Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Open TTD, Kingpin and Chaos Gate

I’ve been playing several different games over the last couple of weeks, so if this blog seems a little longer it is because these notes cover two weeks rather than one!

They’ve mainly been on my laptop. I played a bit of Wolfenstein 3D, killing Hitler at the end of the third chapter and playing through the prequel campaigns; I’m about half way through them now. It’s an odd experience; I’ve been playing WWII-related games for many years now, and this is the first time I’ve killed Hitler!

I’ve found that because the game requires a certain amount of timing and skill to complete, this isn’t the sort of game where you can play it for ten hours and beat the whole thing. After about an hour and a half, my concentration drops, and I make silly mistakes that get me killed; at that point I find it’s best to drop the game for a little while and come back to it another day. But it’s nice to have that option!

Not exactly historically accurate, but fun nonetheless!

I’ve also found that with a few exceptions, the level design of the game is generally very good. The graphics must have been impressive for the time but were hardly the photo-realistic polygons we’ve come to expect now, the sound was tinny and distorted, and while the presentation was thematic and did the job, it’s basic. The design team at ID software were aware of this and had to really concentrate on making the game playable – which they have, without a doubt. They might only have one level of view and and three guns to play with, but they designed the levels and challenges to really get the most out of their limited resources. So apart from a couple of clangers (one of the levels require you to find a secret in order to find the key, which when the secret areas are not telegraphed very well is a significant challenge, that you’ll only really achieve by luck rather than judgement. Or read a guide, like I did. It’s not fun to press the activate button on every wall on a huge stage on the off chance you’ll get the right one!) the game is designed very well.

I carried on with my game of Open TTD and I’ve realised some of the problems you can run in to when running a transport network consisting mainly of road vehicles – they get old and need replacing. I’m playing on a large map and I have a lot of road vehicles; it takes time and it is a massive faff. It’s part of the game, I suppose, and it gives you the option to replace those vehicles with improved versions, but I wish there was some way to automate the replacement! I’ve also reached a point in the game where some of the supplying businesses start to close; I’ve noticed it mainly with oil: there comes a point where the primary business doesn’t operate anymore, and a lot of the transport designed around it becomes redundant. Rerouting your entire network to compensate is a challenge!

Of course, as Kingpin was released in 1999, the
character models are absolutely hideous.

There were some other games as well. A while ago I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime, plus a couple of older Games Workshop games, Final Liberation and Chaos Gate. I’ll go in to specifics in a minute but for now let me say that as I downloaded these games from GOG, all three of them required fiddling around with the game files to run. This involved looking for advice from the community, finding out what patches I need, and making sure they were in the game files. Kingpin wouldn’t boot at all until I’d installed a patch, and Chaos Gate wouldn’t proceed past the point where I’d launched the mission because apparently it can’t handle particularly long file paths, so I had to make a new directory for it. Final Liberation was a little easier to fix; for some reason it doesn’t want to play the videos, so I had to go into the configuration file to disable them. This is a little sad as some of those videos were brilliant; not technically wonderful but the actors and producers were clearly in to what they were doing! I got them all working eventually but this is not something I expect to have to do with a product I’ve bought from a game distributor on the understanding that it will work.

I wasn’t too impressed with Kingpin, actually. From the marketing, I was expecting a kind of Grand Theft Auto without the cars, where you build up your criminal empire and take on the people who betrayed you. In fact, it’s a difficult shooter with some shopping and recruiting. I didn’t get far in to it; maybe it gets better at some point but starting a game like this with no weapons and being surrounded by enemies who are at least on par with you and often much tougher made the game frustratingly difficult.

The rest of the squad are in the Thunderhawk...

Chaos Gate was a lot of fun, though. It’s a Warhammer 40K squad-based tactics game, and I’m a lot better at them now than I was when I originally bought the game in 1999 so I set it on the middle difficulty rather than the easy mode I would usually look for back then! The graphics look a bit “Second Edition,”[1] and while the weapons make the right noises, I’m not sure how I feel about firing the rocket launcher and seeing the impact of it with absolutely nothing in between, but the game itself is pretty good if a little clunky. It must be one of the first games I played with a Permadeath function; if your squad members get killed, there’s no replacing them at all in the campaign. It even has an Iron Man mode, which I haven’t touched yet. I’ve got to the second mission, but I can’t seem to get through it without at least one squad member dying; I’ll keep trying though!

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[1] If you know, you know.

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!