Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

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!

---

[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: Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

This week I have had very little time to play games. I pre-empted this and played Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Knowing the game was very short and that I could potentially beat it in one night, I gave it a go, and I did. This will end up on Backlog Beatdown eventually but I haven’t finished my write-up. In order to avoid publishing two blogs within a week of each other going over the same ground, I am instead going to cover what Metal Gear means for me. This might sound like an odd thing to want to talk about, but while it’s true that Ground Zeroes fell short of expectations, it wasn’t for the reasons I was expecting.

This had never been done before...

The first time I owned a Metal Gear game (Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation,) I was fifteen. 3D games were still developing at that point, and while some were good, there were some clangers as well. Metal Gear Solid not only blew most of the 3D games out of the water, it also was the first game I remember outside of RPGs to have a truly memorable plot. Rather than taking you around the world on different missions, it stuck you on Shadow Moses island; one military base to cover the entire game. Characters had complexity and depth, there were betrayals, cover-ups, a reason to unlock both endings, and some clever fourth-wall breaking. Not to mention, Snake was cool. It was one of the few games on the Playstation I played through multiple times.

Snake. The hero we both need AND deserve.

On the Playstation 2, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was one of the most hyped games. The characters would look better than ever, it would take advantage of the advancing hardware, there was even a demo of it available in Zone of the Enders; it was an exciting time! Then the game came out and, while very few people remember Raiden fondly, the game was very well-designed – even if, you spend a lot of the time listening to the codec. The plot was contrived; I had to go on to Wikipedia to make sense of it, but it was fun to speculate.

Then we got Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This is a phenomenal game in terms of the camouflage system and survival mechanics. But I didn’t like playing it without the radar anywhere. Snake was still a cool character but I guessed you were playing the character who would eventually become Big Boss – the overarching villain for the original Metal Gear games and who overshadows the Metal Gear Solid franchise. So I had an idea of how the story would work out and wasn’t interested in seeing it. I never got to the end of it.

I missed Guns of the Patriots entirely, as I never had a Playstation 3. From what I understand it wraps up the whole meta-plot of the franchise, though there was still more to explore. But now Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is out and laced with controversy surrounding Hideo Kojima’s relationship with Konami. If the game wasn’t truly finished and never will be, it’s not a game I have any interest in playing, even if I owned a machine capable of it.

A good game, but not as much as I was expecting...

The first two Metal Gear Solid games still resonate with me to this day because they never forgot they were only games – radars, health packs, fourth wall breaking and the like. I was a teenager when they came out. I’m thirty-two now, and I’m becoming fed up with games where stealth is the central mechanic. Ground Zeroes was a very competently-designed game, but felt less like a Metal Gear game and more like a 3^rd-person action-adventure that could have been any game, really. I had no investment in the characters, no reason to play this at all really beyond wanting to play and beat a relatively short game. This done, I had no interest in playing the other missions, or finding out what it was all about. I’m not saying it should have stuck with the old style; of course it needed to evolve. But it’s become a very different game to the one I enjoyed playing when I was younger.

Last Week's Games: Crazy Taxi, Reigns, Mordheim: City of the Damned, Guitar Hero, New Super Mario Bros

Pretty crazy...

I started this week by downloading Crazy Taxi off Xbox Live’s Games with Gold. This is a game that has been talked about fondly for many years but as far as I can remember, I never actually played. I didn’t own the Dreamcast, and while a version of it did come out for the PlayStation 2, within six months of buying one I was bought Grand Theft Auto 3 for Christmas, in which the same essential experience can be created by stealing a taxi and starting the taxi mission. I initially thought it was going to be another pick-up-and-play game, which was fine by me, but I sat playing it for two hours so I definitely enjoyed it! I’m not very good at it though; the advanced driving techniques performed by the somewhat clunky gear-shift mechanic elude me at this point, and I haven’t yet managed more than a “C” rank. I’ll probably keep trying, though!

I also had a quick go with Reigns, a whimsical decision-making game about being the king, and trying to remain so as long as possible before you die in some way. I didn’t get too far in the game before being pulled apart by various people in the church. I’m not quite clued up on how all the mechanics of the game work yet, as in what decision is likely to affect what outcome – but it looks like this isn’t a game you “beat” in the usual sense. More likely, you’ll be unlocking all the possible characters, all the deaths, all the events etc. I’ll probably have to look at a guide or something to get to the last few, but it looks like a game that would work great on mobile; a filler for a spare ten minutes.

Of course I returned to Mordheim: City of the Damned, and continued my campaign as the Red Death Possessed warband. At the moment I seem to be doing well against most of the other factions except the Sisters of Sigmar, whose morale and resilience are at odds with my somewhat low level of damage output and not quite having the right spells to deal with it. The first campaign mission is ready to go but having attempted a playthrough as Chaos before I know that the opponent for this is the Sisters, so I’m making sure my warband s is ready to go before I do this – even though this is usually how I get bogged down in the game and find progress very difficult.

Not sure which game this shot comes from,
could be any of them...

And then for some reason I had an urge to dig up my old Guitar Hero controller and try the first Guitar Hero game. I’ve never been especially very good at these games because I find that when I watch the scroll bar going up for a while, my vision starts to do the same so five or six songs is usually quite enough. Somehow in spite of this I managed to get through the entire game on Easy mode and earn a 5-star rating on all the available songs.  I had a go on medium difficulty, but I found myself thinking that if I’m going to work that hard to get through a game, I might think about doing some more practice on the real thing so I can play some more songs!

Someone want to tell me how to
open up that bottom path?

Finally, I continued playing New Super Mario Bros. I beat the first world, and got up to the first save point in the second before going to bed. One thing I’m noticing about the later Super Mario games is how well it accommodates varying levels of play; the levels aren’t that much of a challenge to get through and you could potentially get through the whole game by running to the right and jumping at the right time. But some of the content is gated off by a certain number of collectables you have to pick up, in this case the large coins. It gives an incentive to take your time, explore the levels and really get the most out of the game. I found it was a similar situation when I covered Super Mario 3D World last year; it’s a sign of good game design!

Last Week's Games: Atari Anthology, New Super Mario Bros U, Theme Hospital

I started this week by playing the Atari Anthology on the PlayStation 2. This is a compilation of 85 games that were a mixture of the Atari 2600 console and Arcade games, and with my borderline OCD method of decision-making, I tried some of them in alphabetical order. I had a go on a 2600 years ago which my friend Richard inherited off his Dad, and even with my age in single digits, I knew that games had come on a long way since then. Most people who collect and play these games now do so because they have some nostalgic investment in it; I don’t have this but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. The games showcased by this compilation “Started a Revolution,” and from what I understand about the 2600, it needed this shortlist! Many of the games released for it weren’t very good, and contributed to the over-saturation of the market that cause it to crash in the 1980s. Video games were in their infancy at that point, and a lot of what makes them fun for me – an end goal, an engaging plot, a challenging process and a satisfying resolution – just wasn’t there.

I like how the art for the early video
 games looked significantly better than
 the actual game...

Due to the limitations of the hardware, and that the entire concept of video games was still in development, the better games concentrated on their playability. I had a lot of fun with 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, a game played over a 4x4x4 cube. There is definite strategy involved, but if you mirror the computer’s moves, you’ll reach a draw. It took a while to beat but I managed it in the end.

Air and Sea Battle was reminiscent of early shooters, in which you play a gun turret shooting planes and helicopters out of the sky. Set up correctly, you have two minutes to score more points than the gun on the opposite side. As a single-player experience it’s over quite quickly; I’d imagine it would be better with two players, but most things are!

When I needed a few moments to wind down, I had a go with New Super Mario Bros U on the WiiU. I find that, with such wide gaps between playing this game, I forget about some of the newer techniques and power-ups and have to remember what they do before I can use them in any meaningful way. But it’s a nice fun game that I don’t have to think too hard about, which is exactly what I need at eleven o’clock at night!

Last Friday I beat Theme Hospital. I’ll put out a Backlog Beatdown review next Friday, but developing the points I made last week: The Epidemics and the Earthquakes are difficult to deal with, need to be included. In the later levels, there comes a point where everything needed to beat the level is basically done, and all you’re doing is waiting for the money to roll in so you can progress to the next one. The Epidemics, which gamble some money and reputation on being able to cure a certain number of patients in a certain time and none of them going outside, and Earthquakes, which damage your machines, appear at random and add some challenge to the game when everything is done. It’s a harsh way to extend the game, but they needed to exist.

Oh dear, that doesn't look too good...

Also the last level was deceptively simple to beat. I’d researched all the cures, built all the rooms and trained all my doctors to be as efficient as possible. While the criteria for beating the level is quite high, I was waiting for a curveball I didn’t think was going to come. It arrived right at the end: Most of the levels end on the next quarter of a year. With the last one, it only ends at the end of the year – and you have to maintain the standards until then. It took me longer than it should have to clear it, as just before the year ended, an earthquake that destroyed a few of my machines, a couple of doctors working on them – and my reputation. It took a long time to pull it back, but I did, and finished the game I originally bought in 1998!

Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month! 

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Mortal Kombat, Killer 7, Shinobi, Zaxxon, Orcs and Elves.

I’ve played quite a few games this week! Firstly, I finally beat Far Cry 2. It’s been a long journey to get to the end of that game and while I don’t see myself coming back to it, I’m glad I’ve played it. It seems to be the core experience of what modern open world games eventually became; the old games may not be able to match the new in terms of content, but it was developed at a time when the idea was new, fresh, and waiting to see what could be done with it.

After beating a long heavy game like Far Cry 2 I needed something light and playable to enjoy, and I left that task to my old sparring partner Streets of Rage 2. I’m getting quite far in to the final level before I lose all of my lives, but the boss rush on the seventh level still tanks most of them. I’m also enjoying playing as Axel more than I did before; as long as you time his moves correctly, he can be devastating.

I'd love to be able to play the BGM on classical guitar...

I went round to a friend’s flat who had a Sega Mega Drive console, and I played a couple of games with them including Columns and the original Mortal Kombat. Columns is as good fun as ever; I lost the game this time through being very tired (it had been a long day) and doing the cardinal sin with puzzle games, which is to try and be clever and look for combos. I’m sure, with more skill, this would be a great tactic. But right now, just trying to match three gems is good enough. Combos tend to happen by themselves. Mortal Kombat was a pleasure to play again. I found myself remembering some of the old moves that Johnny Cage and Scorpion used to do, and took no small amount of pleasure in using them against Kirsty and her friends who didn’t. It took me right back to when I used to play it at home and organise mini-tournaments with my friends; we’d knock each other out and the winner would get a sweet. Great times.

My new game for this week was Killer 7 on the Playstation 2. I bought it at some point last year thinking that this is a game of some reverence from the reknowned developer Suda51, and therefore must be a good game. It certainly succeeded in making me wonder what in the world it’s all about. I just about understand the shooting and I understand why it’s on rails, but I’m not quite getting the significance of the different characters, and why they’re being guided through the game by a guy in a red fetish suit who feels the need to constantly tell me I’m in a tight spot. Maybe I haven’t had enough time with it yet, and if I give it more time the plot might hook me in a little more. We’ll see how it works out but it’s not like I’ve got nothing else to be playing!

Very hard game!

I had a go with a couple of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I tried out Zaxxon, having heard it mentioned several times on Metal Jesus’ Youtube channel. It’s an isometric shooter that has you moving higher or lower, rather than up and down. It was probably phenomenal at the time it was released but I find it very difficult to aim like that; I guess I’ll get used to it if I persevere. Those games were designed to be hard! So too was the original Shinobi, apparently. You can respawn as many times as you like but it doesn’t help if you keep dying in the same place over and over again! But they were what I needed at that point, which was some mindless fun.

Also I played a bit more of Orcs and Elves; I’m enjoying it so far as the difficulty of the game is just about right for me. Also, as is becoming the case, I’m finding a lot more fun in the games where it’s ok to just pick it up and have a play, rather than immersing myself in a simulation.

No Game New Year: Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts

Ah, Kindom Hearts. It is a beautiful, beautiful game that took the epicentre of imagination and made it into something truly special. It never quite achieved the mainstream success of the triple-A titles of the time, nor did it manage to compete with the leading games that came after. However, after twelve years it retains a relatively small but immensely loyal fan base. And rightly so.

I played through the game up until more or less the end back in 2003, and had a few false starts later on, but I’ve never beaten it. And with No Game New Year still in full swing, and my sister’s PS2 still plugged in, I felt compelled to give it one more shot.

Anybody who knows about Kingdom Hearts knows the score: It is an amalgamation of the Disney and Squaresoft intellectual property in a somewhat linear but very enjoyable role playing game. That, to me, sealed the deal while I was still reading magazines running the preview versions of the game in Japanese – I’m a big Disney fan, and I loved the Final Fantasy games. What was not to love about this?

As with all games that take more than a day to finish, I’ll probably be some time with this one, so I’m going to give you the highlights here:

 

There was a certain amount of innocence to Squaresoft before it became Square Enix. Final Fantasy VII was a huge success, had some incredibly memorable characters and had a great storyline. Final Fantasy VIII was a good game but fell short of the mark in terms of character, and Final Fantasy X was very good indeed.[1] So taking some of the characters from their games and putting them into Kingdom Hearts was a fantastic idea. With a completely new hero, Sora, you actually got to interact with some of the characters who appeared in the aforementioned Final Fantasy games – Cloud, Tidus and Squall (Leon) were all very good as player characters but talking to them from an outsider’s point of view is a special experience even to this very day. It’s an odd thing to pick up on but I loved it.

Similarly, teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck, characters I have been watching on TV and film my ENTIRE LIFE, was magic. They both have video games of their own but having their characters interact with yours – Sora – was an incredible experience that made me somehow feel that they were talking to you – with their quirks and personalities intact. Takes me right back to ‘pretend’ games you played as a kid, which I won’t go in to but don’t tell me you didn’t do the same at some point.

Of course, kicking their asses was fun too...

I equally enjoyed teaming up with the Disney characters you find on the various worlds you visit, though I have done less of it this time due to team balancing (I’ll tell you later.) At the time of writing I’ve only got to Tarzan in this playthrough, but later on you get to team up with Aladdin, Ariel from the Little Mermaid, and The Beast to name but a few. Plus the characters you can get through Summons (Simba, Bambi, the Genie) are a pleasure to have alongside you.

I set the difficulty on this one to Expert. As far as I know, it only affects the combat, and I found myself breezing through most of the combat on Normal difficulty. I wanted a challenge, so I set it to expert. However, I found a different challenge in one of the few negative aspects of this game: The controls.

Sadly, both the controls and the interface don’t work quite as well as they should. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the character action games I’ve been playing on the Xbox360, but it took me a while to get my head around the idea that you can’t change the direction of your attack during a combo. Usually you can do this in games by pointing the analogue stick in the direction you want to go, but it doesn’t work like that in Kingdom Hearts. Some of the moves take a surprisingly long time to do, and more than once I’ve been injured or killed simply because I’ve been interrupted during the first attack of the combo. Similarly the jumping is a little off, in that once you land, there is a delay of about a third of a second before you can move again. I imagine I will appreciate it a lot more during some of the platforming sections I know are coming up, but I’ve been caught out by it a few times in combat.

Well I'm very pleased to hear it...

The other major is that as far as I can see, there is no quick way to access your items. You have to ‘equip’ items to each character in order for them to be able to use it in combat, which is fine, because otherwise Goofy and Donald would use all your potions in five minutes. But once you get in to combat, you have to use the directional buttons – which takes your thumb off the left analogue stick and stops you moving – and cycle down two menus to do something as simple as using a potion. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve died because I was faffing about trying to use my potions, and while I’m getting a little more used to it now, it’s still a design flaw in my opinion.

But as I said in my coverage of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which was from about the same time, this game was developed before a lot of these things were standardised. There wasn’t a precedent for a ‘good’ system, so the developers just did whatever came to their heads, though I still find it hard to believe that anyone thought a menu in a real-time combat system was a good idea. My sister actually told me that it gets a lot better in Kingdom Hearts 2, which I haven’t played yet due to wanting to complete the first game, er, first.

To end on a high point, I would like to shake the hand of the genius who came up with the soundtrack. I don’t know who it is, I have looked in the manual to the game but the composer of the music either isn’t mentioned or is given a different title. I was almost in tears with nostalgia when I heard the background music to Traverse Town. I find it incredible that a loop of 16 bars of music and a melody from what I think is a clarinet can simultaneously make you feel welcome, comfortable and lonely, and it never, NEVER gets old.

I probably will shed a tear or two when I get to Agrabah – Aladdin’s stage – and the Genie makes his appearance. As I write this, Robin Williams, who voice-acted the Genie in the film Aladdin, died earlier in the week. I found myself as moved by the terrible circumstances of his death as I am by the huge legacy of work he leaves behind, and will be reminded of it only too well when his character appears in the game.[2]

I’ll most likely be away next week but hopefully I’ll have a little more to say about it when I come back. See you all then!

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[1] Can’t pass judgement on FFIX because I never played it.

[2] Yes, I know the voice actor for The Genie in Kingdom Hearts was Dan Castellaneta, but it will still nonetheless remind me of Robin. What a loss.

No Game New Year: WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 with a bit of Streets of Rage...

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 (PS2)

I wasn’t going to bother with this game originally. This series of games is in its 16^th year (crikey, that makes me feel old…) and I owned all of the games at some point up to 2009.[1] As the new iterations of the game are almost always better game play-wise than the previous ones, I’d not usually touch the older games after I’d got the new ones, and I put SvR 2007 and 2008 on the list of games that I was going to get rid of at the end of the year, 2009 having already gone a couple of years ago.

Then when I made my list of PS2 games I hadn’t completed, I remembered that I never finished the Season Mode for either game. And given my almost obsessive-compulsive need to play games in order, even though it doesn’t actually make much difference in the long run, I thought I’d play through SvR 2007’s Season mode.

 

I created my own wrestler for this. This is something I don’t do very often. You’ve been able to create your own wrestler in every iteration of the Smackdown games since the first, and while I enjoyed it hugely in the first game, I found that by the time the second one came out, I hadn’t actually played as many of the wrestlers. I thought I had missed out on a lot and didn’t bother with it after that. I think I used the mode once in every game but I’d usually play through the Season mode as one of the wrestlers.

Creating a wrester in the later games is a long and not always enjoyable process so I decided this time to have a bit of fun with it and create a video game character. I chose Abadede from Streets of Rage 2,[2] and basically created a freakishly tall, muscle-bound god with purple underpants, boots and wristguards that were as near as I could get to a metallic colour (black.) Sadly I couldn’t get the right haircut. Apparently 80s bouffant never occurred to the designers of SvR 2007; who knew? I made sure he was from Mexico, gave him what I thought was a Mexican voice but actually sounds more like a cool black guy, and gave him clean tactics. The latter option might seem strange but for his boss battle in SoR2 he never uses a weapon, and it’s a straight 1v1 fight, giving me the idea that Abadede at least had enough pride in his own ability to fight properly. For his move set, I gave him a very powerful uppercut, and made sure he had a lot of opportunities to do clotheslines as these are his main attacks in SoR2, with a fairly standard Power Bomb as his finisher. Sadly I’ve got no way of screen-grabbing anything off my PS2, and trying to take a photo of it always turned out rubbish, so I can’t show you. But I mention it because of the contribution it made to my enjoyment of the game!

 

I took Abadede into the Season Mode. It works on an experience points system, where you play a match and if you win you get 2000 XP, if you lose you get 300. You then get to spend these points in your various attributes. Because of the build I was going for with Abadede, I put as much as I could into Strength, Stamina and Durability, with Charisma as a secondary consideration. But this brought to light a design flaw in the game that brought the momentum of the game to a juddering halt: There is no way to apply experience points from inside the Season Mode. Instead, you have to save your game, exit the Season Mode, load up the Create Mode, apply your points, exit Create Mode and load the Season Mode up again just to apply some experience points.

This is made all the worse by the fact that the PS2 game took a while to load each screen. I would imagine the position would have been somewhat different with the Xbox 360 version, but with no hard drive, the PS2 had to rely entirely on reading the disc. It was a long and not very enjoyable process to do this at the end of almost every match, and knowing that it could have been better with just a single tweak of the game’s design was nothing short of insulting. Thank goodness that I spent most of the time I spent waiting watching videos on Youtube. I do seem to be doing that rather a lot with PS2 games!

The actual wrestling is not bad but it takes some getting used to. For a start there is a ‘Stamina’ system whereby if you use too many big moves too quickly, your wrestler will run out of energy and will need time to recover. Strikes are easy enough, but basic throws are done from the Right analogue stick. You have to hold down R1 for a grapple, from which you can do a number of different moves, again with the Right stick. Some moves target certain areas of the body, and the body damage can impede your wrestler’s ability to use that part of the body but significant damage can be reversed by recovering your stamina. Aspects like Stamina, Body Damage and Momentum were handled better in later games, but once you get used to it, it works. Thankfully, as Abadede is quite clearly a heavyweight, I never had that horrible problem where you can’t lift a wrestler much heavier than you. I guess it makes the game more ‘realistic,’ a term tragically mis-applied given the sport that this game represents, but it slows the game down to a crawl when it happens and is never welcome!

Kind of sad seeing Chris Benoit in the game,
given what was months away from occurring...

The season mode follows a number of pre-set storylines that last for 6-7 matches and culminate with a final match to resolve the situation, usually at a pay-per view. Which stories you get largely depends on whether you choose to be on Raw or Smackdown at the start of the game. I chose Smackdown for no reason other than I like Tazz’s commentary.[3] There’s little you can do that effects the progress of the story; it’s usually the same matches whether you win or lose, but it is what it is – a background giving context to your matches. And it’s got all the camp, hammy, convoluted plots you would expect from a WWE storyline, with your wrestlers being as dense as a wrecking ball in most cases. It’s good fun; wresting always is! After a several storylines have passed you get traded to the other show, I suspect because of the production with regard to writing and voice acting not having enough material to carry one show on its own for a year.

I had a decent amount of fun playing through the various storylines, and actually felt quite good about their resolution when it all went my way. I didn’t feel too badly about it when it didn’t, though, as the game would be very boring if I won all the time! It’s Wrestling – it doesn’t always go your way. It is for this reason that I set the difficulty to Hard; I would not have enjoyed the game much at all if there’d been no challenge. My only complaint really would be the first storyline, The Deadman and the Wolverine, which pits you against The Undertaker and Chris Benoit – two men who few would consider pushovers, and since Abadede had no experience at that point, it was hard to make any headway at all. Other than that, there are no incompetent or out-of-context difficulty spikes that I saw.

My season actually ended when, having won the World Title at Wrestlemaina and defended it against Triple H in the following story, I actually lost it to The Big Show of all people at the end of the final story. I don’t know whether the game would have carried on had I managed to win that particular storyline, but to be honest I was about 2 more upgrades away from completely maxing out Abadede’s stats at this point and there wasn’t much mileage left in it. It was a fitting end to an altogether rather enjoyable game, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it through.

The game also features a general manager mode, where you compete against the other show for ratings. Now, I had a go with this in the previous version of the game, 2006. While it wasn’t terrible, it was a bit of rigmarole, so I think I’m going to tackle that when I play through 2008 – just so that I’ve only got to do it once, with the best version of it.

I probably won’t play 2007 again, and will sell it when I get enough stuff to do make a decent sale. But I did enjoy playing it through, and while I would like to do something a little different for my next game (the last 2 have been fighting games!) I will probably come back to 2008 before the end of No Game New Year.

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[1] 2009 was the Nintendo DS version. I didn’t own a machine capable of playing the ‘main’ version at the time!

[2] I know Abadede appears in both of the first 2 games but the version of his sprite in Streets of Rage 2 was a little more detailed and easier to copy. Besides, I’d been playing the game, which is kind of what inspired me to do it so…

[3] While I’ll probably play through SvR 2008 at some point, Tazz doesn’t appear in that version of the game.

No Game New Year: Virtua Fighter 2 (Mega Drive Version)

OK, here’s another long, convoluted story about my life to explain this one away:

As part of a mid to long term future that has so far taken me up to two and a half years, I’m hoping to move out of my parent’s house quite soon. The reason it’s taking so long is another story. But the point is that when I do eventually move out, the Playstation 2 won’t be coming with me. Why? Because it’s not mine; it belongs to my sister. Some – but not all – of the games we’ve got for it are mine, but as the console itself is not mine to take, I won’t be taking it. This being the case, I thought I’d better play through some of my PS2 games.

 

Sega Megadrive Collection

For clarity, this is not the same game as I own on the Xbox 360. Most of the games are the same, but the Xbox 360 version has more games including the best game in the world, Streets of Rage II, so I was always going to buy this once I had a 360! I’m not going to waste my time playing through all the games that appear on both discs though, instead focussing my attention on the three games the PS2 has that the 360 version does not: Ecco Jr, Sword of Vermillion and Virtua Fighter 2.

 

Virtua Fighter 2

I would imagine that anybody who grew up in the 90s would remember this game. Virtua Fighter was the first time I can remember seeing 3D graphics in a fighting game, and for the time it looked beautiful. Virtua Fighter 2 only improved on it, with better graphics, more characters and a whole lot of pound coins dropped on it in an arcade somewhere in South Wales. That last bit was my contribution.

See? Rubbish.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: This is not a good port. The Sega Megadrive (Genesis to you Americans out there) just did not have the processing power of the arcade machines. The Sega Saturn version presumably looked a little better but the Megadrive version did not have the graphical fidelity, the sound clarity or the fluid controls. The sprites probably would have looked better on Streets of Rage. The sound and the voice acting in particular are choppy and horrible. And the game controls are clunky and unresponsive. For a Megadrive title, this was as good as it was ever going to get,[1] but compared to the ‘real’ version, this is not very good at all.

So, has the game got anything going for it at all?

Actually yes… ignoring the awful port for a second, I think Virtua Fighter left behind an impressive legacy. It was the first arcade game to use fully-3D graphics;[2] Sony’s Tekken was not far behind but VF got there first, and set the standard for what was to come in what at that point was the next generation. It was also the first game that I am aware of to include a character that could mimic others. A lot of fighting games have done it since then, but VF’s Dural was the first character I can think of that could start the round as any character, lending an air of mystery and a significant challenge to the final boss of the game.

But what I really liked about Virtua Fighter was that it was probably the most technical of the fighting games at that point – and for quite a long time afterwards as well.[3] All the characters had a certain move-set, but you could either block or counter most of the moves and you wouldn’t take any damage in doing so. Contrast this with other popular fighting games of the time; Street Fighter II and whatever iteration of Mortal Kombat we were up to at that point, which all had ‘stun’ mechanics, where you could do a move or combo that would hold your opponent still for several seconds. This meant that once your opponent started to build up some momentum, it was actually quite hard to win. Not so with Virtua Fighter. As long as you block and counter in the right places it is NEVER too late to pull the fight back. Of course, the fact that in most cases this was very, very hard made the challenge of actually doing it right all the more satisfying when you did.

I chose Jacky for my playthrough, as his style (Jeet Kune Do) is quick, efficient and gets the job done. Of course, the lack of an instruction manual meant I had to work out a lot of the moves for myself, and most of the time I managed to pull off his more damaging moves was a lot more by luck than judgement. I managed to get through about half of the fighters quite easily, but Sarah, Jeffrey, Wolf and of course Akira were rock hard and I needed a few tries to beat them! I managed to get to the end of the game and fight Dural but not beat her, because it is IMPOSSIBLE. You only get one chance to do it; if you lose the fight it’s Game Over and you have to start all over again.

Well, perhaps not impossible… but the fact is I don’t care enough about the Virtua Fighter canon to do it. There was never much of a story in the game and this port was no exception. If I hadn’t played the game in the 90s and been watching the characters fighting the demos pretty much since then, I might have checked this game out and thought “Well, who are these people? What are they fighting for exactly? Why should I care?” This version of VF2 does little to answer those questions, and since the fights always appear in exactly the same order, there’s little variety beyond learning all the character’s move sets. It probably would be more fun in multiplayer, but what isn’t? So, having got to the end credits with one of the characters, I think it’s safe for me to say I’ve got everything I’m going to get out of this one, and put it to bed.

---

[1] The game was released towards the end of the Megadrive’s lifespan.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtua_Fighter_(video_game) accessed 4/8/2014

[3] I actually had both versions of Virtua Fighter 4 for the PS2 at some point as well.

No Game New Year part 10: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and some Temptations...

Right then, first thing's first, I've recently become aware three games that have brought me ever closer to failing the challenge. I haven't given in, but here they are, and the reasons why:

Temptation 2: South Park: The Stick of Truth

This one's a bit of a mystery to me. Am I a South Park fan? Not really; I kind of lost interest as it got ever-more ridiculous. Am I an RPG fan? Yes, and I've got plenty of those games and I know it. But everything I've seen on the new South Park game looks so good that I really wanted to give it a try. I've seen Angry Joe's review, and Total Biscuit's WTF is... video on it, and it really does look like a game I would enjoy playing. Apart from anything else, it's about time someone put out a decent South Park game!

Temptation 3: One Finger Death Punch

Another one from Total Biscuit, this simple-but-intricately-timed brawler looks like an absolutely amazing way to fill a few hours. I'd love to download it onto my Xbox, (there's no way it would happen on my laptop!) but I'm keeping it quiet for now.

Temptation 4: Final Fantasy VII.

An old friend put me on to this. I think this game is as good as Final Fantasy ever was or ever will be, and I've owned it on the PC and the Playstation. Sadly, there's no way on God's Green Earth that any computer we have in our house will run a game ported to PC in 1998, and I've lost my copy of the game for the Playstation (we suspect it was stolen.) Then my friend put on Facebook a picture of him playing the game on the PSVita, and if I ever get one of those, that will be the reason - so I can play Final Fantasy VII again. Trouble is, dropping at least a tonne on the Vita and buying a game I already own will come dangerously close to breaking the challenge, so in its spirit, I will wait until it is over before I do this.

And now on to what I've been up to this week...

Actually, not a lot. Apart from the fact that I've been busy most nights this week, I've also been quite ill with the back-end of a cold. I've had headaches, I've been dizzy, and I've been unable to regulate my body temperature - three things that are not conducive to having a particularly good time when I've been playing video games. Plus my girlfriend was up this weekend so my PS2 has remained off. So most of these notes actually cover what happened last week...

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

So I spent quite a lot of time last week talking about how I think we came to have such a game on the PS2, and why a relatively poor addition to the otherwise-excellent Fallout franchise came to exist at all. If you missed it and are wondering what Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, here's a quick re-cap: The game is a top-down Dungeon-Crawler action title, with some very basic RPG elements based on the Fallout setting (post-apocalyptic 50s style.) The idea is that you are an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel - about as near as the Fallout series gets to having a 'good' faction - sent on a quest to find some of the brotherhood. Naturally, things don't go to plan, and you end up fighting your way through Radscorpions, Raiders, Ghouls and Super Mutants.

There are quite a few aesthetic differences between this game and the other games in the Fallout series that are worth mentioning straight away. First, you do not 'create' your character in the usual sense; you choose from a choice of three (and later six:) Nadia, Cyrus and Cain. Nadia is the 'quick and nimble' archetype who moves slightly faster and has the ability to use dual weapons. Cyrus is a heavy-set man, tougher than Nadia who can't use dual weapons but can use heavy weapons. Cain is a Ghoul, neither tough nor particularly quick but can use all the weapons and also has the advantage of being immune to radiation. This difference will put off a lot of the more traditional Western RPG fans, but it does have the advantage of being able to put you in the action more or less straight away. These, by the way, are the only differences between the characters. The dialogue options and the way each character handles certain situations never changes in the slightest.

The other change of course is the music. The background music during the game, when present, evokes a feeling of hopeless defeat and laziness, synonymous I think with Fallout. We do have an ironic 1950s track that plays at the start (uncredited, but probably called 'Nuclear Blast.) Most significantly though are the inclusion of tracks from a number of notable Metal bands of the time, including Slipknot, Messhugha and Chimaira. These generally appear during boss battles, and there is nothing like shooting the shit out of the devious mayor of the local town while listening to a vocal-free mix of The Heretic Anthem. It is a little out of style with the usual music you might expect from a Fallout game, but as I mentioned last week, this game was to cater to a very different demographic.

The graphics aren't amazing, in fact for a 6th gen console game they're actually quite poor. The character models only look a little bit better than something you might find on the PS1. Generally, they didn't have to be much better than that, as most of the action is coming from the top-down so you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of view that would give rise to that kind of detail. But you really do notice when you talk to characters and the quality of their models and animations are... repetitive, to say the least. The voice acting is done well enough, but the script sounds like it was written by a teenager with a very limited vocabulary.

Then we get to the gameplay itself. It is pretty standard stuff; running around, hacking and slashing and shooting at various enemies that will do nothing but try to kill you. You eventually pick up a balance of Ranged, Melee and Grenade-style weapons, and as you can equip up to three weapons I guess it's the best balanced option to pick all three types. With Melee weapons, there's usually not a lot of difference in how they handle; a Hammer is only marginally quicker than a Knife, for example, but does more damage. The difference, then, is that certain characters can't use the larger weapons. With ranged weapons, there's a little more variety between single-shot, automatic, shotguns and all sorts really, though certain characters can't wield two at the same time. The aiming is rubbish: you press R1 to aim a shot; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Finally there are the grenades, and I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when their functionality was designed. You have to hold down the button to throw them, and then a little glowing light moves steadily ahead from you to represent your shot power. You then let the button go and they're thrown in more often than not a random direction as it gets stuck on a piece of scenery. Cover is limited to being able to duck, which I wouldn't have notices at all if I hadn't bashed all the buttons to find out, and even then it's hard to tell.

To be fair, I think all this was before controls in shooters were really standardised, so there are some differences to the controls and functionality which may have just been ill-educated guesswork. And there is some fun to be had in gunning and slashing your way through hordes of enemies. Why do you think we play Dynasty Warriors? However it gets repetitive very quickly and, despite the inclusion of three characters, doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs. This is about my fourth, though I've never reached the end of the game.

For this one, I chose Cyrus, and ramped up the difficulty to the maximum available, and here's where it starts to get interesting: You have to pick your spots carefully. Some enemies are better dealt with ranged weapons than others, but ammo is limited and so is your health, so you have to learn how each enemy attacks, how to avoid it and how to kill them as quickly as possible. You find yourself asking questions like: "Is it worth using a few rounds of ammo to deal with this Radscorpion who will poison me if I get too close?" "These raiders are pretty fierce and I'd love to shoot them but I know that some of them have got Flamethrowers, should I save my ammo for them?" "Is it worth taking a few hits to take down four guys at once with a grenade?" This is where the game comes in to its own, and almost becomes reminiscent of the old-school platform/run and gun style games where you'd have to memories enemy types and attack patterns to survive.

The problem is that the old games it emulates were generally over in an hour and a half. With this game, it takes about that to get through a single section of the game, and there is a LOT of it. The plot isn't particularly compelling either. Currently I'm at the end of the first chapter out of three. I'd love to get to the end of this title simply to say that I have, but I have a feeling I will be tired of the overly-repetitive gameplay long before the game is.

We'll see where I am with it next week, though if my eye doesn't stop twitching, I won't be playing much of anything...