Last Week's Games: Snakebird, Legions and Mordheim.

It's worth playing for the looks on their faces.

This week I did something I don’t do very often these days, and that is play a game within about a month of buying it! In this case it was Snakebird, a puzzle game involving moving a curious combination of a snake and a bird towards the level exit. It works on a grid-based movement system, and you move your snakes forward by one tile each time looking for the best way to get the exit, and eat all the fruit along the way if there is any. It’s bright, colourful, and sounds very twee and pleasant. This is just as well because the puzzles themselves are very frustrating! There aren’t really all that many options available to you and if you make a mistake it’s all over; either your snake will get trapped or fall on spikes or water. The puzzles where you have to move two or more snakes are even more difficult, because they rely on each other to proceed – you somehow have to find a way for them to climb on top of each other, and still have enough support to remain still once their partner has gone!

So, Snakebird is frustrating, but there is a certain amount of fun to be had in finally getting it right, even if the vast majority of the time it is more by luck than judgement.

It's good to be back...

I also came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: The Horus Heresy: Legions. I stopped playing this for a bit when I was at the UK Games Expo, funnily enough. I found myself far too busy on the Saturday to play the game and when it transpired that I was happy enough not playing it, I didn’t go back to it for a long time. But last night I gave it another go and was pleasantly surprised to find my low-power Lucius deck was still as fierce as ever. I have been very busy with family and work commitments over the last few weeks, but I might start streaming and recording again soon if the time is right.

Finally, I got justifiably angry at one of my favourite games: Mordheim, City of the Damned. If you’ve been following my blog for any significant amount of time you’ll know I love this game; the warband development and winning the 20-60 minute battles give me no end of pleasure, and getting to know the warriors in your band gives them more character than any amount of design or voice acting could. But it was my intention to get through the campaign eventually so, having finally completed my Wyrdstone obligations, I entered into the third Mercenary mission in the Library. I took my Level 4 Ogre, knowing how useful it was going to be to have a warrior immune to fear and terror, and set about finding the grimoires.

The Daemonette did for Luther in the end. If it had
gone to plan it would have looked like this:

So, to complete this mission, you need to find three warding wands to disable the wards around the grimoires and pick them up. You also need to collect three other grimoires that are around and about, whilst dealing with the Curator, who is pretty fierce, and the Daemons, who are horrible because of the terror they inspire. They are few in number but are brutal, and few creatures will survive a 1-1 fight.

It was when I was picking up the second Grimoire that disaster struck – the game bugged out. It’s done this before where you pick up a quest item, and it is added to your inventory, but the game doesn’t register it as completing the objective. As in these missions there are only usually as many items as you need, (no extras,) it is impossible to complete the mission. The only thing you can do at that point, (and thank you to the Steam community or I wouldn’t have known this,) is to let the Dramatis Personae die – this is the only way you can end the mission without there being further consequences to your warband, as usually they take additional injuries if they abandon the battle. I did this, and thankfully most of my soldiers survived – but this bug has been going on for years! Why hasn’t it been patched?

Pickups and Trades #5

I’ve been very short on money this month, so I haven’t bought as many games as usual. That can only be a good thing!

On Steam, I bought the following games:

The Risen trilogy. I know, I know, it’s not very good, but it was on sale, and the first one purports to have some flashes of brilliance in it so I bought it as a pack.

Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD: A Real Time Strategy game with Castles instead of bases. Sign me up!

Sword of the Stars Complete Collection: It looks like a space combat game plus its expansions, I haven’t played one of these that wasn’t a Star Wars game in a while so this will be interesting.

Can you figure out this interface?

From GOG, I bought Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat. This is a game that I don’t know if I ever officially owned, (more likely borrowed off someone and never gave it back) but I probably still have the CD-ROM lying around somewhere. It’s based on the Warhammer Fantasy universe, and I enjoyed it hugely when I used to play it nearly two decades ago. I actually have it on the PlayStation, but it doesn’t work very well on there. The user interface was never particularly good, and without a mouse or any form of analogue controls, it’s a nightmare to try to run. I’ll never get the CD-ROM version to run on my laptop in a million years (from what I remember, you needed to be in 256 colour mode. Remember that? I’ll tell you what doesn’t remember that: Windows 8.1,) so I bought a digital version. I gave it a test run, as some GOG users were experiencing problems with it, but it seems to be running just fine and I had a great time getting stuck in to it again!

While my financial situation is unlikely to have improved by the time next month’s blog goes out, I had saved up some money and bought some games at the UK Games Expo at the beginning of June, so I’m looking forward to telling you all about that!

Pickups and Trades #4

So after being allowed to spend money again, I ended up buying a whole lot more games than I did last month! The vast majority of these were a sale of some kind, which is how I buy a lot of games. I’ll always have them so I may as well buy them while they’re cheap!

On Steam, I bought the following games:

Kill the Bad Guy: An oddball puzzle game about making assassinations look like an accident. Should be interesting!

King’s Bounty: Collector’s Edition. A tactical turn-based RPG, right up my alley!

"Yes, I'm here about the Systems Analyst position..."

Painkiller: Black. Apparently this is a really good FPS, but I’ll struggle to keep a straight face during the intro sequence due to Yahtzee’s skit at the end of his review of The Witcher…

Reigns: Her Majesty. A version of Reigns where you play as the Queen. I’ve been enjoying Reigns so far and I kept an eye on the sequel for when it went on sale.

Rocket League: This is one of the few games I’ve had talked up to me in person. It looks an absolute riot so I’m looking forward to giving it a try!

The Sexy Brutale: This has made it on to many of the Game of the Year lists from the Youtube personalities I follow. It looks very interesting, and different to what I’m used to so I look forward to trying it.

Shogun: Total War. I bought this one as I wanted to get the core experience of the Total War games, before they were clouded by extra mechanics and themes.

Thoroughly enjoyed this so far...

I also bought a War bundle, which were some games based on Games Workshop’s intellectual properties. I’m hoping to do a complete retrospective on this at some point, so even though it cost a bit of money, I now had a discount on the following games: Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night, Man O’ War Corsair, Talisman: The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade, Warhammer 40,000: Regicide, Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf, Warhammer Quest, and Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide. Looking forward to trying some of these out, although from what I’ve seen of the coverage on them, a lot of them rely on random number generation that may or may not make for an interesting process.

On Xbox 360, I bought a couple of games:

Syndicate: Recommended as a Hidden Gem by Metal Jesus, I bought this game knowing there’s been some questions raised about its quality, however I never played the original Syndicate so I’ve no basis for comparison, or bias!

Tenchu Z: The Tenchu games got better as they were going along in my opinion; Wrath of Heaven was better balanced and produced than the first game. I’ll be interested to see how it progressed for the 360!

So I’m now left with the unenviable task of establishing when in the world I’m going to have time to play all of these. The Warhammer games can wait a while, but I really should get cracking with some others…

Backlog Beatdown: Handling my Fate with Hand of Fate

I bought Hand of Fate in the summer of 2016. I remembered watching TotalBiscuit’s impression of it the previous year wishing I had a computer powerful enough to play it, then jumped at the opportunity to play it when I bought one. This was probably the reason I bought a Steam Controller as well; I knew a lot of it was an Arkham-like brawler and I didn’t fancy doing that on a laptop keyboard!

This is the best you see of either character.

Hand of Fate is a procedurally-generated Deck Builder/Brawler/Role Playing Game. You are an unnamed adventurer, across the table from The Dealer; a mysterious being of considerable power. The Dealer has a deck of cards that take you through various encounters; these purport to be memories from your adventures. These cards are laid out in a simple shape, some large and some small, some linear and some more open. You move your character onto the cards one at a time and resolve the encounters on there. Sometimes this is a decision, sometimes it’s a game of chance, and a lot of times they’re combat encounters with a variety of monsters. You have to make your way through these encounters, through various ‘levels’ of the dungeon created by the deck, manage your resources along the way and beat the boss at the end of the adventure. You’re supported along the way by equipment cards, and you can manipulate what occurs by building up the equipment and encounter deck at the start of the game. Each run takes between ten minutes and half an hour, promoting a “Just one more go!” mentality.

The combat - simple, but short and functional.

Hand of Fate appears to be a jumbled mess of ideas that shouldn’t work in a game, but it really does. The game is beautifully presented; the graphics are nothing special for the time but the theme and the atmosphere create a fantastic and slightly unnerving experience. The Dealer, in particular, is wonderful character: Primarily an antagonist with a distinct aura of menace about him, but almost friendly in nature; not above congratulating you for a victory, apologising for a harsh card, or laughing at you for a mistake. That you can only see his eyes means his countenance never gives too much away, and Anthony Skordi’s brilliant voice acting brings as much to the character as it needs to – clearly invested in what he’s doing, but no overblown dramatics. The deckbuilding is well-implemented; you can either build the decks yourself or allow the computer to do it for you. This allows for micro-managing and optimisation for those who want to, and rewards you with more cards and items if you do, but doesn’t distract from the game for those who just want to play it. Some questions have been raised about the combat system but the only major flaw for me was that I wasn’t able to control the camera, meaning that I didn’t know what was going on in some situations. Everything else is fine; it’s basic, but you’re rarely in combat for more than a few minutes at a time so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. If anything, it adds to the general effect of not quite being in control of the situation!

If you play pen-and-paper RPGs and have ever wondered
what "True Neutral" looks like, I think The Dealer is it!

Finally, one of the game’s greatest strengths is in its plot. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be one. You don’t know who the adventurer is, or who the Dealer’s true identity, or the purpose of the game. Without wishing to spoil, the ending, while spectacular, doesn’t address any of this. But this is fine; it allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself, and you can never be so invested in a plot that isn’t there that you feel the need to restart every time you come back to the game after a time, which is usually the reason I rarely see RPGs through to the end. And I’ll happily come back for more later; some additional difficulty levels were patched in post-launch, there’s downloadable content which implies different classes, and a sequel was released not long ago.

Hand of Fate is a game that delivers exactly what I needed when I needed it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time, and I’m looking forward to returning to it soon!

Pickups and Trades #3

This month, I’ve had to slow down with buying games, since I don’t have much money at the moment, and the small amount of money I do have was perfectly capable of spending itself without any help from me.

It's OK but my lack of know-how is slowing
me down at the moment!

I downloaded Heroquest, Space Crusade, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk from myabandonware.com, meaning to check out some of the earlier Games Workshop licensed games. As this is abandonware I didn’t buy the game the usual sense; just downloaded it and made it work in DOSbox. I’ve already tried Heroquest and will try the other three when there’s time.

I deleted Ascend: Hand of Kul from my Xbox 360 hard drive. This was a game I’d downloaded from Games with Gold nearly five years ago now; it is a game in which you played a huge creature called a Caos warrior fighting across a grim fantasy land to defeat the Titans. Or at least it was. I had a look on the Wikipedia page and it turns out its servers were shut down in late 2014. I was more upset that it took me this long to notice, to be honest! I enjoyed it at the time but it’s been taking up space on my hard drive I could ill-afford for three years.

On Steam, I bought a few games when I got paid. They were:

88 Heroes, an interesting-looking pixel-art platformer where you have the titular 88 Heroes to get through the game,

Guacamelee Gold/Super Turbo Championship Edition, A Metroid-Vania style platformer where you play as a Lucha-Libre wrestler, I’ve seen this talked up several times over the last few years, even though it’s been years since release. I look forward to seeing how it all works!

OlliOlli: So Olli they named it twice, this is an odd 2D skating game that I’ve seen TotalBiscuit talk up so I thought I’d give it a go.

This looks exactly like my thing...

Renowned Explorers – International Society: It’s been a while since I’ve seen any coverage on this game, but if I found it interesting enough to put on my wish list it’s worth a go!

Torchlight: A fantasy RPG that again I saw TotalBiscuit cover a while ago. I do like my RPGs, so this one’s worth a look!

I meant to get The Banner Saga as well but I had some confusion over the sale dates and missed it. Not to worry, it will go on again!

Pickups and Trades #2

A while ago I made the mistake of copying my “Interesting Games” list onto the Wishlist on my Steam account. Every so often I get emails telling me that some of these games are on sale, and if they’re charging less than £10 I’ll very often buy them. In hindsight, that’s probably not the best way to go about it since I’ll be very surprised if I even play all of these games this year, let alone beat them! For financial reasons, I doubt I’ll be doing the same next month. Still, I’ve made it a priority to at least have a go with some of these games I’ve been buying, so keep your eye on the Last Week’s Games series to see what’s been going on.

On Steam, I bought the following games:

Bastion, Transistor and Pyre: These games went on Steam sale, and was on my radar for being talked up by a lot of the Youtube channels I follow who were impressed by the games 
and art style.

911 Operator: A game about, well, being a 911 operator. Over the last few years I’ve been really getting in to games trying to do things just a little bit differently, and I’m looking forward to trying this one out.

Desperadoes 1 and 2: From what I understand about the gameplay to this one, it’s Commandos with a Western setting. I was sold straight away and when it went on sale with both games for less than £2.50, I jumped at the chance!

I ended up playing this in the end, and what
I played of it was compelling to say the least...

Reigns: This appears to be a whimsical game about the decisions you might make as a king. For not even £1, it’s worth a look at least.

Enter the Gungeon: A Rogue-like Dungeon-Crawler with an emphasis on shooting. I’ve been waiting for this to go on sale for a while!

This War of Mine: A wartime survival game of some considerable renown; I’ve been looking forward to picking this one up for a long time.

Mount and Blade, Warband and Fire and Sword: I seem to remember Totalbiscuit talking these games up a while ago. Looking forward to playing them!

STALKER: Call of Pripyat: A rare (for me!) shooter on the PC with references to Chernobyl, this will be an interesting experience!

Detention: A horror game set in Tailand. I’m not big on Horror games but this seems to do the job well, by accounts.

Also from GOG, I acquired Dungeons 2 for free, from an advertisement sent to my email address. I have no idea what this one is about but it’s got Dungeons in the title so that’s good enough for me!

Rest in peace. I'll stick to the Lego games in future!

One game I had to say goodbye to was Marvel Heroes Omega. I did intend to return to this at some point but sadly Gazillion Entertainment, who ran the game, has been shut down, and so therefore has the game. The game doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s no reason for it to be on my hard drive either, and this highlights a wider issue currently under discussion: There’s a massive push form some of the larger game publishers for games to become “Online Services,” i.e. games played entirely online and funded by the people who sink a lot of money into micro-transactions for it. It might be working at the moment, but the demographic who play these games won’t be doing so forever, and if the decision is made to shut down the games, the game, the players and any money they’ve put into it is deleted permanently.

This is a risky venture for players, but also for game developers. If we’re creating an environment where a small number of games have to be continuously funded in order for them to survive, it will be difficult to sustain a job for very long. Let the horror of Marvel Heroes sink in: Just before Thanksgiving last year, at least 75 people at Gazillion lost their jobs, all accrued benefits and their livelihoods, because the game was shut down. There were a lot of very complex reasons for this that I’m not aware of but for what it’s worth, and I hope that Gazillion’s former employees managed to find more work.

For the Xbox 360, I downloaded Split/Second from Games with Gold. I had to delete some of the games I’ve got physical copies of to make room, but I managed it! This was one of the games on my list to collect so I was very pleased to acquire this one for free. I look forward to playing this; it’s been a while since I’ve played a racing game!

I also bought Mini Ninjas from CEX in Merry Hill; it looks like a good fun Ninja game that doesn’t take itself too seriously so I’ll be glad to have a go with that.

Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month! 

Last Week's Games: Cluckles' Adventure and L.A. Noire

This week worked out significantly differently to expectations! While I wasn’t expecting to have much time to play video games this week, I had arranged with Warlords in Netherton to run a Ticket to Ride demo event for them on Sunday. The idea was that I’d run some games of the demo version of Ticket to Ride, hand out their promotional Golden Tickets to anybody who plays and generally have a great time.

Two things altered this plan: Firstly, I was off sick on Friday, and took advantage of that to play some games which I’ll talk about in a minute, and secondly, it snowed. Which won’t mean much to people who live in those parts of the world where it snows all the time, (I have a surprising number of readers in Canada,) but in most of the UK our reaction to snow is to grind our infrastructure to a halt. I wasn’t going to rush to a gaming shop in the middle of the snow, as even if I’d made it, most people who were far more sensible than me would have stayed at home. I also cancelled band practice for similar reasons, and gave myself some time to recover from what had been a pretty heavy week.

I spend far too much time on Youtube watching people talking about video games, and if I see one I like I think “I’d like to try that at some point,” only to forget it moments later. To prevent this, I started writing down all the games I was interested in on a file on my laptop called “Interesting Games.” I’m not sure what that says about me, keeping a record of what games I’ve been interested in so I know which ones to buy, but it meant I could go through the list and see what was on offer on Steam. I downloaded two games: Age of Empires 2 and Cluckles’ Adventure.

I mean, literally, this is it...

I played Cluckles’ Adventure first. It’s a platform game with a pixel-art style that looks almost – but not entirely – quite unlike games released on the NES and Sega Master System. It certainly plays like such a game, with about as ridiculous a premise as most of them. You play as a chicken with a freaking sword, alright, and you’ve got to traverse the different levels. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, but you can also explore the levels to collect all the captured chicks. I played it for an hour and I really enjoyed it. The controls are tight, with one puzzling exception that pressing down make you jump down to the next platform – most games do this by hitting down and jump. The gameplay is fun; the platforming is fine and the enemies are varied and interesting. Most things go down in one hit, including you, and Cluckles’ only attack is a forward dash, so you need to be careful where you do it in case you dash yourself off a cliff. But what I really like about it is that each level is a self-contained challenge. There’s no experience points, no equipment upgrades that are necessary to beat a level: Everything you need to get through a level is there; whether or not you do is dependent on your skill as a player, as it should be.

Beautifully presented, I'll give it that...

The other game I played was L.A. Noire. I played this way back in 2013 and hadn’t touched it since then. I remember liking it at the time but as I needed to give at least an hour to get through even a bit of it, I didn’t come back to it too quickly. I originally intended to go for a 5-star rating on each case but, as doing that without a guide would take me far too long and suck all the fun out of it, I decided to pick up the game from where I left off. I actually finished the story mode in the end, so that’s another one off the list!

Not sure what’s coming next week, though I’ll try and play Cluckles again at some point because it deserves far more of my time than it’s had so far! 

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies and Assassin's Creed.

Doing this blog has opened a lot of doors for me in terms of the games I’ve been playing over the last couple of months. Most games require days, weeks or even a couple of months of my time to complete – and that’s if I play it for roughly a few hours a day whenever I can spare that time – and I have to keep my blog interesting by playing a mix of games during the week. I actually managed to beat Assassin’s Creed earlier today and had to put some time in to that to make it happen, but if that had been all I’d done all week I’d end up replacing the title of “Last Week’s Games” to “Last Week’s Blog.” Against anything I would consider my better judgement, people do actually read this; roughly 100 or so people a week depending on how many games I played. While they’re probably not all retained readers, I think I owe it to the few people who do read what I have to say week in week out to not repeat myself all the time. And it’s not like I haven’t got a tonne of games I haven’t played… 

Does this look 8-bit to you? Thought not.

To this end I found myself alone with my laptop for a few hours and played a game I downloaded quite recently: 8-Bit Armies. This is an isometric Real-Time Strategy game that purports to have 8-bit graphics, although that’s more to do with the design aesthetic because anybody who’s ever played an 8-bit game would know they don’t look even remotely this polished. I was aware of it because TotalBiscuit did some coverage on it a while ago; at the time he said something along the lines of while the mechanics of the game were solid enough, it was difficult to recommend because out of the proposed six factions, there were only two in the game at that point and they functioned more or less identically. I was reluctant to buy it straight away for that reason, but when it came up in a Steam sale a few weeks ago, I bought it and its two sequels, which is where I expect the four remaining factions ended up: 8-Bit Hordes (medieval combat) and 8-Bit Invaders (Sci-fi combat.)

I really enjoyed playing it for the relatively short amount of time I had. It controls well, and I’m mature enough now to know when the game is teaching me its mechanics of its various component parts as we progress – letting me see the purpose and function of the lower-tech units before letting me loose with the big stuff. So far it hasn’t challenge me in any massive way, but there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in executing a plan. An early mission has you destroying the enemy’s motor pools in each of the three bases in the area, and it was good fun to send my armoured cars in their first to scout the area, establish where the traps are and plan the best attack route before attacking with a horde of rocket launchers and infantry. This isn’t a set piece; the game doesn’t hold your hand. You have to work that out for yourself, and it’s all the better for that. It’s not perfect; with an isometric viewpoint some of the things in the game are blocked from view and there’s no way to rotate the map that I’ve found yet. But it’s a solid game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it.

Lots of people to save. Kind of contradicts
the point of an assassin, honestly...

And, I beat Assassin’s Creed. I’m not going to say too much about that as it’s going to get its own blog in the next few days, but I will say this: I might play the other games in the series at some point, and with each effort to innovate, the original Assassin’s Creed has become more obsolete to the point where many people now find it unplayable. I know I have an almost-obsessive compulsion to play all the games in order and that rarely does me many favours, but in this case, I’m glad I had the chance to be the game that forms the core experience of Assassin’s Creed –before all the innovations came in.

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M