Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Backlog Beatdown: Rimming the Sky with Skyrim

 I bought The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the Xbox 360 way back in 2013. It’s been released on just about every major platform going since then, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade; I’ve owned the game for roughly eight years and I’ve only just gotten around to beating it so I don’t know what I was going to do with extra content and multiple copies of the game!

Hagravens are vile creatures...

Skyrim is a game that needs little introduction. After waking up as a prisoner on a cart and narrowly escaping execution, your character discovers an almost unique ability to absorb the souls of dragons. They find out they are the so-called Dragonborn, and that they alone can harness the power of the shout to stop the evil dragon Alduin from raising the dragons from the dead and conquering Tamriel. Along the way, they must learn to control their powers, contend with warring factions, and explore caves, dungeons, and constructs to build up their power, all building up to the final confrontation…

Ugh. Spiders.

I chose an Argonian for my playthrough and was going to go for a lightly armoured double-handed weapon fighter build, but as is very often the case when people play Skyrim, you end up as a sneaky archer. I managed to get somewhere between the two and was very glad of my ability to breathe underwater and heal quickly! I’ve played Skyrim several times already but as all my previous save files were on a different hard drive, I started a fresh character to see where a new adventure would take me.

The thing with Skyrim is that you really need to pace yourself. There’s no point going straight for the main quest; I’m sure a skilled enough player could speed run the game in about five hours but there’s a whole world out there to explore, and there’s little reason to miss out on the content on offer here. I levelled my character up to 50 and there were still outstanding quests to resolve by the time I’d finished the game – I’d refrained, for example, for taking a side between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. This was a choice I’d made in the game, as I couldn’t honestly say I supported either side. The Imperials were the invaders of the land, but such strongholds they had were being maintained reasonably well. The Stormcloaks had the home advantage but had a ruthless streak in them that made them very difficult to support. That I managed to beat the game without resolving this conflict goes to show how huge this game is! Do a quest here, clear a dungeon there, take a bounty somewhere else, sell your gear wherever you can. Set yourself some goals and play for however long you want to play.

Clavicus Vile is the exception
to the otherwise static voice acting...

The graphics work well enough for a ten-year-old game, and some of the scenery is beautiful; Skyrim feels like a living breathing world to get lost in. The music is great, and the sound effects are good, the voice acting is alright for the most part, if not particularly inspired. The game does suffer from a few bugs that can get in the way of beating certain quests, and I had to weather a few hard crashes, but nothing that stopped me from beating the game – not that I’d have realised I had, if I hadn’t known that this was the end of the main quest. It was only once I’d got to this point that I realised – there are very few cut-scenes in the game, and the ones that are there are interactive to a certain extent. All the exposition is done within the game. There’s no ending sequence, no credit roll, you just… win. I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down by that, but after sinking nearly 120 hours into the game, the journey made it more than worthwhile.

Skyrim is better than average and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’m not sure it’s the pinnacle of RPG experiences, but it does what it does well. I found a way of pacing myself so that it worked well for me – but don’t forget it took me eight years to get there!

Final Score: 4/5: Great game

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

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

A nasty piece of work,
but brilliantly played.

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

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

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

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

A simple but very entertaining game!

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

Last Week's Games: Lego Star Wars, Skyrim

 I knew it! I knew it was a good idea to hold on to Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I knew I’d want to come back to it eventually!

As regular readers will know, my daughter Jessie has recently taken an interest in Star Wars. She’s now watched all nine mainline films and a lot of the Clone Wars series, and last I looked she was going through the Lego Star Wars series as well. At some point, I asked her if she wanted to play Lego Star Wars with me on the Xbox 360. She did, and thus began my next trek through the Star Wars Saga…

We haven't even touched
Free Play mode yet...

In all honesty, this is one of the many things that Lego games were designed for – a safe, easy game aimed at younger players, but enough implied humour to entertain older gamers, and collections and achievements for the hardcore completionists. If you’ve been following my blog long enough you’ll remember that this is one of the few games I’ve actually managed to complete 100%, so there’s nothing left for me to do in the game now – except to guide my young daughter through the game. It will take a while before she builds up the skill and dexterity needed to handle games much more intense than this, but Lego Star Wars is designed almost perfectly. Jessie doesn’t like fights – at least, not ones where she doesn’t know she can win – and is happy to let me handle most of the enemies. Instead, she likes using the force on the build-its, and the droid characters to do their various utility functions in the game. She’s still got a role to play in the game, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the combat, which she can do when pressed and really enjoys piloting the vehicles. She’s less fond of the vehicle levels, and there’s some tricky platforming sections she had to drop out of the game to allow me to complete. She also absolutely refused to take part in the section from Revenge of the Sith where Anakin fights Obi-Wan. But ultimately gaming is and always has been a large part of my life, and it’s lovely to be able to share some of that with Jessie.

Hagravens start out tough, but can be
dispatched with a well-placed hit...

The other game I’ve been playing for far too long over the last few weeks is Skyrim, and I’ve reached as deep into the game as I’ve ever managed before. It certainly requires some pacing! I became briefly involved with a discussion on Facebook about the quality of the game; it’s obviously very good but some questions were raised about the fact that there is so much optional content to pursue. I understand what they were going for; the mainline quest is what you must complete to beat the game but at the same time there are other situations in Skyrim and other stories to be told. If the aim was to increase the immersion of the game though, it doesn’t really work, as it requires you to suspend your disbelief that the main quest is happy to wait around for you to do it while you look for ten bear pelts, or get involved in some other side quests that have absolutely nothing to do with it. I also find myself spending a significant amount of time trying to sell or store all my loot, so I don’t overextend my character’s weight limit! For these reasons, I tend to like Skyrim best when I can set myself a goal – clear out a dungeon, resolve this particular quest, that sort of thing – and can therefore keep the game going, rather than be overwhelmed by how much there is to do. In terms of scope, yes, Skyrim is amazing. But does a world really want to wait around for you to happen to it?

You may also have noticed that there was no painting blog for December. Sorry about that! Through all the things I had to do during that month, painting was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I have been working on something for this month which I’m hoping to finish in time.

And there’s a very special blog coming this Sunday…

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.

No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.