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!
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| 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!
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| 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!
