Last Week's Games: New Super Mario Bros, Diggy's Adventure, Hey, That's My Fish!

This week, I’ve been very pushed for time with work, gigs with the bands, playing video games took something of a back seat for me! But I managed to get some games in.

This happened quite a bit...

The first one was, to my surprise, New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I happened across someone who had the same game and we had a go with the multiplayer mode; Mario vs Luigi. In this, you have to collect five stars before your opponent does, using power ups and platforming to hamper your opponent any way you can. There’s a lot of fun to potentially have with this mode, however I should point out that the person I was playing against is very young and there was something of a disparity in skill level, so we didn’t play for very long!

The Dark Angels...

I continued my eternal crusade on, er, Eternal Crusade in those evenings where I had a bit of time. I’m still enjoying it, and I’m becoming a lot more familiar with the different classes now. I’m still absolutely hopeless at it, typically finishing somewhere in the bottom third of the leader board, and against players who have been playing since launch I haven’t got a chance. I’m also starting to notice the fact that there’s not really that many maps. It could do with a few more, to vary things up a bit! But on those times where I manage to sneak up behind someone and one-shot kill him, or capture a control point, or take out three guys at once (the latter happens at very infrequent intervals!) it’s really good fun, and I think this will see me through a long time yet.

With a chin to rival
Buzz Lightyear...

My new game for this week was Diggy’s Adventure on my Kindle Fire. This is a game where you have to make your way through a top-down cave by digging through collapsible squares of sand, gravel and the like. Each dig takes a certain amount of energy, and if you run out, you either need to manage your resources to make it last longer, or buy some more in micro payments! It’s competently-designed, doesn’t take itself too seriously (either that or the developer’s writing team had the week off!) and was a nice enough way to fill half an hour. But there’s not much challenge in the game that I’ve been able to see, apart from a couple of lever puzzles that are easy enough to work out. I guess later on there’d be an element of resource management in there, where you dig just far enough to achieve your objective and come back and clear the level later (the game rewards you for clearing the entire level.) There’s nothing wrong with Diggy’s quest, but like with most mobile games, I’m not sure how long it will keep me engaged.

Damn that robber!

I went in to Warlords and Wizards again and had another game of Settlers of Catan, where it got very competitive! We had to call the game early due to time allowance, but it was a pleasure to play again and I’m looking forward to the UK Championship at the UK Games Expo! I’m not expecting to do very well, but it will be interesting to play some different games with some different people. I also continued painting some Chaos Space Marines, I’ve nearly finished them now which will bring me up to 20.

Brutal but fun!

Finally, I had a few games of Hey! That’s My Fish with my Mom and my girlfriend Kirsty. It’s a really nice game to play because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, the rules take about a moment to work out (apart from working out what order to place the penguins in, I didn’t need to refer to the rules even once,) it’s really good fun and surprisingly tactical. I won the first two games and my Mom won the third. We helped her out with a move at one point near the end which turned out to be the deciding point, but as long as everybody is having a good time, it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses. I know that sounds like a very wishy-washy thing to say but it is absolutely true!

Last Week's Games: Kill the Bad Guy, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Catan

This week, I played two new games…

Splat!

The first was Kill the Bad Guy on the PC. It is a puzzle game where you have a “bad guy” taking a pre-determined route in a city-like setup; the objective of the game is to kill him and make it look like an accident. You can drop a piano on their head, start a car so it goes flying in to him, make a power line fall on to water that he’s walking in etc.

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how well it’s pulled off. It’s not a good-looking game; the environments are deliberately designed to be very drab. It’s pretty easy, at least in the earlier levels, to work out what to do; the challenge is in timing and force. For example, one of the stages involves launching a car over a ramp and in to the bad guy. Do this with too much force and the car will go straight over his head, but too little and the car won’t go far enough to reach him. How much force to use is precise, and the build-up metre is very sensitive; it takes a second to fill the whole thing. There are other objectives too, such as finding a passport hidden in the environment, and catching a tooth that comes flying off the bad guy when you kill him. Secondary objectives add to the way you kill someone, but that’s usually described in very vague terms and not easy to work out. I’ll give it another go, but I hope I can find a bit more fun in it than I currently am.

Monkey is performed by the
always-excellent Andy Serkis

The other new game was Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This is a Post-Apocalyptic action-adventure; you play an agile but brutish thug called Monkey, who escapes slavery with a vulnerable but tech-savvy young woman called Trip. Trip binds Monkey to her using a slave headband, and he now has to guide her home, initially through what was once New York. First impressions of the game are good, because it breaks out of the usual desolate wasteland that forms the basis of most post-apocalyptic adventures. The adventure occurs roughly two hundred years after the apocalypse, and nature is starting to reclaim what was once modern New York City; traces of civilization are still there but the environment is surprisingly lush and green. The game plays well; less fluidly than I’m used to but it better contributes to the idea that the stunts and combat moves that Monkey pulls off are quite difficult to do. I’ve got a little way into the game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it!

And I continued playing Eternal Crusade; I’m still enjoying playing the game. I’ve played multiplayer shooters before like Gears of War and Gotham City Imposters; arguably better games but I suspect I’m enjoying this one a lot more for the 40K setting!

Always a pleasure to play this...

I went in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and played The Settlers of Catan with a couple of the people there. I’ve often described this game, borrowing a quote from Yahtzee, as the game to play “if you’re a bit strapped for cash in the run up to Christmas and you need to lose three friends as quickly as possible.” A harsh description, and one that doesn’t necessarily fit the nature of the game about settlements where no one gets killed. But it’s very competitive, with the trade mechanic being almost entirely a matter of personal choice and establishing how one can benefit from a deal. I like it because it is a self-contained game; you don’t have to micro-manage optimal army lists or paint models to play. You go in with the materials that the game gives you, and your wit and experience which you have to earn – there is a lot of skill involved!

I signed up for some tournaments; one of them is Catan. This will be happening at the UK Games Expo in June, and I’ll be playing Dominion there as well, which I haven’t played yet, but I like deck builders! I’ll be playing X-Wing at a tournament in Stafford in July, but more on that later…