Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon again with Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

 I’ve been playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as part of the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Details of how I came to own this are detailed in my original review of Spyro the Dragon, and the same basic details apply, so let’s jump right into it:

Do you know what he is?

The plot of Spyro 2, such as it is, picks up from where the previous game left off. Spyro is looking to go on vacation with Sparx to Dragon Shores, but instead gets summoned to a fantasy realm called Avalar. There, he meets with Elora the Faun, Hunter the Cheeta and Professor the, er, Professor, who tell him that they’ve summoned him there to help to defeat Ripto, a diminutive but malevolent… I don’t know what to call him. Warlock, apparently. Anyway, he’s taken over Avalar with the help of his much larger minions Crush and Gulp, and since he comes from a world of Dragons who keep him in check, Spyro has been summoned to try to beat him. With the help of his new friends, Spyro chases Ripto across the Summer Forest, Autumn Planes and Winter Tundra, hoping to defeat the evil warlock and bring peace to Avalar.

The underwater sections added a
new dimension to the levels.

The gameplay is much the same as the original Spyro the Dragon, but the game was so good that this hardly matters. Spyro still has his old moves; he can charge, breathe fire and glide over long distances. In addition, he can hold projectiles in his mouth and manually aim them to spit them out again, and gain a quick hight boost while gliding. Later in the game, Spyro learns to swim, climb and even perform an overhead smash. It’s everything a sequel should be – everything that made the original game great, with enough new mechanics added to open the level design and vary the challenges.

The levels in Spyro 2 usually have an overarching objective – usually get to a certain point on the level, by which time you’ll have defeated the enemies that form the main antagonists for that level. There are also some orbs you must collect in order to open up certain sections of the game, and these are attached to your side quests. Some of these are quite mundane, such as killing a certain number and type of enemy, and most of them are fairly easy, but some of them are actually quite challenging, and apart from a couple of clangers where the solution is deliberately obtuse, they’re pretty good fun. The highlight for me was the Ice Hockey mini game early on! The flying levels make a welcome re-appearance as optional changes of pace, and they have time trials attached to them as well to make sure you’re bringing your A-game!

Gulp proves a significant challenge
when aiming for completion...

I also managed to complete the game 100%. This isn’t too hard to do, since there are no trophies tied up in multiplayer modes and the tasks are, with a few exceptions, quite easy – a fine game to play if you’re a completionist looking for something you can breeze few in a few hours. Just keep in mind that, unlike the first Spyro game, some of the areas are locked behind mid-game abilities so some backtracking is necessary.

The presentation is great too. The voice acting is spot on, the graphics show significant improvement from the original PS1 games with the Re-ignited trilogy and are absolutely gorgeous, and Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack is a great augment to an already fantastic game. The developers really hit their stride with the level design; a little more linear than the previous game but still with a sense of openness that put them ahead of their contemporaries. There are a couple of aspects that niggle – I’m not sure why, when returning to a level, you have to watch the cutscenes and in some cases do the main quest again; this feels like something that could have quite easily been left out.

All in all, Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage is a great game that anyone should be able to pick up and have a decent amount of fun with. It is not a hard-core experience, but it knows what it is, tells the story it wants to tell and is the game it wants to be.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Last Week's Games: Gears of War 2, Warhammer Quest, Spyro 2, Juju

I’ve got a few new games to talk about this week. I discovered a better way of counting my games on the spreadsheet I have for them, and found that I had more than I thought I had bringing me up to over 1000 games now, and the number of games I have yet to play is astonishingly high so I thought I’d better play some of them.

Dom's sad story brings a tear to the eye...

I played Gears of War 2 on the Xbox 360 a lot last week. I beat it as well, so most of what I’m going to say about the game will be in the review I’m going to post up about it next week. However, I will say this: It’s among the first games I ever bought for the 360, and I didn’t play it for the longest time mainly because I wanted to get everything I could possibly get out of the original Gears of War before I moved on to its sequel. Of course, that didn’t happen, and probably never will, but I found myself thinking about the almost obsessive attitude I’ve taken towards completing games over the last eight years, and how I’m making the necessary adjustment to accommodate it.

First, I needed to break out of the need to play through games sequentially. I usually do this if I can, but it means a few things that are detrimental to clearing my backlog. For one thing, many of the games I’ve bought over the years are series; I’ve bought many sequels to a base game before I’ve even played it. I bought the first three Gears games at the same time, for example, but I’d never have dreamed of playing any but the first game first. Also, there are many game series out there whose first iterations are on consoles I no longer own, or computers I don’t have access to and never will. Finally, the quality of games tends to improve with sequels, so I’m potentially missing out on the best the series has to offer by playing them all in order first!

Secondly, I need to not worry so much about the achievement points and trophies. They’re nice to have, but difficult to justify why it’s so important to me when, say, I’m playing a game where many of the achievements are tied up in online multiplayer modes with dead servers. Gears of War is one such game, and I won’t be throwing away the opportunity to play a well-designed game with a fun story because I haven’t completed its previous iteration any longer!

Danger threatens in the dungeon...

I’ve also been playing Warhammer Quest on my laptop. I first saw this covered by TotalBiscuit, and while he didn’t think much of it, I can usually find some fun in Warhammer-related games. It’s a turn-based dungeon basher, with some basic role-playing game elements to it. There’s not a lot to it, and the skill involved with the game is almost nullified by the random number generation that permeates the game, but sometimes a simple dungeon crawler is all I want to be playing, and Warhammer Quest appears to be a game I can dip in and out of if I happen to have an hour to spare in the afternoon.

This is Ripto, in case you were wondering.

Finally, I’ve been playing a couple of games that are very much aimed at children: Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage on the PS4, and Juju on the Xbox 360. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: my daughter Jessie is around a lot of the time now, and while she’s maturing at a rapid rate, it would be very irresponsible of me to play graphically violent or intense games when she’s around. So, when she’s with me, I stick to either racing, sports or child-friendly action games. Regular readers may remember I was talking about Spyro the Dragon a lot last year, and what I’ve seen so far is everything a sequel should be: more of the same, but with extra moves, more things to do, and an overall better experience. Juju is a charming little platformer where you make your way through an exotic forest jumping on things; I’m sure I’ll be playing more of this in weeks to come!

Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon with Spryo the Dragon

Don't mess with the dragon...

I’d never even have thought about buying Spyro the Dragon back when it was released on the PS1, and frankly I wouldn’t have thought to buy it now. However, last year my partner Kirsty bought the Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on the PS4, which I played when I wanted a game I could play around my young daughter.

It turned out to be really good! It is a 3D platforming game where you control a little dragon called Spyro on a quest to free the other dragons of the world from a spell put on them my Gnasty Gnorc that caused them to turn into jade statues. You run around the various stages, defeating enemies by charging in to them or burning them, and collecting treasure in the form of differently-coloured gems, before setting off on a hot air balloon to the next one. And having now not only played through the game but completed it 100%, I can honestly say that I don’t play enough of this type of game!

It's not looking good for that chicken...

Back when Spryo was first released, around the middle of the 5^th console generation, 3D platforming was still in its infancy, and while there had been some notable successes, (Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie etc) they were often poorly presented and didn’t handle very well. With Spyro, the rulebook had been thrown out of the window. The whimsical, fun design of the game wasn’t usual for Playstation games, (at least, not without being overly silly,) but opened the doors for a wider audience. The level design – bang on point, for the most part – had to compensate for the fact that Spyro can glide huge distances, so they are more explorative in nature. Different enemy types responded to different attacks; some were vulnerable to charging, and some to fire. And while the game’s enemies rarely present much of a challenge, finding all the collectables and rescuing all the dragons was a large part of the experience. But the best thing about the game is the support from the dual analogue sticks, which allowed you to control Spyro’s pace as well as the position of the camera. All of this makes the game fluid and an absolute joy to play. The flying levels in particular, while little more than showing off, are a great change of pace and offer a different kind of challenge to the rest of the game.

The graphics and sound are very good; the art style works well on modern consoles and will still look good in years to come. The music was composed by Stuart Copeland, and while not particularly memorable after the fact, supports the game very well. The voice acting was good as well; it knows that it’s camp, silly and fantastic, and makes no pretence to the contrary.

It was actually harder to get the trophy for making
Gnasty run around the level five times than it
was to beat him...

I probably could have blitzed through the game in a single afternoon if all I wanted was get to the end, but I found that the real fun of Spyro is exploring the levels for the treasures, hunting around for those last few gems, and figuring out the secrets. For the most part this works well; it’s always good to have the answer to the problem lie somewhere in the level design, and the skills and move set you start the game with. The only slight clanger are those sections where the solution is based on the charge jump: By the time you’ve done the first one, you’re moving far too fast to plan your move; it’s going to cost you a few lives as you veer off the edges and plummet to your doom. I admit to having to look up some guides to find out what to do – if I’m looking to 100% a game I don’t want to get bogged down – but none of this is required to beat the game and is thankfully rare.

Spyro the Dragon is a great little game that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with. It’s competently designed and great fun. It’s not for everyone – hardcore gamers will find the presented challenge too easy, and even completionists may be expecting a little bit more – but for most people who enjoy playing games, you’ll have a great time with Spyro.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Dragon Quest, Spyro and Legions

At one point in the week I found myself with quite a significant gap between one engagement and the next, and decided to fill the time with a couple of hours of Dragon Quest, which was released on the Nintendo Switch recently. It’s a relatively early form of JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) and the start of a long-running series of games. I’ve spoken quite a lot over the last few years about playing the first iterations of games to see their core mechanics; they rarely provide as deep an experience as their later games but it’s always interesting to see. Dragon Quest plays like an early Final Fantasy, or Phantasty Star game, where you’re set on a quest to find the Ball of Light and rescue the Princess from the Dragon Lord. This doesn’t sound particularly inspired, but sometimes the simplest plot lines are the most effective!

Stay off the purple patch until you can handle it...

This game doesn’t have the depth and options of games that followed, either to its sequels or to the vast amount of games it inspired. The turn-based combat is entirely menu-driven, the magic system is very basic, there’s no party, no visible customisation and no crafting. With that being said, I’m pleasantly surprised about how much fun I’m having with it. It’s challenging, but well-balanced. Admittedly, the first fight I got in to was with a monster that was too high-level for me and I died straight away, but this is actually quite a rare occurrence and the difficulty of the monsters scale up quite well. You have a choice of where to go in order to complete your objective, but not too much choice. The world map looks big but doesn’t look like it will take too much time to see the significant areas. There is a certain amount of grind required to get through the game – you’re relying on your equipment to a certain extent, and treasure is not dropped at a rate where you have more money than you can spend, so it will be a while before you get enough gold together to buy the best gear – but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The result is a standard but enjoyable experience that I’ve had a good time with so far, and I hope to be able to pick it up again soon!

I’ve also been playing Spyro the Dragon, and this time I managed to complete the game 100%! I’ll do a blog about that at some stage, so I won’t say anything more about it here other than what a delightful experience it was, and hopefully I’ll get some time to play the other two games on the disc!

At this point I'm just recycling pictures of Legions
I've used before and seeing how long it takes
people to notice.

Finally, I was putting a lot more time than I expected into The Horus Heresy: Legions. I got caught up in the politics of the Warrior Lodge I am a part of – it takes itself a bit more seriously than my last one, and there is an expectation that we will get a certain amount of points before the end of the bi-weekly events or we will be kicked out. I came to within about a day of this happening, so I stepped my game up and actually ended up doing quite well, which at least partly resulted in the lodge getting the second highest reward crate available. They’ll never do any better by my intervention, as I refuse to spend any money on tickets, but they’ll have what help there is in me!

I also found myself enjoying the cards in the new event, as for once I’ve read the material it’s based on: Macgragge’s Honour, a graphic novel. Also, Ouon Hommed – my preferred choice of warlord for this – has a very powerful card-drawing ability that I suspect will get reduced for balance purposes in later iterations. However, I managed an eight-win run with him, which is my best run yet, and won the achievement for doing so which is a positive thing! I’m going to try a few more runs with Hommed to see if I can get him up to twelve wins – the maximum you can get off one ticket – before his abilities are modified, as for once I might have a hope of managing it!

Last Week's Games: Rayman, Call of Duty and Spyro

I haven’t been very well this week, mainly with a cold but it nonetheless drags you down! So, with a very busy week, and in a state of almost constant exhaustion, my time for playing games was limited for the first half, and heavy for most of Monday where I refused to do anything else. Because of that, I managed to beat two of them. They were: Rayman Legends on my Switch and Call of Duty: Classic on the Xbox 360.

This level took a few goes!

I’ve talked about Rayman Legends on this blog enough times for you to know I’ve been enjoying it, and I’d rather reserve any additional remarks I have on the matter for the review. I will, however, say that it is nice to still be having fun with a game with the post-game content, and in games like this, getting to the end is only half the battle! It’s one of the few games I have a hope of achieving 100% completion on, and if I’m still having fun on the journey, one wonders why not.

Seen one bombed-out ruin, seen them all...

Call of Duty: Classic was a different matter. I bought this game in 2013, I think. (It was somewhere within the bracket of buying the Xbox 360 in 2012 and making a habit of keeping track of what games I was buying, which was 2014-2015.) I’d probably thought at some point that if everybody else was playing Call of Duty by then, I might as well play it too, and given that I almost obsessively had to play games in sequence at that point in my life (still do, though I’m less finnicky about it now!) I was always going to start from the first one and work my way up. Never mind that, at the time I bought it, Black Ops 2 was out, Ghosts wasn’t far away and the part of the game that everybody liked – the multiplayer – dies as the yearly sequel spawns; I wanted to play through those campaigns! If I’d have known at the time it would take me over six years to get through even one of them, I might not have bothered. Nonetheless I managed to get to the end of the first Call of Duty game. It was OK. It’s showing its age now, obviously. It’s playable enough, but brutally hard in places and some of it feels quite cheap. However, I’m rather smug to be able to say that I got through the second half of the game without using the Lean function even once. This was because I only remembered it existed when I checked a Wiki to find out how in the world you are supposed to get all the achievement points by beating the game on its hardest difficulty setting – apparently this is a key skill for most of it, though it won’t help in certain “turret” situations, and “that” level in Russia where you somehow have to hold a building for four minutes. I was also surprised to learn that it was originally a PC game, and not, as I had previously thought, a port of Call of Duty: Finest Hour, which I owned for the Xbox at one point but traded in.

There's a secret room behind him...

Earlier in the week I carried on with Spyro the Dragon, beating the Beastmakers levels – not without some help from a guide for those last few gems; I’m not looking to get bogged down – and did the first level of the Dream Weavers, which I found quite colourful and endearing! I haven’t got much further than that though as my attention drifted over to Call of Duty, which sounds bad but let me explain: Kirsty’s PS4 is in our living room, my Xbox 360 is in our bedroom. Noticing I wasn’t well, Kirsty convinced me to come to bed where it was warmer and play some games there. The original plan was to play some co-op games but when all the Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve been saving for co-op turned out to need a separate profile in order to play them in co-op mode, I moved swiftly on! Kirsty didn’t seem to mind watching me getting killed in CoD over and over again, so no harm done.

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!

Last Week's Games: Roll the Ball, Ultra Street Fighter 2 and Plot Depth Discussions

I’ve been playing a lot of Roll the Ball on my phone this week, as my gaming time has mostly been limited to whenever I can get a moment to sit down and do some none-work related recreation! If you don’t know from my previous coverage, it’s a puzzle game where you have to connect tiles with paths through them to roll a ball from the start of the level to the end. I downloaded it onto my phone last summer and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since.

This is a different mode entirely,
but we'll get to that...

I played through and beat Bianca level pack on Star Mode. The basic principles of this are described above; what Star Mode brings to it is that certain of the tiles have stars in them; three per level. You have to connect the two ends of the path using the tiles, and the more star tiles you use, the higher number of stars you get at the end of the level. This rarely requires much thought, as it’s usually pretty obvious what you have to do to make the path, and only becomes challenging once they start introducing star tiles in the tiles that can’t be moved – you then have to work out how to move the rest of your tiles around them. But for how much of a faff the rotation levels turned out to be, it was nice to be able to blitz through some of the levels. I proceeded to the Bravo level pack in Classic mode, where you have to create the path for the ball in as few moves as possible, with three stars given when you achieve the target number. Usually this is obvious but there are a few challenging levels in there which take a few goes to get it right – the paths are often easy to make, but doing it with maximum efficiency is a different matter entirely! I’ll be on these levels for a while.

I might have to write a review of Roll the Ball soon. I usually only do this once I’ve beaten a game, or when my time with it has reached its logical conclusion. But the time it’s going to take me to do this with Roll the Ball could potentially run in to several years; I may even have a new phone before I do! As it stands, I’ve had a go with all four variations of the level design. Nothing will be news to me now; I’ve seen all there is to see, so I might as well give it a review!

Will a Sonic Boom help against Fei Long?

I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers on my Switch too. This is the only game I’ve played on the Switch so far, and I’m enjoying it. Most of us have done Street Fighter 2 at some point; the addition to this game other than re-done voice-overs and graphics is that Akuma, Evil Ryu and Violent Ken are available to play from the start. I played it a lot over the Christmas break and managed to beat the game on its hardest difficulty, my favourite character being E. Honda due to his power, speed and reach. But I had another go at it recently and couldn’t even get past the first fight! Arguably I was out of practice, but it didn’t help that the game kept putting me against Fei Long, who is absolutely nails.

I also had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend Kirsty while she was playing Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on her PS4. Four out of the seven games we have for it are remakes or remasters of older games, in some cases several generations old. Kirsty was talking about the difference between Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, the nearest the PlayStation really had to mascot platformers, with regard to the plot. Crash never had much going for it in that regard but Spyro’s seemed to be fleshed out a little more. I don’t know, I never really played much of either game, but perhaps it highlights the evolution of story-driven games during the 5^th console generation. It’s worth thinking about, if only to get some insight on the level we enjoy games on these days!