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

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

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

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

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

Chloe's a great character...

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

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

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

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

Last Week's Games: 221B Baker Street, Ultra Street Fighter II

Last week me and Kirsty tried a board game out for the first time – 221B Baker Street.

The smell of freshly-printed
card was curiously absent...

This game, as you might expect, is built around the Sherlock Holmes property; not something either Kirsty or I have much investment in but from what I understand, Sherlock Holmes was the progenitor for a lot of how certain kinds of modern fiction were developed – detective stories, of which I’ve enjoyed many even if I can’t remember many of them, and also the “buddy cop” trope where the protagonists are polar opposites in terms of personality and approach, and this variation is often what leads to the results. The actual game presents you with a murder mystery, and the gameplay loop revolves around visiting different places in London to find different clues – some are word games that point to the solutions, and others are background information to support the given facts.

Now, there’s two ways you can play this – competitive or collaborative. The former involves up to six players using a die to move around the board, arriving in different locations and receiving their respective clues. You can also play a “Scotland Yard” card to block players from visiting certain areas, and a “Skeleton Key” card to remove the blocks. If you think you know the answer – usually the name of the murderer, the murder weapon and the motive – you travel back to 221B Baker Street, reveal your answer, and if you get it right, you win the game.

A board game without dice may seem a little odd,
but the visual representation helped.

However, Kirsty and I chose to play it in the collaborative way, where we travel to the different locations finding the clues and try to solve the mystery in as few moves as possible. You’re graded on how many turns it takes – a maximum of 14, and a minimum of 1, and you need to get between 1-5 to get the highest grade of Master Detective. Straight away this presented some mechanical differences – we eschewed the die, as there was no need to randomly determine how long it would take us to get to a location once we’d agreed where we were going. We also managed without the Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key cards as well, since there was nobody competing against us to block off. Finally, we saved ourselves a lot of time – the instructions were talking about roughly an hour and a half for one game, we managed it in 30 minutes. Instead, we focussed our attention on the clues themselves, trying to work out what they represent and working out the answer. The first case, we didn’t do very well – we got the worst possible grade of Watson, but we were struggling with the motive and it didn’t become clear until we’d gone around all the locations. The second case went much better; I think we were more familiar with the gameplay by then!

Straight away, Kirsty began wondering whether we can run this game online – if you’re reading this in the future, either when Covid-19 has been eradicated or when it’s caused the downfall of the entire human race and the ants have taken over, we have limited social contact in these times and much of it is over Zoom. We have done a few social deduction games with some friends and family, but a collaborative effort like this might make a nice change. Not bad given that the only reason we bought the game was because we’d accidentally bought each other two copies of the same games for Christmas 2019!

Fei Long's quick attacks make him
absolutely nails...

Elsewhere, I played Ultra Street Fighter 2 with Jessie. This was one of the first games I had on the Nintendo Switch, and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’d been doing Street Fighter for about 25 years at that point, and there was nothing new in there other than Way of the Hado. Playing it with my four-year old daughter was… interesting. Of course, I could have flattened her straight away if I’d wanted to, but that wouldn’t have been fun for either of us. Instead, I held back a bit and found Jessie’s unpredictability a refreshing challenge on the game! We didn’t need to play it for very long, but we enjoyed the time we had nonetheless.

Last Week's Games: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, Necromunda: Underhive Wars

 I’ve got quite a bit to say about the games I’ve been playing this week. I don’t know how much of it is going to make sense; I’m not very well today. But we’ll see how I get on:

The first thing I should say is last Friday I reached the end of the main campaign of Not Tonight; you can read my review here. I’ve enjoyed it, and it hasn’t outstayed its welcome so I might give the extra part of the game called One Love a go as well, but I haven’t got much more to say at this point.

I also reached the end of God of Word. As a game that I installed onto my laptop so that I’d have a game on there I could play without necessarily having to plug in my mouse, it certainly served its purpose, and I managed to spend quite a long time playing it over the last few weeks! I’m hopefully going to get a review out on Friday so I’m not going to say too much about it now, but it was a good time.

Back in the day when pickups increased your
score and didn't have to make any sense...

It was my birthday last Wednesday and my daughter Jessie bought me a game for the Nintendo Switch: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. The James Pond series never really broke out of the fourth console generation (Megadrive / Super Nintendo) and hasn’t had the longevity of some of its contemporaries, but they’re still fun to play. A couple of my friends at school had Codename: Robocod, so I’ve played it a few times before, but never beaten it. It’s a side-scrolling platform game where you traverse colourful locations in Santa’s workshop, fighting your way through traps, hostile creatures and rescuing hostages. Interestingly, of all the James Pond games, it was Codename: Robocod that was ported and re-made onto several consoles after its generation, with some differences including level layout, music, and hostages. I have a vague memory of the hostages in the old versions of the game being penguins; these days they are Santa’s Elves – I suspect mainly because the penguins in the original game were a product placement for the McVities Penguin Bars, and the sponsorship deals have long since expired. The game was altered several times over the generations it was released on, so I don’t really know which version I’m playing – it could be that there was a new version entirely for the Switch!

I bet she's a sight for sore eyes...

Finally, on the PlayStation 4 I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars. I’d been looking forward to this game for a long time and is one of the very few games in years I have bought close to release. I’d rather have got it on PC to tell you the truth, but for some reason it’s not designed to work on Windows 8.1 (My PC specs are fine in most other respects, but I wasn’t going to waste my money risking a purchase when it says on the Steam webpage it will only work on Windows 10.) So, I bought it on the PS4. Now, some of you will know that Mordheim: City of the Damned is one of my favourite games, and Necromunda looked like it was going to work much the same way but with guns. And it does – but there are other things going on as well. The campaign – the small amount of it I’ve played, anyway – is far more narrative than Mordheim, with each mission I’ve played so far supporting a plot point. I haven’t tried making my own gang yet, as the story mode drops you in with the Escher gang and presumably allows you to explore the other gangs (Goliaths and Orlocks) as you proceed. I’m not sure whether I like this or not – part of the fun of Mordheim for me was taking your warband through its own story and progression and having the occasional mission to do in between to move the plot along. I appear to have less agency over how the Necromunda gangs develop, but we’ll see how it goes. It may take some getting used to but I’m sure I’ll find the fun in it; it’s a GW game and I usually like those by default!

Backlog Beatdown: Not Letting People In Tonight with Not Tonight

Not Tonight is a game that I’d seen some coverage on during the time it was released for PC in 2018. I’d heard it described as somewhere between Brexit: The Game and Papers Please, and for that reason didn’t buy it for PC – even to this day I’m hearing about Brexit on an almost daily basis, and I already have Papers Please, so I didn’t feel any massive need to buy this game. Then Kieran, with whom I play in a band called Raphaella Kornarskis,[1] told me it was for sale on the Nintendo Switch and I should give it a go. So that’s what I did. Here’s what I found:

"Take Back Control." Hmm.

In Not Tonight, you play as a person of European Heritage in a post-Brexit Britain, who lives in a flat/habitation block and must work as a bouncer to earn enough money to prevent deportation. The game works on three levels: Your working patterns as a bouncer, managing your money and living conditions to prevent game loss through deportation or untimely death due to ill health, and working to support the resistance against the far-right Albion First government.

Your gig as a bouncer is where the bulk of the gameplay lies. You must check people’s identification and other documents to allow them into pubs, night clubs, parties or wherever it happens to be. Initially, you’re just checking that they’re old enough, the photos match the person and the ID card is still in date, but as the game progresses, you have to deal with things like Guest Lists where you have to manage two queues, VIPs who need no ID but you only have a short amount of time to get them in with the correct password, hidden objects, dress codes and nationalities. The game allows you to make a few mistakes, but not many, and if you let too many people in who shouldn’t be in, you get fined or lose the level all together.

Guest Lists: all the faff of checking ID -
AND checking if their name is on the list.

Managing your status is crucial as well. Initially you only have to worry about paying bills and can just about make enough money to do it, but as the game progresses, you’ll find that you start getting billed for things like rent and tax, plus you necessarily have to make improvements to your flat otherwise your health suffers. The only easy way to make enough money to do this is to do some work on the side – Some punters, for example, will offer you bribes if you initially refuse to let them in. Many of them will buy drugs off you if you can buy and supply them. And any money you make off this will stay with you whether you finish the level or not – but do it too much, and your Social Credit will fall to the point of losing the game entirely.

Finally, there’s an ongoing plot about the resistance: You must complete several tasks within the game to build your position in the resistance to activate the final plot device and get the best possible ending.

Later on, you start pulling duties on
government checkpoints. Sounds familiar...

The game runs reasonably well on the Switch; only once did I ever experience a bug in the game. The controls work well enough, though the arrow buttons are sometimes a little fiddly. The graphics are pixel art which have the delightful combination of looking dated but at the same time consistent and enduring, meaning the game will still look as good in 10 years. The sound is limited to some basic effects and mumbled dialogue, but the music is great. Not Tonight does have a rather British tongue-in-cheek sense of humour about it, and while I struggled with it initially (I’m afraid I don’t find the idea of Brexit the slightest bit funny,) eventually I was laughing along with the jokes it made. It’s more linear and binary than Papers Please; you don’t need to balance out your government’s obvious disdain for you with the desire to be a decent human being, but this makes it its own game and it tells the story it wants to tell.

Not Tonight is not for everyone, but if you’re interested, give it a go.

Final Score: 4/5: Great Game.

---

[1] It’s my blog, I’ll promote my band if I want to.

Last Week's Games (or whenever it was; I've lost track!) : Not Tonight, God of Word

The original draft of this blog was supposed to open with a paragraph about how I’d only recently published the previous blog and didn’t have much more to say, so I focussed on games I’d been playing the week before. Then I forgot to publish it. Thankfully, I got to the end of last week with precious little more to say, so these notes are equally applicable. I’ll try to have something a little more interesting to say by the next one!

Most of what happens in this game is pretty grim...

I had another go at Not Tonight, the queue management game that I’ve been playing on the Switch. Some of you may remember that while I thought it was a good game, I was struggling with the humour as the situation it describes was just a bit to close to reality. Coming back to it after a few weeks, I found I was able to take it a little more on the chin and enjoy the game a lot more. I got as far as the second chapter in the game, where it adds some very uncomfortable mechanics. One is the dress code system – some venues don’t allow you in if you’re wearing beach gear.[1] But the most horrific one is the need to manage your own health. How this works is that you’re hit with a huge medical bill after the NHS gets privatised (which hasn’t happened in reality yet, but I don’t hold much hope for the future as long as this government is in charge of it!) and then you get a tracker on your own health. It’s affected positively by things like the condition of your flat, heating and bed, and negatively by things like going to work. It’s necessary to buy certain things to keep your health up like a fridge and a heater, but also you have rent and bills to pay and if you fail a level, you lose the money you would have got from it. Having low health but needing the money for bills that were already in arrears, I took my character to work for the evening, and found out he’d died during the night.

Now the game gives you the option to go back to any of the previous days and carry the game on from there. However, I thought I’d do a lot better by starting the game again and, now that I had a better grasp of the rhythm of the game, turn around a lot more money by the time I get to the second chapter. I learned a few crucial things – you can use the X button to find out the requirements for each level, (very useful when deciding what does and doesn’t count as “beach wear,” cheers Kieran!) You don’t need to allow the entire guest list in, (which takes a bit longer to do,) and you get to keep the money from bribes and drug deals whether you beat the level or not – that’s very useful.[2] So I’m doing as much of that as I possibly can, and I’m still only barely getting by but at least I’ve got everything I need for the flat now!

I also downloaded a game I bought about a year ago and hadn’t got around to yet – God of Word. This is a word game set in Ancient Greece, where your character is trying to get a message to the king of Thebes, I think, and you must beat the monsters in your way by typing words rapidly. It’s a Unity engine game and lacks a certain polish, but I’m having fun with it so far. My main motivation for this was to have a game I could play on my laptop without having to plug my mouse or controller in; it’s a faff to have to do that when I just want to play a game for ten minutes!

---

[1] This required some suspension of disbelief as well, incidentally, since the venue in question is in Swindon, Wiltshire. I went out with someone who lived in Swindon for four and a half years. There’s no beach there. I’d have noticed.

[2] Reading that back, it’s a good thing everyone knows I’m talking about video games here…

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order, Diablo, Super Kirby Clash

I didn’t get a huge amount of time to play games last week, but that’s OK since I didn’t talk about many of the games I’d played the week before either, since I went off on one about luck vs skill. So, here’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks:

He looks a bit like a young Domhall
Gleeson, funnily enough...

I bought a few new games for the PS4 and played Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order. This is an interesting game set in between the Clone Wars[1] and the Galactic Civil War[2], where you play a young former Padawan[3] initially trying to hide from the empire, but early in the game joins up with a former Jedi trying to re-build the Jedi Order. As this story pre-dates the original films where this hasn’t happened, I can guess it’s not going to work out quite the way they’d hoped, but in the meantime we’ve got a solid character action game that has often been called the Dark Souls of Star Wars. I can sort of see what they mean, although the setting is Star Wars rather than the grim-dark gothic fantasy of the Dark Souls games – it’s challenging with a priority around parrying attacks. But there’s other influences here that are well worth keeping an eye on: 3D Zelda-like puzzle dungeons, Uncharted-style platforming and Ubisoft collect-o-thons. All this set to the Star Wars background is pretty good if you like that kind of thing, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t seem like a bad place to start. I look forward to seeing where it’s going!

The dungeon changes each
time you play...

On my laptop I’ve been playing Diablo. I bought this game a long time ago and I remember enjoying it but never reaching to the end, nor do I have any idea how far I got originally! I re-bought it on GOG at some point last year (even if I knew where the original disc was, I doubt I could get it to run on a laptop built nearly 20 years later, so I went for a version that I could entertain a reasonable expectation that it would work!) with the Hellfire expansion. Apparently, this puts more dungeons into the game – extra content is always welcome! But the other addition to the game is the Monk, who expands the roster of playable characters. I ignored this and played as the Sorcerer, and had a fine old time bashing the first four levels of the dungeon. It took me a while to remember that games this old didn’t necessarily have an autosave feature, so there have been a few times when I’ve had to replay substantial sections of the game for forgetting to save it, but other than that it’s been a pleasure casting spells at tougher enemies, hitting weaker ones with my staff, and managing my resources. The Sorcerer is a tough class to play because he doesn’t have a lot of close combat ability and can find himself overwhelmed in tougher boss situations – I’d long gone past the Butcher before I finally had the staying power to beat him. This is counterbalanced by the fact that he has a lot of area-of-effect spells so large numbers of enemies aren’t the threat they might otherwise be. Let’s see if I can overcome the finnicky mid-90s interface to get to the end of the game this time!

It's cute, if nothing else!

A while ago Kirsty got me Super Kirby Clash on the Nintendo Switch, and I had a go with it for a while last week while Jessie was around. This is a game where you play as one of four difference kinds of class (fighter, defender, alchemist and wizard) of whatever Kirby is supposed to be, fighting a large boss-like monster. It’s essentially a mobile game on the switch and the fighting works well enough though I have a feeling I’ll hit a wall where it will be necessary for me to pay money to progress any further (it was a free-to-play game.) It plays OK, and I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn’t got Super Smash Bros Ultimate in the Switch as well – a better game that handles in much the same way.

---

[1] Episodes 1-3

[2] Episodes 4-6

[3] Learner Jedi 

Last Week's Games: Not Tonight and Enchanted Forest

This week I’ve played a new game on my Switch: Not Tonight. I’ve been playing it for a while now; it’s left me with a few things to say, and be warned: some are political…

Here we manage a guest list
and a regular line...

It’s a difficult game to describe, but if you could imagine a point between Papers Please and Brexit: The Game, that’s about where we are. In a version of the UK that had left the EU by 2018, a second-generation European immigrant has been confined to poor living conditions and has been forced to take a job as a bouncer in order to raise the £2500 per month needed to prevent him from being deported. You take jobs from some venues in the local area (beginning in the South West of England,) and the aim of the game is to manage the queue to get in to allow a certain number of people into the venue in roughly four hours of game time. You’ll be checking people’s ID – against their age to begin with, but the game soon escalates with guestlists, fake IDs, prejudice against people from certain countries, and the pressing need to keep on top of your own finances. This results in you having to micro-manage two queues and dealing with a horribly short time limit to get everything done – but get it done you must, or you will lose the game.

Even the title screen is sneering at Brexit...

Not Tonight is an odd game. The mechanics work well enough and make for an interesting and engaging experience. But beyond that, it seems to have a lot to say as an art form – or at least, how the developers thought a post-Brexit Britain might look like. As a British-born European on the edge of being deported, you’re treated with the upmost contempt from higher authorities than you, regular contempt from your bosses who are relying on you to make their night work (even the more friendly ones can’t resist a bit of Euro-baiting condescension,) a certain amount of grudging respect from people who are waiting in line to get in to their chosen venue, and the only people who treat you as equals are the other European people who are in a similar situation. It’s not without a sense of humour: even if Britain had left the EU as soon as the referendum result came in, the earliest it could have done so would have been roughly half-way through 2018, not at the beginning of it when the game starts, and even the most capricious racist is unlikely to be as open about it as the game suggests, so it’s obviously not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem for me is that as I sit on the pro-EU side of this situation, and I’m genuinely concerned for what Brexit is going to mean for my future for reasons I’m not going to go in to now,[1] some of the intended humour was lost on me. In a way, playing Not Tonight was a bleaker experience than Papers Please, as at least I’m a long way from the political situation the latter was purporting to represent. But ultimately, it is an uncommon experience that I’m glad I’ve had. Let’s hope I can see it through to the end!

The treasure is under the trees - who will find it first?

Beyond that, I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick – mainly because I’ve started a new painting section to the blog that I run alongside this, and I wanted to be able to say I’d painted something in the month of July! (Here’s the first edition, erroneously titled Last Week’s Painting.) For that reason, I spent a lot of my free time last week painting rather than playing games, but I did have a go with Enchanted Forest, a game about hunting for fairy-tale treasures in the titular forest. It’s OK – it appeals to my daughter because she likes fairy tales and treasure hunting, but the mechanics aren’t particularly well-designed, and it can get very one-sided towards the end of the game. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it while it lasts and will probably play it again.

---

[1] Mainly because trying to explain my concerns to people who voted leave has the same general effect as trying to headbutt a rhinoceros to death.

Last Week's Games: Moving House and some other bits of faff...

Despite some major positive changes happening in my life lately, this blog will take on a mainly negative tone. None of it is all that bad, in the grand scheme of things, but there are some inconveniences which have meant I haven’t had all that much time for playing games over the last couple of weeks.

Yeah...

The most significant thing that has happened to me in a few years, then, is that I bought a house. This was something that we had to organise quite quickly. Kirsty and I had been planning to move out of our flat and into a house for a little over a year at that point; for various reasons we didn’t manage it until now. We viewed the property back in January and offered on it, then Covid-19 happened which bought with it all sorts of confusion with the solicitors doing the conveyance. By the time we’d got a straight answer and a date for completion, we had about six days to pack down our entire home and move it into a house – thankfully not far away, but it was a confused mess and we couldn’t count on much help! Part of what this meant was that I had to move my entire collection of board games, and this very afternoon I managed to arrange them all against the same wall our spare room, taking the picture you see on your right while conceding that I really do have problems with obsessive hoarding.

Apart from the time it takes to move to a new house and get everything fixed and tidy there, which is still an ongoing process, we couldn’t use our TVs for a while either. The landlord of the flat we moved out of cut the plugs off our TVs and wired them up straight into the mains so that we didn’t have wires trailing everywhere.[1] The problem was of course that with the lockdown, he couldn’t put them back on again, and because the plugs they came are sealed, neither could we. So, we had to wait for a convenient moment to go and buy some plugs to plug the TV in before I could use any of the consoles! Of course, there was always the Switch or my Laptop, but time was not on my side this week, so I didn’t get to play them too much.

I tried to come up with some sort of snide remark about
where I'd like to stick that sniper rifle but it just came
out really rude.

One game I won’t be playing again is Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any of it, but it’s cost me a lot more than it was worth. Basically, my account got hacked, and a certain amount of money was spent on it. I won’t say exactly how much here; it was more than a takeaway, less than the deposit on my house. I’d never had a problem with this before in a year of owning the Switch and came across it within weeks of sharing information with Epic Games, so in addition to changing my password, I’ve deleted Fortnite off my Swtich and I won’t be playing it anymore. I’m currently having some email dialogue with Nintendo to resolve the situation, so hopefully I will get my money back, but this has left a rather bitter taste in my mouth as you might imagine!

I tried to have a go on my Xbox 360 – I was hoping to beat Sonic Generations, and I’ve been able to see my games for the first time in a year and a half (they’ve been in the loft hitherto) so I was hoping to try those of them I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. Two things got in the way of that – first, the HDMI cable wasn’t plugged in, and second, it’s doing that thing again where the controller won’t connect to the console. This is the second time it’s had this problem this year, and it won’t be going away – it might be time for a new one. I’ll try and order one in the next few days; if nothing else I’ll get an extremely helpful new hard drive to download some free games on to!

Until next week…

---

[1] It’s alright, he’s an electrician; he knows how to do it.

Backlog Beadown: Going on a Dragon Quest with Dragon Quest

I bought Dragon Quest when I saw it advertised on Facebook. This was not a series I had any investment in, or even many games for – one for the Nintendo DS that I haven’t played. But I like RPGs, and within the last few years I’ve been quite interested in the first iterations of long-running series. This is partly because of my almost OCD-like desire to play games in sequence, but I also find it fascinating to see the progression of games as a series: Where the story went, what mechanics were introduced, where the games were good and where they weren’t.

The box art has a certain charm...

Dragon Quest, then, is the first in a long-running series of what later became known as JRPGs – Japanese Role-Playing Games. As an opening statement of intent, it does the job well enough. You play as a stranger who is descended from the legendary hero Erdrick, who has journeyed to the land of Alefgard. Upon arrival, you are informed that the Princess has been captured by a dragon, and that the land has been overridden with monsters and danger from the Dragonlord. The hero then goes on a quest to rescue the Princess, follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, defeat the Dragonlord and bring peace to Alefgard. As plots go, this is as basic as it gets, but in many ways that’s a positive thing – there’s no massively contrived plotlines, no twists, no wandering around the world trying to remember what’s going on. Here’s the dragon, here’s the princess, here’s the Dragonlord, what are you going to do about it?

If you can get around the outskirts of the town without
actually leaving, you'll meet the key seller...

The gameplay is fine; it’s a top-down role-playing game that became the standard in the mid-80s to mid-90s. It is interspersed with a random battle system that pitches you against monsters of increasing difficulty depending on how far you are into the game. Both are quite simple; exploration is nothing too taxing, except for one or two of the secret areas that are necessary to discover to get to the end of the game. As a nice touch, most of the dungeons you can explore aren’t lit, requiring you to use torches – and later, magic – in order to be able to see more than a few feet. Some may call this a faff, but it puts a simple resource management mechanic into the game. The combat is turn-based and not difficult; you attack, the monster fights back, and who ever runs out of hit points first loses. This is for the best as Dragon Quest is very grindy and you will be in combat a lot to be at the required level. Magic is introduced later in the game but it’s mainly for healing; attacking spells are not particularly helpful in any way I that I noticed. Levelling up just happens once you’ve reached a certain number of experience points – there’s no assigning points or anything like that.

This is my evidence that I have no imagination at all
when it comes to naming my characters.

It’s a basic game that does its job well – but the Switch version has got a rather jarring art style. From what I understand, it’s a port of a version of the game that appeared on mobile devices, and some of the graphics are off-base. It’s rare for me to complain about graphics; I’m usually fine with anything if the art style is consistent. But that’s not the case here. The overworld looks like a slightly overdone Super Nintendo game. The monsters have cutesy Kids TV look to them – faithful to their original design but reducing their implied threat somewhat! And the fonts look like the most basic Arial font on Microsoft Word. It doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t look bad – it just looks wrong. And I guess it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game. Neither does the sound, which works well, if a little repetitive. Even the dialogue, which presumably is a cringe-inducing American interpretation of what Olde English sounded like, works. But with a little re-working, polish and consistency, this version of Dragon Quest could have been so much more.

Dragon Quest is a good game, if a little grindy and lacking in polish. I don’t feel any particular need to return to it – but I would very much like to see where it’s going in its sequel…

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Rhino Hero, Sonic Generations, Dragon Quest, New Super Mario Bros U

Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win...

Over the last weekend, I continued running Rise of the Runelords for my Pathfinder group. We are trying to maintain the game during lockdown by doing it as a video call; it worked well with some connection issues. Long-term readers of the blog will know that running a game online is nothing new, but when I’ve done it before, it’s how the game stared – not as a contingency plan for not being able to meet! The group completed their task in the Vault of Greed, and journeyed on to the Shimmering Veils of Pride where they encountered their own reflections in the mirrors! Not to put to fine a point of it, but there could have been no better time for me to not have to hand out their character sheets, as for perhaps the first time I had access to all their information and was able to run their characters. Unfortunately, I had to cut the battle short due to family illness, but we will hopefully pick it up again in the future.

There is talk of members of that group doing a game in the week as well; I’d like to be a part of that but we’re in discussions about that system to run and who will be running the game. I’ll see how it works out; I would prefer to play this time as I don’t get to play very often, but it depends on what the other lads want to do.

Spider monkeys. See what they did there...

Earlier in the week, Kirsty and I had a go with a board game that I’ve had for a while and not done anything with yet – Rhino Hero. This is a game about stacking cards to resemble a skyscraper and getting your hero to the highest point on the skyscraper without knocking the whole thing down. It’s aimed at younger people and is a good game; perhaps not with the depth of some of the other games that we play, but certainly the most dextrous and one of the better ones for spectacle. We had a great time building the towers and trying not to knock them down! Kirsty won both games that we played, and we’d be happy to show this to our friends when we’re out of lockdown and they can come around again!

Sonic Generations. It's a lot of fun!

One game I forgot to mention I’d played the previous week was Sonic Generations on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to play this partly by YouTube’s The Completionist, partly because I’d downloaded if for free off Games with Gold, and partly because I’d just finished Assassin’s Creed 2 and wanted something light-hearted and fun to play. I’ve enjoyed it so far, although I find it better in short bursts rather than prolonged sessions. If it were just a case of getting through the game, I might have beaten it by now already, but while the number of stages may appear to be small, there are a lot of challenge modes attached to each stage and that is taking a decent amount of time at this point! I’ve been playing Sonic for almost for as long as I’ve been playing video games and there’s little to surprise me now, but it’s a good fun game and one that I’m hoping to see through to the end.

You would not believe the faff I've got to go through
to get a screen grab from the Switch to my computer...

One game that I actually did see through to the end was Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Switch. I’d bought this a few months ago, played it for a few hours in November, and didn’t play it again for a while, mainly because knowing the time investment generally needed for RPGs, I waited until I had some time before committing to it! I don’t want to say much more than that right now because I’m hoping to get a review out either this week or next week.

Finally, I’ve been playing New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. As it’s been a while since I played it, and the levels I tried to play through last time were very difficult, I started a new save file. I may or may not see it through to the end but it’s a Super Mario game; they’ll always be fun while they last!

Last Week's Games: Cities: Skylines, Super Smash Bros. Ulitimate, Fortnite

Strewth, I’ve been playing a lot this week! I beat Assassin’s Creed 2, you can read about that here, but I’ve talked enough about that game so here are some others:

Yeah, mine doesn't look that good.

On one of the nights in the week I had a go with Cities: Skylines, a city building game on the PC. It’s been out for a few years now and has been talked up quite positively as an alternative to SimCity. From what I’ve been hearing about the most recent iteration of SimCity, an alternative was needed, as many people weren’t happy with the always-online DRM (Digital Rights Management,) and the fact that it almost forced a multiplayer mode on what has been traditionally a single-player experience. Having not played a SimCity game since SimCity 3000, however, I went into Cities: Skylines without much prejudice; games like this have moved on since I last played one and I was willing to see what has changed since then.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised thus far! The zoning is much the same as I remember, but the roads can bend (not that I’ve been able to make it happen yet!) and while there are a certain set of utilities you need to make happen straight away like power and water, other public services – police, fire, healthcare – don’t actually come in to it until your town is big enough to give rise to the need for them. If I have any issues with it, I would say that once the game starts moving, it moves a little fast for my liking. This is arguably because I’m still trying to learn the mechanics, I can’t see the veterans of the game saying the same, and I know you can pause it, but I couldn’t help the feeling that the game was running away with me somewhat.

Absolute chaos for most of this!

I charged my Nintendo Switch and played a couple of games on that as well, namely Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. I bought this game a couple of months ago, and knowing the scale of the game, didn’t touch it for weeks. I’ve had a go with it now and I’ve quite enjoyed it; I’m not sure about the controls (Combining platforming with two-finger fighting is an odd one!) but they can be re-bound, so that’s ok. Fighting in arena battles with characters from major gaming franchises is fun, and with a lot to unlock it’s the kind of game I can dip in and out of and continue to make progress as I’m going along. I’m still getting used to the mechanics; getting your opponent’s damage to a certain point then knocking them off the edge of the stage is unlike any fighting game I’ve played before, but it’s an interesting challenge which I’m enjoying so far. If I get enough games to justify it, I might consider buying a subscription to the Nintendo live service – I haven’t yet, but I think with Smash I may always have the fact that I haven’t got a hope of unlocking any of the online achievements at the back of my mind…

Better get used to seeing this load screen...

Finally, I’ve had a go with Fortnite, the Battle Royale game that everyone’s been talking about, for better or worse. I had a go with it on the Switch; I don’t know how well that version stacks up to everyone else but that’s what I’ve chosen to play it on. It’s alright. Again, I’m finding the controls a little off, and I’m not sure how mapping some of the game’s key controls to the face buttons lends itself well to such a compact machine as the Switch. But as a shooter, it’s fine, I’ve played it for long enough to have an idea of its addictive qualities and have fallen into the trap of the “Just one more go” mentality. It is worth the hype? I don’t think so, but then again I haven’t bought the battle pass (and until I’ve earned enough, what was it again, “V-Bucks” in game to buy it, I won’t,) so I probably haven’t had much of the core experience yet. I don’t know how frequently I’ll come back to this, but it’s not like I’ve spent any money on the game, so...

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

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

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

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

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

A very sad moment of the game...

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

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

Intense...

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

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

Last Week's Games: Lumo, Planescape Torment, Assassin's Creed 2, Tekken 6

I’ve not been in the best of health this week; nothing worse than a cold but it’s knocked me about!

I like being able to change the colour of the character...

I’ve played some more of Lumo on the Nintendo Switch; the puzzling nature of the game makes it better enjoyed in short bursts, but I’ve been having fun with it. Collecting all the rubber ducks continues to be a challenge, but it became a lot easier once I’d gone online and found that you can hold down the jump button to jump as soon as you land. This isn’t usual for platform games but is a welcome addition here! There are other elements to the game too; a minecart level, and I’ve reached a rather odd section where you have a space-shooter mini-game, of all things – an odd addition to an already very surreal game, and I’m hoping it will all make sense by the time I get to the end! I’ve also found some measure of combat in the game, though currently this amounts to nothing more than shining a light on your wand and scaring spiders away.

The starting room. Grim.

On advice from my sister I gave Planescape Torment another go. I say another go, but it’s been nearly two decades since the last time, when I owned it on CD-ROM! This is a computer RPG in a similar style to Baldur’s gate, except that the setting for this is Sigil, the City of Doors – and is quite frankly bizarre. You play as The Nameless One, a human-like being of some considerable power but not much in the way of memories, as you journey through a morgue trying to find out who and what you are. This is about as much as I’ve been able to discern so far, both from the time I’ve spent playing it and what I can remember from playing the game all that time ago! It is a complex plot and a very involving game, and like many RPGs I will be surprised if I manage to see it through to the end, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

Managed to pull this move off the other day...

I continued my game of Assassin’s Creed 2, guiding Ezio through a few speed and assassination challenges. Assassin’s Creed games can very often feel like busy-work, and this is no exception, but I enjoy what I can in short bursts and progress through the game a bit at a time. That way, I enjoy what time I put into it – even if it isn’t very much! I particularly enjoyed the mission where I had to assassinate four guards without using my weapons. Three of them were easy – they were on top of buildings, I just had to push them off – but the fourth was on the ground level, and the way I had to beat them was to hire a group of mercenaries to do it for me. This may seem counter-intuitive because on the surface it seems like you’re paying a certain amount of in-game money for the game to be played for you, but it got more interesting once some of the other guards started to interfere – at that point, I could join in the fight, as I was allowed to kill the guards that weren’t my targets!

Boom!

Finally, Kirsty and I played Tekken 6 on the Xbox 360. Tekken has always been a good set of games and I’ve enjoyed each one I’ve played, whether in the arcade or on various iterations of the PlayStation. I downloaded this version off Games with Gold, and we had a fine time experimenting with the different characters, finding out who we liked and who we didn’t. I used the random generator to pick a different character each time, whereas Kirsty likes who she likes and tended to go for Panda, Jack and Eddy. Eddy is probably the best character in the game for button-mashing, and Kirsty has a track record of winning with the bigger lads by spamming a low kick attack. We played 11 matches and Kirsty won 6 of them; some of them were close calls! It’s a pretty good game, and I’m looking forward to getting more deeply in to it later on.