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: Streets of Rage 2 and Hydro Thunder Hurricane, plus buildng Warriors of Khorne

It’s been a bit quiet on the gaming front this week, due to being extremely busy for most of it and asleep for the rest. Here’s what I’ve had going on:

For a while I’ve been meaning to start a new game on my Xbox360. Which one? I don’t know yet. I’ve got quite a few single-player narrative-driven games to play, many of which I’ve never even touched despite having owned for years, and I’d like to get down to playing some of them. However, because I’m out most evenings, and because I’m very tired when I come home, I put on my Xbox, try to work out what I’m going to play (Current frontrunners are Blue Dragon, Shadow of Mordor, Of Orcs and Men and Enslaved) and invariably go “Never mind, I’ll have another bash at Streets of Rage.”

I can cheese that big fat guy on the right -
but only if I face him alone...

So that’s the principle game I’ve been playing this week, and I find myself using Axel more than Max for my play through these days, perhaps as way of keeping the game fresh for me! Interestingly I got as far as the fifth stage and found that I wasn’t concentrating anywhere near as much as I should have been; for this reason I lost the game on the elevator boss rush on the seventh stage. I don’t usually get much further than that but I could barely keep my eyes open!

It's big, it's dumb, it's fun. I love it!

I’ve also been playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane; I’ve been really enjoying going for the gold score on every level. I don’t play many racing games; there’s fun in learning tracks and optimal customisation options, but it is a long-winded process which gets tedious after a while. With Hydro Thunder, you pick the right boat for the track and away you go; any customisations are purely cosmetic – so I know if I’m going wrong it’s because I don’t know the track very well, not because I don’t know how to set up my vehicle and am therefore knackered from the start. It’s the kind of arcade racer I used to play when I was younger, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than I might for not taking itself too seriously.

In my quest to tackle my ever-growing backlog of hobby models, I had some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards on Sunday and put together some of the Warriors of Khorne from the Age of Sigmar boxed set that came out – and I bought – over two years ago. I built and painted most of the Stormcast Eternals, and some of them appeared in my previous blog, but it was so long ago that I can’t actually remember how I painted them. (Yes, I know they’re blue. I can’t remember what I did to get the highlights etc. I don’t want half my army looking different from the rest!) This is a problem I never even considered I would run in to before, but with many, many paints in the Citadel range, I’ve started keeping track of my paint schemes a little better now. I build all of the character models and monsters, and five of the Blood Reavers; I’ll do the rest at some point but that should keep me going for now.

If I have a large number of models from the same army I like to alternate painting the “rank and file” models in blocks of five, and then paint something else. That keeps it as fresh as it’s going to get and I get more done for not having to paint the same model over and over again, or take ages to see any progress for painting too many models at a time. I like to do a good job – or as good as I can manage – but I fall foul of many of the fallacies that plague many amateur painters: Rushing the last few parts, trying to get as much as I could do in the time and not taking breaks when I need to. I try not to paint to a deadline anymore, as this puts pressure on me to do something I’ll never manage and I get disillusioned.

Went on a bit about the paint there, but I’ve not got much else this week!

Last Week's Games: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Lock's Quest, Shinobi III, Streets of Rage II, Vectorman 2 and The Story of Thor

With a well-received week off one of my two jobs, I found myself with a bit more time to play games this week, including some important finishers. Let’s see what they were:

I recently downloaded Hydro Thunder Hurricane for free from Xbox Live Gold, and inspired by Youtube’s MetalJesusRocks, who likes games like this, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a speedboat racing game, and is good fun; it has a good selection of modes and there’s plenty to unlock. I probably won’t ever complete it, as some of the achievements rely on local multiplayer of all things; I currently only have one controller. But I’ll dip in to it now and then to see what it’s got to offer.

Also I had another look at a game I’d been meaning to finish for roughly five years and have now got round to coming back to: Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. I started the campaign again as I’d forgotten most of the plot and the mechanics, but I found it coming back to me quickly enough, even if I had forgotten how hard the game is! I’ll try and get to the end of it this time, when it’s convenient for me to be playing a handheld system.

But the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection is still in my Xbox360 and is not leaving any time soon. I can’t think of any other Xbox360 game other than XCOM: Enemy Unknown that I’ve got more mileage from during the time I’ve had the console. I gave Shinobi III another go, and very nearly got to the end. I lost on the last stage; the fighting is easy enough but at one point you come into a section of the final level where most of the floors and walls are electrified, and you need some precision platforming in order to survive; I just don’t have the right set of skills! Also, during a quiet night at work, I transcribed the tune “Whirlwind” from the game’s soundtrack into Guitar Pro. One of my hobbies is listening to old video game music and transcribing them; it’s a great way to train my musical ear!

I attacked Streets of Rage II as well, because why wouldn’t I. Once again I fell down on the last boss rush, however I’ve been varying my runs by playing as Axel every so often. Normally I would play Max, but Axel has his own charm. His Grand Upper attack does a huge amount of damage, and spamming it is a great approach to most of the bosses, but I find other aspects of his style a little hard to deal with – he’s nowhere near as good with the heavy weapons as Max.

I played, and to my surprise beat, Vectorman 2. After being stuck on the fifth level for goodness knows how long, I took a more methodical approach to playing the game, and got to the eleventh level with a good amount of lives in reserve. Feeling that I had a good chance of beating the game, I ploughed ahead to the end and did just that. You can read my full review here.

Finally, I played the oddly-titled The Story of Thor. Oddly-titled because in North America and Europe it’s actually called Beyond Oasis, which makes more sense in the context of the game, and also the story has nothing to do with any iteration of the character Thor that I am aware of. It was called The Story of Thor in Japan. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good Zelda-like RPG, designed for the Mega Drive’s 6-button controller and with surprisingly good graphics and sound. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I’ve only got as far as I needed to unlock the Water shrine, which is what I needed to do to get the achievement points.

This brings my quest to get all the achievement points for the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection to an end, and it’s been quite a journey! There’s still mileage out of some of the games and I don’t think I’ll ever say goodbye to Streets of Rage 2 again, but it’s still a milestone for me.

Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2, Vectorman 2, Bioshock Infinite, Star Wars: X Wing and Final Fantasy II

I’ve picked up and played quite a few games over the course of this week. Let’s see what they all are: 

Some cosmetic differences to the
characters in the game, funnily enough...

First game I had a go with was my favourite game of all time, Streets of Rage 2. I’ve waxed lyrical about this game many times before, and I still get it out every now and then because I’ve only got one thing left to do with it now: try to beat the game on the hardest difficulty without cheating. I tend to use Max for my play through, which might seem like an odd decision because of his speed, or lack thereof. However, at 20,000, 50,000, and every 100,000 points thereafter, you get an extra life, and this happens far more quickly with Max than with the other characters because you score more points for his high-impact grapple moves, and I can make up for his lack of manoeuvrability with his sliding tackle. I can therefore rack up a huge amount of extra lives in the early game, which generally keeps me going until the 6^th – or if I’m very lucky, the 7^th stage.

I didn’t manage it this time; I fell down on the one part I always manage to mess up on – the elevator on the 7^th stage, where there’s a huge ‘minor boss’ rush section and barely any room to move. Max isn’t great at manoeuvring and against the high-speed ninjas, it’s a struggle. It tanks most of my lives, with barely any left for stage 8 if I’m fortunate enough to get there. On this occasion I did, and I got as far as the boss rush in the elevator and finally died to Z.Kusano. Next time…

The other game I had a go with on the same disc is Vectorman 2. I’m after the achievement points for this one, and to get them I simply have to get to Scene 11. The problem with this is that the game is boss-hard and I can’t get past scene 5. It’s a throwback to old-school gaming where you have to study a level to find all the secret areas and power-ups. I wish I could wrap this up a little more quickly but this game was designed at a time where the longevity of the game could be increased by its difficulty!

That's the bit I've just done, if you're wondering...

I played Bioshock Infinite as well; I’m slowly going through it. For me, with the Bioshock games, the story takes a long time to get going. I’ve played all of them up to this one (not the DLC though,) and found myself having a standard experience for the first few hours of the game, before the story and the stakes ramp up in the second half. I’ll keep going at it; one of the better qualities of the game is that it is divided in to sections that you can play through for roughly an hour or so at a time – it’s not necessary to sit down and beat the whole thing in one go.

I played Star Wars: X Wing on my laptop as well. I had this game in several iterations in my youth, and enjoyed it immensely at the time. It harks back to an era of flight simulators where potentially any key on the keyboard does something, and while the control schemes can feel a little contrived sometimes, it’s probably closer to the experience of being a fighter pilot than an arcade shooter! I’m trying to get through all the Y-Wing training and historical missions; while the latter are easy enough, the proving ground was very tricky, as the lack of speed meant I needed to be on it with my targeting!

I continued the game of Civ IV I mentioned last week but I found I was getting stuck in a rut, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep that.

Finally, when I was necessarily restricted to a handheld, I was playing Final Fantasy II on my old Gamebody Advance. I tend to play this one very small bit at a time, in this case the rescue of Princess Hilda from the Palamecia Coliseum.

Am I going to play as many games next week? We shall see…

Backlog Beatdown: Oh, oh, oh, Oh Borderlands we rruuunnn!!! (Sing to A Sort of Homecoming by U2)

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s because I’ve been playing Borderlands and it took me absolutely ages to complete…

I bought Borderlands in late 2013, before I started No Game New Year. I can’t remember why, most likely because I’d heard it was good and I needed a game to make up a special offer of buy two get one free. Borderlands is a first-person shooter action game with role-playing-game elements. The latter only applies in the woolliest sense; you have quests, variable weapons and armour, and you level up. The obvious comparison is with Fallout 3, but while Fallout prides itself on being gritty and realistic, Borderlands is very much high adventure and silly. And it took me a while to get in to it. I started the game several times and would get as far as the Pisswash Hurdle before I’d start wishing I was playing XCOM. But this time, after watching The Completionist get through the game, I thought I’d give it another go.

This time, I was better equipped to deal with it: Borderlands is a game best enjoyed in short bursts. You can have fun shooting up Skags, Bandits and Spiderants (your main variety of enemy for the first three quarters of the game) and doing fetch quests, and I was enjoying myself. But the pacing is rubbish. For every quest that advances the plot, there are several more side quests that make you feel like you’re jumping through hoops.

I chose Lilith for my playthrough. Her Phasewalk
ability got me out of a lot of tight situations!

The obvious counter-argument here is “Why don’t you skip all the side quests you don’t need to do and advance the plot?” Well, apart from looking for the achievement points, I’m in two minds about this: The game would have been better paced if there weren’t so much side questing. Yet if I skip it, I’d miss probably two thirds of the game. And I wasn’t in a hurry to get through the game. So I played for one, or two hours at a time, doing a few quests, increasing my headshot count and my skill with sniper rifles, and whenever I needed I break I’d stick the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on and have a go through Streets of Rage 2. The quests in Borderlands rarely presented a massive challenge; it was only the Arena levels and the final mission that gave me any significant trouble. I think this was because I’d done all the side quests and levelled up to the point where there wasn’t much challenge left in the game, but I have no problem with that; that’s the whole point of levelling up!

The pacing issues changes once you get to the end. After you beat the missions on The Salt Flats, the game gives you entirely plot-related missions, and a sense of urgency that you didn’t have before. At this point, the game becomes difficult to put down. The principle enemies you have at this point – the Crimson Lance soldiers – are far more challenging than the other enemies in the game and there’s a sense of achievement for taking them down, rather than mindlessly killing bandits. Also, the game becomes quite linear. This is no bad thing, as instead of skirting around obstacles you have to think about how you’re going to tackle them.

The final Boss Battle with The Destroyer took a while, because I didn’t realise there was more than one place you were supposed to be shooting. Once I’d figured it out, I did it one go, and was rewarded with the ending. I know Borderlands has been criticised for having a rubbish ending. It’s true that there is much left unexplained and that you don’t get what you came for in terms of your original objective. But to be honest, I didn’t mind. It fits in with the tone of the rest of the game and leaves a lot open for the DLC and sequels. The only thing that left me unsatisfied is that I would love to have known who the Guardian Angel was, and her level of investment in it.

I have the Game of the Year edition, meaning that I have the four DLC packs as well. I haven’t touched these yet; once I’d reached the end of the game I was ready to move on to something different. I might come back to it at some point. I certainly have no immediate desire to rush out and buy Borderlands 2, which I’ve heard is much the same game with some slight differences. I’m all Borderlandsed out at the moment!

Incidentally, I bought Catherine for the Xbox 360 during my playthrough. This brings the total number of games I’ve completed vs the games I’ve bought to 4-3 to me for this year. I’m toeing the line!

No Game New Year: WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 with a bit of Streets of Rage...

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 (PS2)

I wasn’t going to bother with this game originally. This series of games is in its 16^th year (crikey, that makes me feel old…) and I owned all of the games at some point up to 2009.[1] As the new iterations of the game are almost always better game play-wise than the previous ones, I’d not usually touch the older games after I’d got the new ones, and I put SvR 2007 and 2008 on the list of games that I was going to get rid of at the end of the year, 2009 having already gone a couple of years ago.

Then when I made my list of PS2 games I hadn’t completed, I remembered that I never finished the Season Mode for either game. And given my almost obsessive-compulsive need to play games in order, even though it doesn’t actually make much difference in the long run, I thought I’d play through SvR 2007’s Season mode.

 

I created my own wrestler for this. This is something I don’t do very often. You’ve been able to create your own wrestler in every iteration of the Smackdown games since the first, and while I enjoyed it hugely in the first game, I found that by the time the second one came out, I hadn’t actually played as many of the wrestlers. I thought I had missed out on a lot and didn’t bother with it after that. I think I used the mode once in every game but I’d usually play through the Season mode as one of the wrestlers.

Creating a wrester in the later games is a long and not always enjoyable process so I decided this time to have a bit of fun with it and create a video game character. I chose Abadede from Streets of Rage 2,[2] and basically created a freakishly tall, muscle-bound god with purple underpants, boots and wristguards that were as near as I could get to a metallic colour (black.) Sadly I couldn’t get the right haircut. Apparently 80s bouffant never occurred to the designers of SvR 2007; who knew? I made sure he was from Mexico, gave him what I thought was a Mexican voice but actually sounds more like a cool black guy, and gave him clean tactics. The latter option might seem strange but for his boss battle in SoR2 he never uses a weapon, and it’s a straight 1v1 fight, giving me the idea that Abadede at least had enough pride in his own ability to fight properly. For his move set, I gave him a very powerful uppercut, and made sure he had a lot of opportunities to do clotheslines as these are his main attacks in SoR2, with a fairly standard Power Bomb as his finisher. Sadly I’ve got no way of screen-grabbing anything off my PS2, and trying to take a photo of it always turned out rubbish, so I can’t show you. But I mention it because of the contribution it made to my enjoyment of the game!

 

I took Abadede into the Season Mode. It works on an experience points system, where you play a match and if you win you get 2000 XP, if you lose you get 300. You then get to spend these points in your various attributes. Because of the build I was going for with Abadede, I put as much as I could into Strength, Stamina and Durability, with Charisma as a secondary consideration. But this brought to light a design flaw in the game that brought the momentum of the game to a juddering halt: There is no way to apply experience points from inside the Season Mode. Instead, you have to save your game, exit the Season Mode, load up the Create Mode, apply your points, exit Create Mode and load the Season Mode up again just to apply some experience points.

This is made all the worse by the fact that the PS2 game took a while to load each screen. I would imagine the position would have been somewhat different with the Xbox 360 version, but with no hard drive, the PS2 had to rely entirely on reading the disc. It was a long and not very enjoyable process to do this at the end of almost every match, and knowing that it could have been better with just a single tweak of the game’s design was nothing short of insulting. Thank goodness that I spent most of the time I spent waiting watching videos on Youtube. I do seem to be doing that rather a lot with PS2 games!

The actual wrestling is not bad but it takes some getting used to. For a start there is a ‘Stamina’ system whereby if you use too many big moves too quickly, your wrestler will run out of energy and will need time to recover. Strikes are easy enough, but basic throws are done from the Right analogue stick. You have to hold down R1 for a grapple, from which you can do a number of different moves, again with the Right stick. Some moves target certain areas of the body, and the body damage can impede your wrestler’s ability to use that part of the body but significant damage can be reversed by recovering your stamina. Aspects like Stamina, Body Damage and Momentum were handled better in later games, but once you get used to it, it works. Thankfully, as Abadede is quite clearly a heavyweight, I never had that horrible problem where you can’t lift a wrestler much heavier than you. I guess it makes the game more ‘realistic,’ a term tragically mis-applied given the sport that this game represents, but it slows the game down to a crawl when it happens and is never welcome!

Kind of sad seeing Chris Benoit in the game,
given what was months away from occurring...

The season mode follows a number of pre-set storylines that last for 6-7 matches and culminate with a final match to resolve the situation, usually at a pay-per view. Which stories you get largely depends on whether you choose to be on Raw or Smackdown at the start of the game. I chose Smackdown for no reason other than I like Tazz’s commentary.[3] There’s little you can do that effects the progress of the story; it’s usually the same matches whether you win or lose, but it is what it is – a background giving context to your matches. And it’s got all the camp, hammy, convoluted plots you would expect from a WWE storyline, with your wrestlers being as dense as a wrecking ball in most cases. It’s good fun; wresting always is! After a several storylines have passed you get traded to the other show, I suspect because of the production with regard to writing and voice acting not having enough material to carry one show on its own for a year.

I had a decent amount of fun playing through the various storylines, and actually felt quite good about their resolution when it all went my way. I didn’t feel too badly about it when it didn’t, though, as the game would be very boring if I won all the time! It’s Wrestling – it doesn’t always go your way. It is for this reason that I set the difficulty to Hard; I would not have enjoyed the game much at all if there’d been no challenge. My only complaint really would be the first storyline, The Deadman and the Wolverine, which pits you against The Undertaker and Chris Benoit – two men who few would consider pushovers, and since Abadede had no experience at that point, it was hard to make any headway at all. Other than that, there are no incompetent or out-of-context difficulty spikes that I saw.

My season actually ended when, having won the World Title at Wrestlemaina and defended it against Triple H in the following story, I actually lost it to The Big Show of all people at the end of the final story. I don’t know whether the game would have carried on had I managed to win that particular storyline, but to be honest I was about 2 more upgrades away from completely maxing out Abadede’s stats at this point and there wasn’t much mileage left in it. It was a fitting end to an altogether rather enjoyable game, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it through.

The game also features a general manager mode, where you compete against the other show for ratings. Now, I had a go with this in the previous version of the game, 2006. While it wasn’t terrible, it was a bit of rigmarole, so I think I’m going to tackle that when I play through 2008 – just so that I’ve only got to do it once, with the best version of it.

I probably won’t play 2007 again, and will sell it when I get enough stuff to do make a decent sale. But I did enjoy playing it through, and while I would like to do something a little different for my next game (the last 2 have been fighting games!) I will probably come back to 2008 before the end of No Game New Year.

---

[1] 2009 was the Nintendo DS version. I didn’t own a machine capable of playing the ‘main’ version at the time!

[2] I know Abadede appears in both of the first 2 games but the version of his sprite in Streets of Rage 2 was a little more detailed and easier to copy. Besides, I’d been playing the game, which is kind of what inspired me to do it so…

[3] While I’ll probably play through SvR 2008 at some point, Tazz doesn’t appear in that version of the game.