresy: Legions. I have been booted from my lodge, because there was a gap of a couple of months where I wasn’t playing at all, but I’ve joined another one mainly for the card rewards. They won’t be as good – there aren’t as many members, and the ones that are there aren’t as busy – but I’ll keep playing with them until I get a 12-win run. I keep playing single matches with my Space Wolves as well; they’re always fun!

I tried to find a different picture,
but all that comes up on Google
Image Search is the character
from Pokémon.

Finally, I played Misty again with Kirsty. She had a better handle of the game this time and put up much more of a fight as we tried to arrange our window drawings strategically. I won again, but not before we’d forced a fourth round out of a draw! The main benefit of this game, we discussed afterwards, is its simplicity. If you’ve never played a card drafting game before, this one is pretty easy as the cards only do a limited number of things; we’d be happy to play this with younger or older family members!

 

Last Week's Games: Dragon Quest, Spyro and Legions

At one point in the week I found myself with quite a significant gap between one engagement and the next, and decided to fill the time with a couple of hours of Dragon Quest, which was released on the Nintendo Switch recently. It’s a relatively early form of JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) and the start of a long-running series of games. I’ve spoken quite a lot over the last few years about playing the first iterations of games to see their core mechanics; they rarely provide as deep an experience as their later games but it’s always interesting to see. Dragon Quest plays like an early Final Fantasy, or Phantasty Star game, where you’re set on a quest to find the Ball of Light and rescue the Princess from the Dragon Lord. This doesn’t sound particularly inspired, but sometimes the simplest plot lines are the most effective!

Stay off the purple patch until you can handle it...

This game doesn’t have the depth and options of games that followed, either to its sequels or to the vast amount of games it inspired. The turn-based combat is entirely menu-driven, the magic system is very basic, there’s no party, no visible customisation and no crafting. With that being said, I’m pleasantly surprised about how much fun I’m having with it. It’s challenging, but well-balanced. Admittedly, the first fight I got in to was with a monster that was too high-level for me and I died straight away, but this is actually quite a rare occurrence and the difficulty of the monsters scale up quite well. You have a choice of where to go in order to complete your objective, but not too much choice. The world map looks big but doesn’t look like it will take too much time to see the significant areas. There is a certain amount of grind required to get through the game – you’re relying on your equipment to a certain extent, and treasure is not dropped at a rate where you have more money than you can spend, so it will be a while before you get enough gold together to buy the best gear – but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The result is a standard but enjoyable experience that I’ve had a good time with so far, and I hope to be able to pick it up again soon!

I’ve also been playing Spyro the Dragon, and this time I managed to complete the game 100%! I’ll do a blog about that at some stage, so I won’t say anything more about it here other than what a delightful experience it was, and hopefully I’ll get some time to play the other two games on the disc!

At this point I'm just recycling pictures of Legions
I've used before and seeing how long it takes
people to notice.

Finally, I was putting a lot more time than I expected into The Horus Heresy: Legions. I got caught up in the politics of the Warrior Lodge I am a part of – it takes itself a bit more seriously than my last one, and there is an expectation that we will get a certain amount of points before the end of the bi-weekly events or we will be kicked out. I came to within about a day of this happening, so I stepped my game up and actually ended up doing quite well, which at least partly resulted in the lodge getting the second highest reward crate available. They’ll never do any better by my intervention, as I refuse to spend any money on tickets, but they’ll have what help there is in me!

I also found myself enjoying the cards in the new event, as for once I’ve read the material it’s based on: Macgragge’s Honour, a graphic novel. Also, Ouon Hommed – my preferred choice of warlord for this – has a very powerful card-drawing ability that I suspect will get reduced for balance purposes in later iterations. However, I managed an eight-win run with him, which is my best run yet, and won the achievement for doing so which is a positive thing! I’m going to try a few more runs with Hommed to see if I can get him up to twelve wins – the maximum you can get off one ticket – before his abilities are modified, as for once I might have a hope of managing it!

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Last Week's Games: Painting a Dark Apostle and Uncharted

I’ll start this week by talking about something I should have mentioned in the previous one: I’ve finished painting my Dark Apostle for my Chaos Space Marine Word Bearers army.

This one was a massive faff to keep it held together. This being a Finecast model, it wasn’t terribly well cut and there are some rather wobbly joins holding it together. The result is a model that would very likely fall apart if somebody breathes on it too hard, (even as I write this the star on the top of his weapon has broken off again,) and a lot of the time I wanted to spend painting it was spent repairing the thing.

Not the best picture but
the best I could do at the time.

I was a little puzzled at first as to what colour I should be painting him. Dark Apostles are, of course, the Chaos Space Marine equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, and they always wear black armour no matter what chapter they are attached to. I wondered if the same applied to Chaos Space Marines and whether I would necessarily have to paint it in that dull rusty colour that appears on his box art. After a little research I couldn’t find a definitive answer, so I opted to paint him the usual Word Bearers colours of red and silver, making a neat job of the trimmings but not with the level of detail one might expect from a character model such as this. I’m pleased with the result nonetheless, and I look forward to putting him on the gaming table at some point.

This concludes the 500 points block of Chaos Space Marines I was painting in the Word Bearers colours, including a Chaos Space Marine squad, two squads of Cultists, a Chaos Lord and the Dark Apostle. Nothing particularly hard-hitting there, but those of you familiar with the most recent edition of Warhammer 400000 will recognise that this brings them into the Battalion force organisation chart, which means I have 6 strategy points to work with for a 500 point army. I don’t know how well it’s going to work but I’m hoping to find out soon.

I own more models for the army than this – I’ve got another squad of Chaos Space Marines and a Helbrute – but as I’ve not used any of them yet, I’m hesitant to get into a battle that’s too big, as I invariably end up slowing the game to a crawl by having to check the rules for the different units every few minutes. Far better, I think, to play a few games with what I’ve got, find out what works and what doesn’t, and add to it after I’ve got used to the rules for the models I’m currently using.

The next project is a Raptor squad that I intend to paint in Black Legion colours, inspired by the Horus Heresy: Legions game I’ve been playing on my phone. I’ll write more about that once I start to progress!

Pretty good, but not much motivation to play it again...

In other news, I reached the end of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and wrote a review for it which is scheduled to come out on Friday. From the tone of the review it seems quite negative, so I just want to clarify that it really is a good game. It was more a case of… you know when you’ve really enjoyed a game and you get to the end of it wishing there were more of it so you can keep playing? With Uncharted, I was quite ready for it to be over when the end credits rolled. The fact that it was 3am probably contributed to that.

Also, there are some new cards out for Horus Heresy: Legions; the Word Bearers are now a faction and a tough one at that. They seem to work around summoning Daemons, which fits the lore, and while they take a while to get going, once those Daemons start to arrive, they can take you down very quickly. I’ve not had a go with them yet, (I tend to keep to the loyalists in the events,) but I’ve got one of their Warlords so I might have a go with them in the future. It would be fitting, since that’s my 40K army!

Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein, Epic Mickey, Open TTD

I started this week with my run through Wolfenstein 3D. In my previous blog post I may have given the impression that I wasn’t fond of the game. While I stand by the remarks that none of the environments are particularly memorable, it is a competently-designed game and I am enjoying it. The levels are designed in such a way that you almost always must clear most of the level to get to the end. There are no skipping tough sections; if one part is too hard, you need to figure out a way to deal with it. Bottle-necking enemies in doorways usually works, but you also need to remember where in the level the health pick-ups and ammo packs are. Your character doesn’t pick them up straight away if he doesn’t need them but you’re likely to run in to a difficult section later that will tank both your health and ammo, and you’ll be glad that there are some pick-ups to run back to! The fact that there is no map (that I’ve been able to see!) doesn’t help but it adds to the challenge of memorising the levels.

They'll drop you in a couple of hits...

I also enjoy using the Chain Gun. This is the most powerful weapon in the game, but it has a problem with ammo conservation; it never uses less than two bullets and any amount of sustained fire will drain your ammo quickly. You’re therefore forced to fire in short bursts to take out the regular guards and save your ammo for taking down the harder opponents like the SS or Mutants. It’s a simple strategic element but is far more effective in making a challenging game than simply giving you the chain gun and letting you run wild!

We worked this bit out eventually.

Elsewhere, me and Kirsty played Epic Mickey 2 on the Xbox 360. This was a free download a few months ago, and we like Disney so we gave it a go to see what it was like. We wanted to like it, we really did, but it’s been a long time since I played a game in split-screen mode and it was very tough for all the wrong reasons. The solutions to the puzzles aren’t particularly intuitive, and the split screen restricts your field of view. We got stuck at a point where you must use one character to throw the other over a gap in the environment, and we weren’t very clear on what we had to do; it sucked all the fun out of the game, and we called it a night.

I’ve carried on with Horus Heresy: Legions; there’s a new event running now that requires you to fight a Titan. Most of the Imperial decks are Space Wolves, and I find them a lot easier to use than Custodes, and the Titan battles are easy enough, but the Player Versus Player modes are always a challenge.

Wha...? I can't even... no. No.

Finally, I came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: Open TTD. If you don’t know, this is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, one of the most memorable management games I think I’ve ever played, if only for its Jazz soundtrack! It’s a free download and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. The aim of the game is to build a transport network to supply passengers and various commodities to towns around the environment. There is also a competitive element to the game where you have other transport networks attempting the same. Now, I can build the routes, but I’m not great at micro-managing the train lines in order to get them to run efficiently, and no matter how well the signal system should work, I always end up getting one train or the other stuck. I doubt I’ll make enough money to win the game, but apparently the game ends after 100 years of game time so if I get that far, that will be an achievement!

Incidentally, it was my intention to record some footage of this to put on YouTube. Unfortunately, I can’t get my capture software to work with it, presumably because it doesn’t launch from either Steam or GOG. Still, we can always follow the blog to keep up!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Castlevania IV, Torchlight, Horus Heresy: Legions

I’ve been playing quite a few games this week, many of which I’ve never played before; let’s hope I’ve got the space to write about them all:

As with the later Doom, the chaingun eats up
a lot of ammo...

The first one was Wolfenstein 3D on my laptop. This one is often regarded as the Grandfather of first-person shooters, and while it might have been the first game that kicked off a huge part of what mainstream video games eventually became, it hasn’t aged particularly well. You run through the halls and rooms of a grey castle, shooting Nazis and collecting treasure. It works, and it is fun. The level design has a certain “Dungeons and Dragons” sensibility to it, and it’s challenging enough on the right level. But when all the levels look the same with very little variety in what you’re doing, it’s hard to think of a part of the game I’ve played that I would classify as “memorable.”

Robert Foster and Joey.

I’ve also been playing Beneath a Steel Sky. This was a game that I got for free on my GOG account, for some reason, and had never touched it in that time. From the occasional coverage from Jim Sterling, I knew that it was a Point and Click adventure, but unsure as to whether I had the patience, I didn’t bother with it for the longest time. But I’m playing it now, and it’s a pretty good adventure; it was developed by Revolution who also did Broken Sword, so it was interesting to see the contextual mouse system being developed, even if it was in its infancy back then. It’s pretty good, amusing in the right places, but it has the same problem that most games of its time had – if you can’t work out the puzzle, the whole game grinds to a halt. This has happened to me at least once, where I had to use a guide to figure out what to do next, only to find I had to talk to a character I had no practical reason to talk to at that point. Nonetheless, I hope I get to the end of it!

Hands up who remembers THAT music...

On the WiiU, I’ve been playing Super Castlevania IV. This is a game I played a while ago, as my mate Matt had it on the Super Nintendo; it’s arguably as good as the Castlevania series ever achieved and certainly an entertaining game after all this time. A nice variety of enemies, tricky platforming sections, and bosses that you should never be able to beat makes for a fun time, marred only slightly by some cheap deaths and odd checkpoint placement. It works especially well with the WiiU’s internal saving system, and I’m enjoying playing through it again, if only to give myself some ideas on what I might develop in my own DnD campaigns in future!

Spiders. It had to be spiders, didn't it?

I also played Torchlight on the Xbox 360. This was a free download with Games with Gold, and while I’d already bought it on the PC I thought the Xbox would be a more convenient platform to give it a go. It’s a dungeon-basher, with a lot of things to loot, an interesting “Pet” mechanic and a linear and standard storyline. It’s been fun so far, but it hasn’t got the depth of many of the RPGs I play, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much more than getting through to the end of the game. I’ll stick at it for a bit, but I don’t know, I might have wanted a bit more than this. Still, I didn’t pay for this version of it, so I guess it’s OK!

Custodes. A pain in the bum to run or fight.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Horus Heresy: Legions on my phone. It took me a while to get back in to it, but I got there in the end! I’ve joined a new lodge as well – emperors Finest. The reason for this was that my previous lodge, the Emperor’s Daggers, was full of dead accounts. I’d love to be able to win some points for the team in the events, but the Adeptus Custodes cards are very fiddly and I’m not sure yet how I can use them effectively.

Let’s see what next week brings, and whether I can finish some of these games!

Last Week's Games: Snakebird, Legions and Mordheim.

It's worth playing for the looks on their faces.

This week I did something I don’t do very often these days, and that is play a game within about a month of buying it! In this case it was Snakebird, a puzzle game involving moving a curious combination of a snake and a bird towards the level exit. It works on a grid-based movement system, and you move your snakes forward by one tile each time looking for the best way to get the exit, and eat all the fruit along the way if there is any. It’s bright, colourful, and sounds very twee and pleasant. This is just as well because the puzzles themselves are very frustrating! There aren’t really all that many options available to you and if you make a mistake it’s all over; either your snake will get trapped or fall on spikes or water. The puzzles where you have to move two or more snakes are even more difficult, because they rely on each other to proceed – you somehow have to find a way for them to climb on top of each other, and still have enough support to remain still once their partner has gone!

So, Snakebird is frustrating, but there is a certain amount of fun to be had in finally getting it right, even if the vast majority of the time it is more by luck than judgement.

It's good to be back...

I also came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: The Horus Heresy: Legions. I stopped playing this for a bit when I was at the UK Games Expo, funnily enough. I found myself far too busy on the Saturday to play the game and when it transpired that I was happy enough not playing it, I didn’t go back to it for a long time. But last night I gave it another go and was pleasantly surprised to find my low-power Lucius deck was still as fierce as ever. I have been very busy with family and work commitments over the last few weeks, but I might start streaming and recording again soon if the time is right.

Finally, I got justifiably angry at one of my favourite games: Mordheim, City of the Damned. If you’ve been following my blog for any significant amount of time you’ll know I love this game; the warband development and winning the 20-60 minute battles give me no end of pleasure, and getting to know the warriors in your band gives them more character than any amount of design or voice acting could. But it was my intention to get through the campaign eventually so, having finally completed my Wyrdstone obligations, I entered into the third Mercenary mission in the Library. I took my Level 4 Ogre, knowing how useful it was going to be to have a warrior immune to fear and terror, and set about finding the grimoires.

The Daemonette did for Luther in the end. If it had
gone to plan it would have looked like this:

So, to complete this mission, you need to find three warding wands to disable the wards around the grimoires and pick them up. You also need to collect three other grimoires that are around and about, whilst dealing with the Curator, who is pretty fierce, and the Daemons, who are horrible because of the terror they inspire. They are few in number but are brutal, and few creatures will survive a 1-1 fight.

It was when I was picking up the second Grimoire that disaster struck – the game bugged out. It’s done this before where you pick up a quest item, and it is added to your inventory, but the game doesn’t register it as completing the objective. As in these missions there are only usually as many items as you need, (no extras,) it is impossible to complete the mission. The only thing you can do at that point, (and thank you to the Steam community or I wouldn’t have known this,) is to let the Dramatis Personae die – this is the only way you can end the mission without there being further consequences to your warband, as usually they take additional injuries if they abandon the battle. I did this, and thankfully most of my soldiers survived – but this bug has been going on for years! Why hasn’t it been patched?

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!

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