The Tenth Year Anniversary of my Gaming Blog...

The thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: “Strewth, I’ve been doing this blog for 10 years!”

My coverage on Batman Begins
remains my most-read blog...

For ten years, I’ve been talking to you about games I’ve been playing, wins, losses, video games, my thoughts on game design, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a long time to keep something going, and while the return isn’t necessarily representative of what you might expect for someone who spends that long on the internet (at the time of writing I’m coming up on 60,000 views across the entire ten years and 325 blogs, and it’s never represented any financial reward) I’ve enjoyed it, people I share it with enjoy it, people I don’t share it with enjoy it, so in some capacity or another, I’ve kept doing it.

My speculation on the 6th edition of 40K was
probably my biggest blog for comments...

Mind you, it did take me a long time to come up with a regular format for the blog that I was happy with. My original intention was to document the games I was playing in Games Workshop, as it still was at the time. I did it for a while, but I didn’t go in regularly enough to blog it in a consistent routine, and even when I did, it sucked some of the fun out of the games knowing that I was going to have to write about them later. The same applied to when I tried to create a journal for the Roleplaying games I was just starting to get involved with; documenting my first character’s journey through Pathfinder’s Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv was entertaining at first but quickly became a lot more work than fun. It didn’t help that I was trying to do the same thing with a music blog every time I did a gig, which meant I was doing a lot of writing! Funnily enough, even though more people I knew in person read my music blog than my gaming one, my gaming blog was engaging a far wider audience. I kept writing on and off about some hobby games I was playing, and some video games I managed to beat, even writing about a game of pool at one point, but it took a long time before I found a format that I was happy to do regularly.

I covered Lego Star Wars in the
original No Game New Year...

Then in 2014 something happened: I came across a Youtube video from a guy called Brian Castleberry who had been talking to his friend Norm Caruso a.k.a. The Gaming Historian about a concept called No Game New Year. The idea was that they had built up a huge backlog of games, some of which they rarely played, so they set themselves a challenge and invited others to join: Don’t buy any new video games for 2014. Instead of that, we were supposed to play through all our old games, keep the ones we liked, get rid of the ones we didn’t, and really try to tackle our backlog. There were roughly 30 people on board to begin with, but by the time the year ended, only a few of us remained, including me, though I had come close to falling off the edge by erroneously buying a new copy of Final Fantasy VII! I don’t know how much of their backlogs the other people involved in the challenge managed to clear, but what I did notice was that without permission to buy new games, they were actually playing games a lot less – and doing more things with their families. That can only be a positive thing! Part of the challenge of No Game New Year was that we were all supposed to update each other on how we were doing with either a video, blog post or even just a Facebook status, (we had a group for it which I still share even to this very day!) so I tried to do the blog in a weekly format. It worked for a while, but I eventually found myself with very little to say without repeating myself, so I changed the format slightly and only wrote about games when I’d beaten them. This is the format of what eventually became Backlog Beatdown, my longest-running series that I created after No Game New Year.

Age of Sigmar was a refreshing change...

I went through some significant life changes in the following few years. I’d taken up singing lessons, started a self-employed music business, became a regular at some of the open mics in Wolverhampton and became a Dad. I found a lot of my spare time was taken up with all of that, so I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in hobby shops as I had prior; most of the games I played were video games and while I kept the roleplaying groups going a little longer, I had decided not to write about those experiences anymore. The fact that I’d bought what was at the time a reasonably powerful laptop capable of playing PC games was also conducive to this, so I kept my blog going with Backlog Beatdown.

Mordheim's been one of my favourite games
of the last decade...

As part of my quest to try to play all my games, I found myself listening to the Co-Optional podcast while I played, featuring TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and a guest for the episode. It was a three hour show in which they would all talk about, amongst other things, the games they had been playing that week. And somewhere around September 2017, I found myself thinking “wow, people are actually interested in this!” and decided to have a go at it myself. Thus, I began my biggest and most popular series of blogs: Last Week’s Games.

Painting this boxed set was an achievement...

The idea was simple: write down what games I’d played in the week and find something to say about them. This usually amounted to two or three games every week, and if I found anything to say about the painting or hobby gaming I’d been doing that week, I’d write that down too. I’d try to release them on Mondays, (regular readers will know that it doesn’t always work out that way!) and run it as a weekly series that I’d share on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to include some of the hobby games, including the one Roleplaying group I managed to stay in. Quite quickly, though, I needed to put a restriction on how much I was writing, because I didn’t want it to become more work than fun. What I decided to do was keep the blogs to exactly 700 words each: this is about a side of A4 paper and is about as much time anybody has to read anything. I quite enjoy editing the blogs to fit in with the word counts, and I rarely stray from it. It was a challenge to do this every week without repeating myself, and I didn’t always manage it, but I did find a massive uptake in my readership – I was getting a lot more views with regular content than I had before. Most of them were from overseas, funnily enough; Russia and Italy are two countries that often have people reading my blog!

TotalBiscuit - Gone but never forgotten.

This carried on for about a year, up to the point when I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time. I found myself needing to re-balance what I was doing in my spare time, owing to the adjustments I had to make to accommodate both mine and my partner’s working patterns and my daughter, to whom I was able to provide a home for the first time. But in the new year of 2019, I started the blog going again and apart from a couple of wobbles where I found myself caught up in all sorts of things with little to say about gaming, I have kept it going ever since.

Murder in the Alps - an interesting, if
not-well-paced mobile game...

At this point I would like to interject that around 2014, as a result of No Game New Year, I created a list of all my Xbox 360 games. I’ve developed it to include all my systems and games and keep track of how many I own, have played, beaten and 100%ed on an Excel spreadsheet. The original plan was to share it on the blog; I never did this because looking at the numbers is frankly embarrassing. But it did give some structure to what I’ve been playing and when, rather than blindly buying and trying games every so often!

Pandemic became oddly prophetic...

All of this makes me wonder where to take the blog from here. I’ll keep Last Week’s Games going, I still enjoy that, and I’ll keep Backlog Beatdown going when I remember to do it! (At the time of writing I still need to write a review to Gears of War 2 which I played last Autumn.) But the way my life and hobbies have changed over the last couple of years has given me some different things to say. For a start, I don’t talk about painting on Last Week’s Games anymore; I put that in a separate blog called Last Month’s Painting – I don’t paint anywhere near enough to make it a weekly series!

Nice to let games become
a family thing...

Also, having huge stacks of games around my house is all well and good, but here I find myself with more to say about how that relates to my daughter. She was pre-school age when I first bought her a board game, and she enjoys playing with me. It’s very interesting to observe her level of engagement, and her enthusiasm for certain games over others developing as we’re going along, to the point where it’s something she wants to do to entertain herself, rather than something she wants to do with me specifically – though that’s still an important point. I’m at the age now where many of my contemporaries are starting families – in many cases already have – and they’re wondering how their hobbies and interests can relate to their children. It’s nice to be able to talk about my experiences in that area, and it may become something I focus on in the future, but I certainly don’t want to make a job out of playing with my daughter so I’ll approach that with a certain amount of care.

The UK Game Expo is a lovely opportunity
to see my long lost friends from Swindon...

There were some plans that fell by the wayside. I wanted to start attending tournaments and blog that, and I tried doing a blog series called Tournaments and Tribulations. Unfortunately, that never really got off the ground, as my week allows little time to rock up at tournaments and spend weekends playing games! My experiences in this area are mainly confined to games I’ve played at the UK Games Expo. I also wanted to do a series of blogs where I go through the campaigns of some of the Dungeon Crawling games that I own (Space Hulk, Descent etc.) That never happened either, though it would have been a mission to coordinate even before Covid-19 became a thing we were all going to have to get used to hearing about! I’d still like to try it out at some point though.

The Horus Heresy: Legions is a game that
took up a fair amount of my time.

It’s also been suggested to me that I record video footage of games I’ve been playing and put them up on Youtube or something similar. I have thought about it and even had a go at streaming The Horus Heresy: Legions at some point. The problem is that making videos takes a fair amount of work and time that I don’t necessarily have, and the equipment I own isn’t up to it – I can’t get a decent framerate out of my laptop if I’m running recording software on it; domestic laptops aren’t designed for that, and I don’t have the hardware necessary to record footage from my consoles either. I could address both of those issues, but that would be a large investment to make for not necessarily a huge return – most games I play are several years old, and common interest in them has waned.

And there’s the fact that somewhere, out in the world, there’s a small sub-set of people who still like to read the written word every now and again…

Last Week's Games: Roleplaying Games, Warhammer Quest, Skyrim

It’s been a while since my last blog post. There have been a few reasons for this: The main one is that I’ve been involved in a theatre project for the last three weeks which has taken up a lot of my spare time. Barely a week has gone by since September where I haven’t had to adjust my working patterns to accommodate one thing or another. Also, my mental health hasn’t been at its peak over the last month. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing’s happened, but in the small amount of quiet I’ve had over the last few weeks, I’ve found it difficult to keep my mind focussed enough to find something interesting and relevant to say.

I’ve been looking at new campaign ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, with the aim of putting together a framework for a whole campaign without getting bogged down in small details. The idea is that if I ever get the chance to run it, I’d develop it one session at a time out of the framework and ideas I’m writing now. However, I’d really like to play as well so I’ve been looking in to trying to find an online group, using mainly Roll20 as a source. This hasn’t been successful; timing often gets in the way but also there are so many people trying to join games on Roll20 it often feels like applying for a job. But I’ll keep trying and we’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, I lost a friend I knew through roleplaying games the week before last. Andy from the Black Country Role-Playing Society passed away in hospital; I don’t know any more than that and I would prefer not to ask. Andy was one of the first people I was in an RPG with; he was one of the players in Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv. He was also in the first game I ran as part of the group. After that, he ran another Pathfinder game: Council of Thieves, in which I played a couple of fighters (I had to change my first one after I learned about builds!) It was a good game to be a part of, and I was able to help Andy run it by occasionally looking up a rule to resolve a dispute or explain a ruling in ways that made sense. I had to leave the game eventually when life got in the way, but Andy remained a constant and committed presence in the group and I’m sure everyone there will miss him very much. I’m glad I got to see him a few weeks ago when I had the opportunity to return to the group; you never know when it’s going to be the last time.

Imagine five, six, seven of these spiders
firing off their webs at you...

With video games, I’ve been having problems with spiders. In Warhammer Quest, I’m fighting some high-level spiders – Venomous Gigantic Spiders, or something along those lines. The problem I’ve been having with these is the way their AI is programmed. They have two ways of attacking you – bites, which can poison you, or webs, which stop you from moving. Bites are the nastier of the two moves, but they will only do this if you move close enough to attack them. If not, they’ll keep firing their webs at you, with the result that whatever is left of your party can’t move or act in any way. This slows the game down to the point where I had to quit out of the dungeons and start again, and since they can take quite a while to clear, this isn’t fun!

Apparently those things either side of its mouth
are its sexual organs. Doesn't bear thinking about...

I’ve also started playing Skyrim again, as an Argonian Two-Handed Weapon fighter. I’ve learned a few things from my time with Dark Souls and I’m a lot better equipped to take on the game now. I like how the game is developing, but I don’t like the Frostbite Spiders. Horrible things. They’re huge. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve tried to play through Skyrim and I can’t remember how far I’ve got in the game before, but my character is at level 18 now and I’m enjoying it so far so hopefully I’ll be able to see it through to the end this time.

Last Week's Games: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Injustice 2

This week I was delighted to return to the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I had to stop going for a while due to childcare issues, but currently neither Kirsty nor I are going to work in the usual sense so it’s not the issue it very often can be. The lockdown situation has caused a lot of restrictions on a great many aspects of life, but ironically in this case it’s freed me up a little.

This is what my character
will look like eventually...
or something like it.

So, it was a pleasure to be welcomed back, and I joined a Dungeons and Dragons game with the Odyssey of the Dragonlords setting. While the published player’s guide is quite insistent that it’s not based in Ancient Greece, that’s clearly where it’s drawn some of its inspiration. I created a female human ranger called Halia with the intention of making her into an Amazon later down the line; this happens at level three. At character creation, I like to roll up random personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws from the Player’s Handbook, and also the background information from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything – this creates some instant background for the character which is surprisingly easy to tie into a motivation for becoming an adventurer. In this case, Halia was raised in a conclave, but at some point, was wrongly accused by an adventurer of a smuggling and assault, and did a year’s time before escaping with the assistance of another adventurer. This means she is wanted in one of the key cities of the game. Also, since I put charisma as her dump stat (currently at 9) I decided that during her incarceration she was badly burned on the side of her face and now has burn scars that she hides with her hair when she isn’t fighting. She’s also quiet, withdrawn and overeats (I rolled up a surprisingly high weight for her) so there’s some personal issues there, which I’m hoping will be addressed and maybe even resolved during the campaign. As for the adventure itself, it took a while to get going, but we ended up hunting a giant boar which had the potential to wipe any one of the party members if it managed to connect an attack. Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem that 5^th edition very often runs in to – action economy. As it’s only one giant boss monster against five characters, chances are we’ll drop it before it has a chance to do any significant damage, which we did at very little harm to us since when it managed to connect an attack, our Dungeon Master rolled spectacularly low on his damage roll. But we levelled up to second level, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

These provided more of a threat than the boss...

I ran into the same problem when I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords over the weekend. We’re in the fifth chapter out of six, and the dungeons in the adventure should be terrifying my players, but as they’re almost all hysterically overpowered, very little is presenting a challenge for them anymore. Yesterday, they fought what was supposed to be the hardest boss in the dungeon, but because of a combination fire snakes and some disgusting fighter feats, they dropped the boss in two turns and wrapped up the entire combat in three. I speak no exaggeration when I say the party have done more damage to themselves than I ever have!

In video games, I had a go with Injustice 2 on the PS4. It’s a fighting game featuring some DC Superheroes, a couple of Netherrealm’s characters, and whatever other major properties they license. I played the original game on the Xbox 360 and I really liked it; this version has more mechanics and strategies added – not necessarily a good thing for me because I’m awful at it – but I did note one of the most crucial improvements I’ve ever seen in a fighting game: The tutorial and training modes offer the option to view a training video to give a much better idea of what those moves and combos are supposed to look like, and give a better idea of the required timing! They require very fast presses though – I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get there.

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Rhino Hero, Sonic Generations, Dragon Quest, New Super Mario Bros U

Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win...

Over the last weekend, I continued running Rise of the Runelords for my Pathfinder group. We are trying to maintain the game during lockdown by doing it as a video call; it worked well with some connection issues. Long-term readers of the blog will know that running a game online is nothing new, but when I’ve done it before, it’s how the game stared – not as a contingency plan for not being able to meet! The group completed their task in the Vault of Greed, and journeyed on to the Shimmering Veils of Pride where they encountered their own reflections in the mirrors! Not to put to fine a point of it, but there could have been no better time for me to not have to hand out their character sheets, as for perhaps the first time I had access to all their information and was able to run their characters. Unfortunately, I had to cut the battle short due to family illness, but we will hopefully pick it up again in the future.

There is talk of members of that group doing a game in the week as well; I’d like to be a part of that but we’re in discussions about that system to run and who will be running the game. I’ll see how it works out; I would prefer to play this time as I don’t get to play very often, but it depends on what the other lads want to do.

Spider monkeys. See what they did there...

Earlier in the week, Kirsty and I had a go with a board game that I’ve had for a while and not done anything with yet – Rhino Hero. This is a game about stacking cards to resemble a skyscraper and getting your hero to the highest point on the skyscraper without knocking the whole thing down. It’s aimed at younger people and is a good game; perhaps not with the depth of some of the other games that we play, but certainly the most dextrous and one of the better ones for spectacle. We had a great time building the towers and trying not to knock them down! Kirsty won both games that we played, and we’d be happy to show this to our friends when we’re out of lockdown and they can come around again!

Sonic Generations. It's a lot of fun!

One game I forgot to mention I’d played the previous week was Sonic Generations on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to play this partly by YouTube’s The Completionist, partly because I’d downloaded if for free off Games with Gold, and partly because I’d just finished Assassin’s Creed 2 and wanted something light-hearted and fun to play. I’ve enjoyed it so far, although I find it better in short bursts rather than prolonged sessions. If it were just a case of getting through the game, I might have beaten it by now already, but while the number of stages may appear to be small, there are a lot of challenge modes attached to each stage and that is taking a decent amount of time at this point! I’ve been playing Sonic for almost for as long as I’ve been playing video games and there’s little to surprise me now, but it’s a good fun game and one that I’m hoping to see through to the end.

You would not believe the faff I've got to go through
to get a screen grab from the Switch to my computer...

One game that I actually did see through to the end was Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Switch. I’d bought this a few months ago, played it for a few hours in November, and didn’t play it again for a while, mainly because knowing the time investment generally needed for RPGs, I waited until I had some time before committing to it! I don’t want to say much more than that right now because I’m hoping to get a review out either this week or next week.

Finally, I’ve been playing New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. As it’s been a while since I played it, and the levels I tried to play through last time were very difficult, I started a new save file. I may or may not see it through to the end but it’s a Super Mario game; they’ll always be fun while they last!

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Age of Empires, Hey! That's My Fish, Sushi Go

The key to First Edition Pathfinder
is to attack something that isn't the
player character's hit points...

I’ll start this week by mentioning something I forgot to tell you about last week: Pathfinder. A weekg ago I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group, and we had a really good time. We’re quite high-level now, I think they’re all at level 11 which is high for a game that in all other times I’ve played it had been wrapped up long before we got to this sort of tier. The group had a fine time defeating The Scribbler, who had in the previous section managed to turn some of the group on each other and using their abilities to circumnavigate certain areas of the dungeon. “Forbiddance” spell denying you access to a certain room? No problem – burrow underneath it by having your Druid turn into an Earth Elemental and have the whole thing collapse out of the affected area. They also managed to dispatch an Ancient White Dragon with relative ease, although that probably has more to do with Ian’s Alchemist’s ability to fly onto his back and drop bombs on the dragon from above. There’s still a long way to go before we get to the end of this, but the other lads seem determined to see it through to the end! 

Not managed anything this huge yet...

I also had a go with a game that I downloaded on Chirstmas Day, according to my Steam records: Age of Empires. I owned this game a long time ago, but it appears to have been updated to run on modern computers and was a pleasure to play again. It’s a real-time strategy game that focuses on the pre-industrial eras of civilization, where society starts of as hunter-gatherers and ends up with huge armies taking over the world, or at least the parts of Central Europe we were familiar with at that point. I’ve played up to the end of the Egyptian campaign, which is more of a tutorial than anything else that introduces you to the game mechanics and win conditions. It’s been a great ride so far; I’ve enjoyed building up my armies, figuring out what I need to do to win and making the right moves at the right time – even if that generally involves turning it into a war of attrition, and waiting for the enemies to use up all of their resources before making my move! I usually enjoy strategy games and this one is no exception.

I also managed to play a couple of games with Kirsty: The first was our old favourite, Hey! That’s My Fish, where we battled our penguins for control of as many fish as possible. Known for its brutal simplicity and surprisingly competitive mechanics, we’re starting to get our heads around this game as we’re constantly watching each other’s penguins and our own, judging what would be the best move to make. I won, but it was close this time with only about five points in it!

A pleasure to play
after all this time!

The other game was a game I’d owned for a while and hadn’t got around to playing, which was Sushi Go. I bought this game for the third time at the UK Games Expo in 2017. The first time, I’d bought the game off Ebay – but it only had the cards, not the instructions, and I didn’t know how to play it at that point, so that was no use. The second time, I’d ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived it turned out to be printed in Polish and Czech; I can read neither. I found it for sale with one of the stall holders at the Expo, who told me that this wasn’t uncommon; the bar code is the same whatever language it is printed in and the guys picking the list aren’t too careful about what they’re picking and for who! It is a “pick and pass” card game that’s supposed to represent a conveyer belt of sushi, where you pick the best card from the ones you’re given and pass the remaining cards around. With two players, it’s an interesting challenge, since you’ve got a decent idea of what will be coming when you pass the cards – it’s easier to plan a strategy! A fun game, in all.

Last Week's Games: Inivisible Inc. and Pathfinder 2e

A lovely art style...

Early in the week, I had a go with Invisible Inc. This is a game that’s very difficult to fit in to my usual form of punctuation! It is a turn-based strategy game with an emphasis on stealth and hacking, rather like the game I imagined Shadowrun to be. It looks gorgeous and I’ve enjoyed it so far, I’ve beaten the first two levels and I’m looking forward to finding the time to do the rest. The stealth element forces you to think about what you’re doing, rather than rushing in for a full-frontal attack, and the game has as a pretty good risk/reward element: You’re rewarded with exploring the levels for money that can be spent on upgrades and equipment, but this increases the level of alarm which potentially means more enemies. I’ve put it on the easiest difficulty setting for now because it’s a whole new system I’ve got to learn – XCOM it most certainly is not! But I can see myself getting a lot out of this game.

Yesterday I got together with my regular monthly role-playing group and had a go with the new edition of Pathfinder. Pathfinder was my first RPG, and while I often describe it as Dungeons and Dragons with the rules turned up to 11, I have fond memories of both running and playing it. The real draw, for me, was the quality of the published adventures, which provides an in-depth experience for groups that want it or a dungeon bash for those who prefer that style of game. They have engaging plots, fleshed out characters and a whole lot of detail for people to explore. Therefore, were you to ask me, I would suggest that Pathfinder provides a richer overall RPG experience than the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons – if only barely.

And lovely art.

With the new edition, I haven’t got the rule book yet. I created a Halfling Rogue out of an app for it, and while I didn’t always know how the stats and skills etc were calculated, it was certainly an easier task than anything I could have generated from the rules at this point! When I buy the rules, I will look in to it and see the ways in which what’s happening on the app matches up to what’s written in the rules. There are a few changes to the rules that I came across in the one-shot game we were playing, some that I liked more than others:

Initiative: Instead of having an initiative statistic calculated from your dexterity modifier, it’s now based on skill. You can use skills to affect your initiative rolls, I’m not sure yet how it is decided what skill to use but I would imagine it’s situational. I like this, as it makes a lot more sense to decide initiative based on how your character handles certain situations and means some characters may react at different times depending on their own capabilities that aren’t necessarily tied up in dexterity.

Actions: This was the most obvious change; you get three actions per turn which could be anything from a move to an attack to almost anything else you can think of. There are limitations – there are penalties for trying to attack more than once, and if you want to use a shield you have to use an action to raise it before it will affect your armour class, but it’s more representational of what happens when you fight.

Mage Armour: This was a funny one because it’s changed for better and for worse. When you cast it, it lasts until you next prepare your spells. But the difference it makes to your AC is +1 rather than +4. On the one hand, the more long-term affect will stop situations where you use a valuable spell slot to cast it, get in to one fight and not use it again for the rest of the day. On the other hand, the effect is nowhere near as good.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else it’s got to offer. That rule book is enormous, though. It might require a bit of trial and error as we’re going along!

Last Week's Games: Uncharted, Into the Breach, The Witness and Pathfinder

After the previous post’s self-serving revelation that I should be getting on with beating some of these games I’ve been buying had gone live, I went back to my Xbox 360 to try to reach the end of Army of Two; a game that you’ll remember I played over the summer. I knew I was up to the last bit and it shouldn’t have taken me too long, however I ran into a rather fundamental issue: My Xbox 360 broke.

What’s happening is the controller isn’t connecting to the console. (This is happening with both controllers we own. “Try a different controller” is the first thing that comes up on every bit of advice I looked up. I tried. It didn’t work.) It’s still turning the machine on, but not connecting to the point where I could control anything. I tried re-synching it; it didn’t work. I tried moving the console and controller around (this has happened before and carrying it around in my backpack apparently fixed it last time!) but still nothing happened. I looked up a YouTube video on how to get at the parts, got as far as taking the side panel off that gives you access to the hard drive, and gave up when I realised that even if I had the screwdrivers I was going to need in order to get at the motherboard, and even if I could access the correct part, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, my old Xbox 360 has gone in for repairs; I dropped it in this morning. From what I understand, if it’s a component part that can be replaced then it shouldn’t be too difficult to repair. If something’s gone wrong with the motherboard, they’re manufactured by machines at a micro level so there isn’t much that can be done. To be fair, I bought it in 2012, it was second-hand then and I’ve got a lot of use out of it since; it doesn’t owe me a lot. And it’s not like I’m short of video games to play!

It's well characterised, I'll give it that!

To that end, I decided to play a game that I’d bought for the PS4 nearly a year ago and hadn’t got around to playing yet: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. This is the first in a trilogy of games in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake collection. I’d seen some coverage of it, and it came across as, rather crassly: “Tomb Raider with a bloke.” And to begin with, that’s exactly what it is, though with a 7^th-gen design sensibility that made the game more like the later Tomb Raiders than the earlier ones. I’m enjoying it so far; the game is fun to play and while it doesn’t look particularly long (apparently, I’m roughly 40% of the way through having just beaten the first bit?) there’s a lot to do. I don’t know what, if anything, the PS4 remaster has done for the quality of the graphics or game but for me it’s all about whether I enjoy it, and at this point, I am.

Massive amounts of Vek and environmental
hazards make this a very difficult mission to beat.

I also played a couple of games on my laptop I hadn’t played in a while: Into the Breach, which I’ve talked about before, and The Witness, which I haven’t. Into the Breach is always a fun game; I really like how it can potentially only take about an hour to get to the final mission so that you’re not bogged down in an hours-long campaign, and I like that the final mission scales up with the rest of the game so it’s not as though you can level up and cheese your way to victory. I haven’t beaten it yet though, as either way it is very difficult. I came to within one turn the last time I tried, but all my mechs got destroyed before I could finish the mission.

These tree puzzles were easy, until they weren't...

The Witness is an odd puzzle game that is about exploring an island solving puzzles on computer screens, such as you might find in a puzzle book. I played it last year briefly during a time where I wasn’t doing the blog and came back to it now because I figured if I have 20 minutes dead time at work I could jump in and do a few puzzles, but I find myself oddly engrossed whenever I put it on and often find myself playing for a long time when I put it on. It’s a weird game, but there’s something quite satisfying about solving the puzzles. I’ve had to look up a guide to find out the conceit of some of the puzzles, but there has only been one so far where I had to look up the actual solution, and even when I found it, I couldn’t see how the clue fit the puzzle!

Fiendish.

Finally, I ran Pathfinder for the usual crew at the end of last month. I had a really good time with it this time; the problem with a lot of the battles in upper-level Pathfinder is the characters often have abilities which trump most of the monsters that you throw of at them. Action economy becomes an issue as well, especially with 5-6 player characters. However, at one point they come across a Forgefiend who can move through the walls and create very difficult environments for them to fight in. Also, it does a huge amount of damage by spewing molten slag out of its belly, which makes me sound quite vindictive, but the PCs have quite high defensive capabilities as well, so getting to a point where I do some damage to them isn’t all that common for me!

I am hoping to get the next edition of Pathfinder again quite soon, but for how often I play roleplaying games and the fact that I’ve got at least another year in Rise of the Runelords, I can’t justify spending the money on it currently. But we’ve got Christmas coming up, so you never know!

Let’s hope next week starts a bit better…

Last Week's Games: Crash, Rayman, Mordheim and Pathfinder

My face if I manage to 100% the game...

I began this week by playing a little more of Crash Bandicoot, trying to get some of the gems and relics. I wasn’t very successful! From what I understand, the game’s puzzle involves getting the coloured gems to open up some of the paths in the earlier levels in order to get all the crates. This is all well and good but in order to get the gem, you need to clear some of the most difficult levels in the game having smashed all of the crates and not dying even once. That is a pretty tall order, especially for a game I’ve already beaten, and while it would be lovely to get all the achievements, I have a feeling that will become more work than fun before too long. 

Haven't played any of the Murphy's Touch levels yet...

I carried on with Rayman: Legends on the Nintendo Switch; pick up and play games are a great boon to have in a busy life! It’s great that you can do a few levels at a time then switch (aha!) it off and not have to worry about it, and while few people would find the levels themselves a challenge, it tests me on the right level. I could probably get to the end of the game and only really make an effort on the boss battles, but of course the real challenge of the game comes from getting all the collectibles. This isn’t particularly difficult either but I will have some backtracking to do on those levels where I didn’t quite get enough Lums, or rescue all the Teensies!

Watch out, he'll batter you...

When I’ve had some time with my laptop I’ve come back to my old sparring partner, Mordheim: City of the Damned, where I’ve been trying to get my Nordland Ravagers warband up to the point where they could tackle the third campaign mission. This mainly involves my Ogre getting to level four before someone kills him, as I desperately need a soldier in the warband immune to the fear effects put upon by the Daemons I know are coming. But I’ve also taken some time out for him to train some skills, so it’s a slow process, during which one of my better henchmen lost one of his arms, and one of my better archers died altogether (to be replaced by someone that, I found out after the fact, only had one leg.) Still, I’ve always really enjoyed this game so I’m not complaining!

Will they ever beat him?

Finally on Sunday I carried on with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. It took us a while to organise this one, and some people have come and gone. This time we organised it with two of our characters missing, so Dave turned up with his friend Ross who created a polearm fighter. He also took the Big Game Hunter feat that is one of the campaign traits for the adventure path. This is an interesting one because I’d read the first adventure for this, Burnt Offerings, long before I’d read the rest of the campaign and while Big Game Hunter telegraphs the larger creatures that this feat is designed to deal with, I wouldn’t necessarily think to take it knowing what was coming in Burnt Offerings! It came in useful this time, as we are at the fourth section – Against the Giants – and the party made short work of four Stone Giants, two Lamias (who are designed in the adventure to be a lot harder than the ones that appear in the Bestiary,) and two Young Red Dragons.

It’s a testament to how enjoyable the Pathfinder adventure paths are that we’ve kept this going for two and a half years, but I’ve run into a problem with Against the Giants – Action Economy. Basically what this means is that while the monsters I’m running are pretty hard in their own right, I haven’t got enough actions with my monsters per turn to pose a threat to the party. To be fair, this might be due to the fact that I didn’t do a lot of preparation (or I might have had the Dragons come to assist the Lamias, that would have been interesting!) but it’s something I might need to think about for future sessions and campaigns.

Last Week's Games: Spiderman, Reigns, Bubble Bath Bunny and Roleplaying Speculation

Spins a web, any size...

I find myself at a point I knew I was going to run into when I started the blog again – not picking up a new game every week means that sometimes I have to search to find something interesting to say! I’ve been playing Spiderman a lot, of course, but that’s been the case for weeks now. I’m getting quite close to the end-game, and I want to make sure I’ve at least done everything else I need to do before I get there. I also researched the trophies available for the game to find out what the hidden ones were, as I don’t want to get bogged down by having to look for them. One of them requires you to visit Uncle Ben’s grave, I’d never have thought of that! It’s looking like I’m going to need at least one more play-through to 100% clear the game, because I need to beat it on New Game + mode at maximum difficulty, but it appears as though all your unlocks, suits etc. are carried over into the new game so I only need to focus on the story elements; less of the faff that comes with open world games!

Looks basic, but surprisingly addictive...

I also had a go with Reigns, a whimsical game which I must have talked about in the past at some point but I don’t know when. (I usually name the text documents I write these blogs on after the games I’ve been playing in the week; that combined with the date stamp on the file usually gives me a useful clue but I don’t always write all the games down!) It’s a game where you are the king, and every year you have to make a decision based on what an advisor or character has told you. Each decision affects your kingdom in four different ways: Religion, People, Military and Money, and if one of those indicators reaches the bottom, you die. You are then replaced by a different king and you start all over again. I usually play this when I’ve got half an hour or so to spare at work; it appears to be an unlock-fest rather than any particularly-driven plot, but it’s fun for a while, even if the interface and control method lends itself better to a mobile game (which it is.)

During her first game...

When my daughter stayed with me over the weekend we played Bubble Bath Bunny, a board game I bought at the UK Games Expo. I won’t say too much about it as I want to do a full review of it at some point, but it’s a memory game aimed at very young children; ages 2 and up. You roll a lovely big dice and try to pick up a face-down token that matches colour or symbol. We have a lot of fun playing it, and even though Jessie can only really manage one round before she starts to lose concentration, she is equally happy playing, winning or losing. That’s the mark of a good game, I think!

Mad as a fish. And so is Xanathar,

I’ve been reading a lot of the Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, and watching a lot of Taking20 videos about Dungeons and Dragons while wishing I had time to play it. While I still run Pathfinder for some friends from time to time (and indeed will be doing so next week so I might actually have something interesting to say about it,) I do miss playing on a weekly basis; work and family commitments got in the way of my regular group so I don’t go anymore. I’m particularly enjoying Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, mainly for the little remarks Xanathar makes throughout the book which are amusing but also a salient representation of how a monster might react to human-level conventions! I also discovered through the videos the potential for Multi-classing, which is something I’ve been against up until now but I’m starting to recognise some of it’s potential for combining effects! It will be a long time, if ever, before I return to playing role-playing games on a regular basis but I hope that when I do, I can bring some of those mechanical concepts to life while my character remains a convincing-enough entity to role-play.

 

Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!

Last Week's Games: Mordheim and Pathfinder

So here are the significant things that happened to me this week:

I spent a lot of time on Monday afternoon playing Mordheim: City of the Damned. You may remember that the last time I talked about this game, I’d failed the third Human Mercenaries campaign mission, and intended to return to it once I’d trained up my ogre to be a match for the Daemons I know are in the library. That was my mission for that session; to train the ogre to the point where he’d be good enough to take on the mission (roughly 4^th level.)

Slight problem with that: he died.

He can dish it out and take a punch...

After taking him into a few battles and levelling him up quite a bit, I then found myself against the Undead, who are a very messy faction to contend with. Most of them are not affected by fear, and they can do a brutal amount of damage before they fall. The vampires themselves cause terror, and that severely limits the effectiveness of your warriors against them. Unfortunately they have a habit of tying up your best warriors in combat and there’s not a lot you can do about it once you’re there. It was a ferocious pitched battle against the two factions, which I eventually won but not before their Crypt Horror tanked most of the health from my Ogre. I managed to drop the Crypt Horror in the end, but after that it fell to one of the ghouls to inflict one blow on my Ogre, which was enough to put him out of action and, when the time came to roll on the injury table, kill him.

I’ve got a new one now – I didn’t have enough money to pay for a higher-level Ogre, but I don’t mind training one up again. I don’t know whether I’ll train him enough to have another go at the campaign mission. I’m more likely to use the regular warriors in the warband for that, because of timing issues. The campaign missions take ages to get through, and I need to give myself enough time to do it, so if I get an evening with a couple of hours spare I’ll do it then – with or without the Ogre. I certainly can’t afford to take him on the mission at the moment, knowing that he will go down quite easily.

Then on Sunday I carried on running the Pathfinder game: Rise of the Runelords that I started two years ago. This is as long and as high-level as I’ve ever run a game of anything! The line-up of players and characters have changed over the years but the core of the group remains the same. We’re at the beginning of Chapter 4 (of 6,) Fortress of the Stone Giants, and the group enjoyed a battle for to save the town from marauding Giants, before investigating certain aspects of the town (trying to avoid spoilers here!)[1]

Great adventure path.

Pathfinder’s an odd game to run; it’s got a huge amount of depth to the rules but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can also get quite unwieldy. There’ve been a few times when I’ve been running it and playing it I’ve found myself thinking, “roll to hit and then do your maths homework.” Thankfully most of my players are familiar enough with the system to know that they at least need to be able to tell me what they want to do and how it’s going to work, otherwise they’ll slow the game down to a crawl.

Where Pathfinder stands out for me, though, is the quality of the adventures – it’s got the best long-form campaigns I’ve seen in eight years of roleplaying games, and it’s a pleasure to be able to run them. I’d even run the same adventure with a different group to see how differently they’d handle it – if I had time.

I’ve got a new game I’m about to try out, and I’m looking forward to telling you all about it next week…

---

[1] By the way if you’ve gone through Rise of the Runelords and are wondering how we’ve only managed to get this far after two years, our group meets on a monthly basis.

Last Week's Games: Regicide, The Savage World of Solomon Kane and Lost Cities.

After playing Eternal Crusade for a while, I had a go with another Warhammer 40000 game: Regicide. This is a 40K game based on Chess, with the different Space Marines representing the different pieces. Tactical Marines are pawns, Terminators are rooks and so on. Where it differs from Chess is that your pieces can shoot at each other with weapons and throw grenades for area-of-effect attacks, putting an interesting spin on the classic game.

Those obstacles block movement, funnily enough...

I’d previously tried this a month ago, but didn’t count it as my “new game” because I only managed to play through the tutorial. I had a go with a Skirmish match – as near as it gets to a standard Chess game – and I had some fun with it. The tactics need to account for having ways to attack the pieces other than capturing them like Chess. I was prepared for it to be an occasional curiosity rather than a game I’d put any substantial amount of time into, but there is a campaign I found strangely engaging due to the short length of the missions.

Some aspects of the game work, and some don’t. In the campaign, your pieces are deployed in a set, and you use them and their abilities to take out certain enemy pieces. It’s like a puzzle, as you manoeuvre your units in to the best position to capture a piece – an instant kill – while trying to avoid such a situation yourself. It also gives me some ideas for how I could run some short games of 40K; pitched battles are all well and good but the game is open to so much more! Where the game is let down, is with its Random Number Generation (RNG.) It uses a percentile ‘chance to hit’ system, which adds complexity to the mechanics but severely alters the strategy. It might seem strange for me to say this given that two of my favourite games of the decade are XCOM and Mordheim, both of which use RNG systems. But in those games you could affect the numbers it came up with – get closer, flank your opponents, develop your abilities etc. Regicide doesn’t have that, and the consequence is that meticulous strategy and puzzle-solving can be invalidated by the pieces being able to attack without having to capture. I’ve lost a few campaign games from making the right moves, but the key pieces falling before I can take the win, in a manner removed from the process of playing Chess. But then, I was never much of a Chess player!

Looks like a Witch Hunter...

I also returned to the Black Country Roleplaying Society after some time off, and joined The Savage World of Solomon Kane. From what I understand, this is a tale of swashbuckling and derring-do in a gothic horror setting, with Solomon Kane himself being a harbinger of righteousness. While he is the hero of the piece, he’s not above committing acts of outright villainy to achieve his aims! I’m playing an elderly sorcerer; able to perform magic but forced to maintain secrecy due to the world’s negative view of magic and witchcraft. And, we have the usual disparate party in the other players!

I approached this game with some caution as I know almost nothing about Solomon Kane, and I’m not fond of Savage Worlds as a system. But with roleplaying games, the enjoyment comes from the interaction with the other players, so I’ll give it a chance. It was a slow start this week due to character creation, but we’ll see how it picks up next week!

Apparently this is quite a common 'couples' game...

Finally, on Sunday night I played Lost Cities with Kirsty. This is a card game in which you compete to make the most money from exploring lost cities by creating long runs of cards, with additional twists: There are five possible explorations you can start, but starting those costs you 20 points potentially ends in negative figures. Also, you can bet to double your score at the start of a run – but this is applied after you’ve taken off the 20 to fund the expedition. It was a fun game while we were playing it, but the maths homework at the end was a bit of a chore!