Last Week's Games: Spelunky, Streets of Rage 2, Mortal Kombat, Battle Isle, Painting Chaos Raptors...

Spiders. It's always spiders.

This week, I’ve had to balance out my time for playing games with the fact that my daughter is around all the time now, so for that reason I’ve been spending a lot more than the usual amount of time playing Spelunky. This is a brutally hard game to play but as nothing worse than landing on a spike trap happens in it, it’s safe for me to play in front of a three-year old! She’s had a go with it as well, she’s not necessarily very good at it as she hasn’t got the dexterity to handle the controls of precision platforming, but she tries, bless her! I’m hoping to get a little further into the game than the mines, but so far, I’ve managed it twice and died almost straight away both times, so I need to be in it for the long haul. 

These were the characters when
me and Jessie played...

Another game that’s fun to come back to every now and then is Streets of Rage 2. Regular readers will remember that this is my favourite game of all time, and nothing has changed in the 26 years since I had it given to me. I hope, one day, to beat the game on Hardest difficulty without cheating; I’m not quite there yet but I’m not necessarily far from it either. Just a few more pushes… Also, it’s a good game to play with Kirsty and Jessie, since on the easier difficulties it doesn’t require much more thought than find someone and beat them up. I played it through with Kirsty one night in the week and got to the end of it, though Kirsty had run out of lives before the final boss rush.

I'll get there eventually. Maybe.

When I wrote about Mortal Kombat last week it probably sounded like I wasn’t enjoying it all that much, but I’m currently working from home and I keep putting it on every now and then. As a run only takes me about 20 minutes before I lose my final credit, it doesn’t take too long and I’m quite enjoying it now! It is a very difficult game though; I can get most of the way through the ladder, but as soon as I come to the endurance matches I get stuck, especially as they always seem to involve Kano – a very hard character to fight if you’re not on it with your blocking! I’ll keep trying though; it’s become a good pick-up-and-play game for me.

Reminds me of Advance Wars...

I downloaded and played Battle Isle, a very old strategy game on the PC. It’s a turn-based strategy game on a Hex grid; my kind of thing, but it’s got some old-style and very finnicky controls! To give an order you must click your unit, then hold the mouse button and move it in the direction of the order you want to give. Also, your shooting phase happens after the opponent’s movement phase – so you’re attacking where they were at the start of their turn; not where they are going to be at the end of it. That takes some getting used to, and I’ve only just discovered you can repair units in the buildings, but it’s early days with this one, so we’ll see how it goes.

It's been fun painting them but that's it for a while.

Finally, I finished painting my last squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. At least, it was supposed to be the last squad – I was always going to get another box of them but the intention was to build and paint three of them so I could have three squads of six. Having bought the new Chaos Space Marines codex and seen how the new points values affect what I’d planned for the army, it works much better to have another squad of five – making four squads of five – and have them lead by Haarken Worldclaimer. I’ll let you decide how to pronounce that name; my preferred method is to put a glottal attack between the two “A”s. I won’t be painting either of them for a while, as we’re in lockdown and it would be incredibly churlish of me to run around town looking for Warhammer models, but I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, including the Terminators from the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set…

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII and Spelunky

I found the original Mortal Kombat trilogy on sale on GOG and remembering how much fun I’d had with those games in the past, I bought them and downloaded the first game. The first thing I noticed was that it handles quite a bit differently to the Sega Megadrive version of the game I was used to…

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

There’s no point in being polite about this; the controls are incredibly clunky, even for a Mortal Kombat game. The game was released for DOS and runs on DOSbox, which doesn’t support the game controller I have. This being a fighting game, I’d rather be using a controller, but from what I understand, that wouldn’t be much better: As PC controllers at the time weren’t expected to have more than four buttons anyway, whichever configuration of the controller settings you used would have meant missing out on at least one of the necessary buttons. I ended up rebinding and using some of the keyboard for the game. It works… but it’s very fiddly to remember what key does what button, and often I find myself pressing buttons that do nothing at all.

Elsewhere, the game is closer to the Arcade game than the console ports that came later. The music is different to how I remember it from the Mega Drive, but some of the tracks were used in the Gameboy port of the game! The fights work well enough, if you can get past the controls, and it would be churlish of me to suggest I’m not enjoying it at all, but there are better fighting games than this now.

A very sad moment of the game...

With the corona virus gripping the country and a lot of my work put on hold, I have spent quite a bit of time playing Final Fantasy VII on my Nintendo Switch. This is another game that, objectively speaking, hasn’t aged particularly well, but is always a joy to play, nonetheless. At the time of writing I’m in the Corel Prison, (I got game over-ed in the fight against Dyne; I’d forgotten how quick he reacts!) which means I’m past the point I reached the last time I attempted a complete playthrough. I’d be surprised if any of you remember this as it was over five years ago, but I tried playing through the PlayStation version of the game which sadly stopped working en route to Corel. Whether I’ll see this through to the end I don’t know, and with the remake due out in a few weeks, I may not have to – but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

I carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2 when I could spare the time, and I’m working my way through the missions in Venice. Funnily enough there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much side activity to do in Venice as there is in the other cities in the game; maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the game wants to move the story on a little more quickly now.

Intense...

Then, when my daughter turned up, I had a go with Spelunky on the Xbox 360. This is a bit of an odd game for me as I played it after playing Rogue Legacy, and I didn’t think Spelunky was as good. But it is one of the better pick up and play games I own on the 360, and the controls are simple enough for my daughter to at least give it a go! It’s a very difficult game, but we have fun in the mines. In my case that means getting through as much of the game as I possibly can, in her case it means trying to get to the end of the level before the ghost gets her!

I also managed to finish painting my second squad of Chaos Raptors for my Black Legion army and bought another box of them. My intention is to get three six-man squads plus a Chaos Lord to make up a 500pt army and see how I feel after that. But I’m painting these models more quickly than I’ve managed in a long time, so while this would normally take me close to a year, this year may prove a different matter entirely.

Last Week's Games: Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Cluckles Adventure and Spelunky

Haven't got to this bit, funnily enough...

After beating L.A. Noire, I felt the need to do my thing where I beat a heavy game, then play a couple of light ones. For this, I dug out my WiiU and play Super Mario Bros again, and Castlevania. Both are challenging platformers, and both are very hard to beat if you don’t know what you’re doing; with Super Mario I got stuck on World 7 where there is some very precise timing required, and with Castlevania, I couldn’t even make it past the third level. I had a saved game somewhere around the fourth, but it requires bang-on precision with the platforming and attacks, and more often than not I fall foul of the knockback that plagues the earlier games. How anybody managed to beat this I don’t know! Then again, the game is from a very different generation, where it was usual for people to not have all that many games (I have several hundred now) and the challenge of the games they did have was added to by ferocious difficulty, and a lives system that forces you to go back to the start of the level after every few deaths; in Super Mario it ends the game altogether! I’m not all that far away from the same thing happening on New Super Mario Bros U, which I also had a quick go at.

Probably shouldn't jump on that snail...

Contrast this with Cluckles’ Adventure. Aesthetically, it’s designed to look and play like one of those older games, but the comparisons end there. There is no lives system; you can replay a level as many times as you want. The 100+ levels are a lot shorter; even the longest one I’ve come across takes about a minute and a half. There are power-ups that help you (so far I’ve only come across a shield that will allow you to take an extra hit,) but none that you’re supposed to have in order to get through a level. No boss battles either, that I’ve seen! It’s just you and a small number of core gameplay mechanics vs some very competently designed levels.

Old classics were great at the time, but things move on.

For example, 30-something levels in to the game, one of the stages telegraphs a secret room by putting a large square boulder on the ground that doesn’t impede you in any way, but is deactivated by a switch at the bottom of the level. Once you return to the area, the boulder is gone, but if you jump straight down rather than clinging to the walls, you fall on to a spike trap, die and return to the start of the level. Now if that were at the end of a level you’d spent ten minutes on, or you had limited lives, it would probably feel quite cheap. But since the only penalty for this is about 40 seconds from your life, it puts you in a position to say “Yeah, OK, you got me. Well played. I’ll know for next time.” I’m not saying the new games are better than the old classics, or the other way around – more that they are indicative of the generation in which they were developed.

A gamer's game, to be sure!

I also had a go at Spelunky. I’ve had this game on my Xbox 360 for a while, and I pick it up every now and then. This is a bit of a weird one because I can never usually play it for very long. It’s a rogue-lite, and the obvious comparison is to Rogue Legacy that I have on my laptop. It’s a similar sort of thing; go around a 2D procedurally-generated dungeon in to find a lot of treasure, defeat the enemies and progress through the game. Where I find Spelunky lets itself down is that there’s nothing you can do with the treasure in-between runs. With Rogue Legacy, the gold you earned could be used to upgrade your character or equipment. With Spelunky, you can buy new equipment as you’re going along, but other than that there’s nothing else to do with the treasure and you lose it all in between runs. It’s good to pick up and play for a few minutes but the brutally hard progression system makes it difficult to remain engaged for long.