Last Week's Games: Skyrim, Lego Star Wars, Monster Match

 This week I find myself running into the same problem I always do whenever I’m trying to play through a long-form game – trying to find something new and interesting to say about it. Fortunately, while playing Skyrim this week, I played through A Daedra’s Best Friend. This is ostensibly yet another side quest, however it adds to what – memes aside – the games has been sorely lacking up to this point: a sense of humour.

A nasty piece of work,
but brilliantly played.

After exiting Falkreath by the West exit, I was met with a dog called Barbas. He tells me that he’s had a falling out with his master, and requests to accompany him to meet him and make amends. I followed the dog – who uses a distinctive American accent quite remote from the Nordic dialects we’ve been hearing so far – to a dungeon I’d already looked at earlier in the game: Haemar’s Shame. I went through the dungeon again, killing all the vampires and at least one spider along the way, until I met with the shrine of Clavicus Vile himself: Barbas’ master. And my word, what a character. He speaks to you in your mind with slight Cockney twang, as an entity that loves nothing more than causing chaos by granting wishes in the most self-damaging ways possible, and will only agree to take Barbas back if you retrieve an axe for him…

There are multiple ways this quest can end so I’ll leave the actual description of it there, but even though the gags in this quest are hideously dark in places, it is a refreshing change to the grim fantasy world presented for us so far! This was the first situation for a while where I wasn’t chasing quests to level up my character or progress the main plot in some way; I genuinely wanted to see where this quest was going. It wouldn’t work if the whole game was like this, but a little humour in a game can like Skyrim go a long way, create some very memorable moments, and break the cycles of questing and quite nicely.

If you were wondering how they'd do the
"I am your father" bit when none of the
characters actually speak, here it is...

I carried on with Lego Star Wars with Jessie, and we’ve reached some areas that are surprisingly challenging to traverse, especially when you’re still learning the nuances of 3D movement in video games! The highlights include The Empire Strikes Back sections: Traversing Dagobah has a wonderful moment in it where you play Luke Skywalker in the middle of his Jedi training. As Luke isn’t a Jedi at this point, the usual mechanics don’t apply for certain parts of this level – he can use the force, but not well. To use the force normally, he must pick up Yoda and put him on his back. This came to a head when Jessie – who desperately wanted to play as Yoda and had grudgingly resigned herself to the fact that putting him on Luke’s back was as good as it was going to get – had to use the force to lower some Lego Mushrooms so that R2-D2 can use the gate at the end of the scene. The problem was that this required some quick timing, and Jess kept getting attacked by bats. It took a few goes, to say the least! The other part we enjoyed was the boss battle with Darth Vader, which was nicely designed in the way that Jessie – who didn’t want to fight, so was playing R2-D2 – was able to be useful by turning on steam vents and raising platforms. It will help to build her problem-solving skills if nothing else!

A simple but very entertaining game!

We also enjoyed a tabletop game called Monster Match, in which you must roll two dice and try to match the numbers and body parts they present to the cards on the table. We had to modify this down a bit – the cards score between one and three points each, we had to take that out – but it helps to build up her number recognition. As an aside, Jessie bought this game for me for Father’s Day last year. We had a go with it then, and she didn’t enjoy it much at the time; it’s lovely to see how well she’s coming on when we see her enjoying it now.

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.