Last Week's Games: Fire Warrior, Hotline Miami, Shinobi 3, Golden Axe, Takenoko

I’ve missed the last few weeks of this! Sorry about that…

In the last few weeks, I’ve played and beaten a couple of games. One of them was Fire Warrior on the PC, and I’ve posted the review for it here. I have a few additional remarks to make here: Many of you will have noticed by now that I really enjoy games based in the Warhammer / Warhammer 40K universe. However, I rarely make the argument that they’re good games, and Fire Warrior is no exception. A lot of what eventually became first person shooters were being standardised during the period where Fire Warrior was released, and in many respects, the game fell short of the mark.

Wouldn't it be great to order one of
your squad-mates to cover you?

It is also worth remembering that the Tau were in their infancy in the 40K universe when this game was released, and with almost two decades under their belt, they have become quite a distinctive force in their own right, rather than the “new kids on the block,” so to speak. I don’t know how well they work in the most recent edition of Warhammer 40K, but certainly as far as 7^th edition, they relied on their squads working together more than almost any other army in the game. That got me thinking: What if a 40K game was made with Tau as the player characters, but instead of a standard FPS game, it became more of a squad-based game like SOCOM and Star Wars: Republic Commando? A rather odd comparison for me to make, since I’ve played neither, but I understand the general premise of those games and having an FPS game with a team of Fire Warriors with different abilities could be something very special indeed. Could it happen? Let’s hope so…

Get used to the game telling you you're dead
'cause you'll be seeing it a lot!

I also played Hotline Miami on the PC, getting to the end of it. I’ve got a review for that coming out on Friday, but I might as well tell you now, I really enjoyed the game. It takes a certain rhythm to get into it but once you have, you can have a lot of fun with the trial-and-error gameplay – as long as you don’t take it too seriously. There’s a lot to be said for being good at what you do. By the time I reached the end of the game, I was still having fun and wasn’t quite ready to get off my crazy horse quite yet, so I downloaded Hotline Miami 2 and I’m playing my way through that now.

These will go down in one hit if you
know what you're doing...

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been once again getting some enjoyment out of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I’ve often spoken about my fondness for Streets of Rage 2, but funnily enough I didn’t even touch that this time. I came back to my old sparring partner Shinobi 3, running, chopping and, er, shuriken-ing my way though the seven stages, and even though some of the platforming is frustratingly difficult, it is always a fun game to play. The furthest I managed was the final level on the flying airship, because as with many platforming games I died to falling off it more than anything else!

The platform sections of Golden Axe
were never great...

I also played Golden Axe with my daughter. This is one of the first games I ever played on the Megadrive, and some of you may remember I beat it several years ago. I had no intention to return to it, but I thought it was a simple-enough game to explain to Jessie, so we gave it a go! It went reasonably well until Jess forgot what button she had to press to continue the game when she died and locked herself out of the game. I managed to reach the end of the game but lost to the final boss.

Everyone loves cute pandas.

Finally, me and Kirsty played Takenoko – a board game where you must grow a garden and feed a hungry panda. Kirsty will play just about anything with cute animals in it, and she managed to win it this time by taking a lot of the panda-feeding cards and scoring points that way. It’s a great little game, about the right balance of luck and skill for us, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again soon!

Last Week's Games: Monster Hunter World, Murder in the Alps, Takenoko

Three things to mention this week:

They don't present a massive challenge,
but they're hard to find!

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World on the PlayStation 4. This is the first Monster Hunter game I’ve ever played, and at this point I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems to be a role-playing game that involves hunting monsters on an island for research; that’s the basic plot. But there’s a lot going on with it, namely upgrading your equipment from parts of the monsters you have hunted, as well as the usual levelling-up progression. I’ve had a decent time with it so far, the combat system is interesting and the world is beautiful, although the most significant challenge it’s offered to me so far has come in the form of the mission where I have to kill twenty Vespoids – and that was mainly because that was the only mission where there was a real possibility of over-extending the 50-minute time limit, as I had to spend a lot of time looking around the map looking for the things!

Apart from that, the main thing I’m having to battle is the game’s insistence on being an online MMO-like experience. I haven’t got PlayStation Plus – I don’t play the kind of games that would make it worth my while. Unfortunately, Monster Hunter World doesn’t seem to want to let that go, assumes it’s connecting to PlayStation Plus when you boot it up, and even when you bypass all of that, it still talks up the multiplayer content as part of the game. Sorry, but MMORPGs are not my thing at all – if I had a group of friends who wanted to play one then maybe but playing with some random people who want to do it a lot quicker than I like to pace myself doesn’t appeal to me at all.

This one is off the... no. No. That's too obvious.

I came back to Murder in the Alps on my mobile last week too. Near to the start of the year I was playing the first run of mysteries, and I thought I’d have a go with the second. It’s basically Murder on the Orient Express – The Game, and I was engaged enough to want to get to the end of it, though the fact that it’s a hidden object game requires some suspension of disbelief. If the character has found the item she’s looking for, why does she keep looking for the other twelve? It’s like that thing people say when they’ve found something they lost: “Always the last place you look.” One might reasonably wonder if they keep on looking after they’ve found whatever they lost. In this game, that’s more or less what you’re doing!

A game about growing Bamboo, with a cute panda.
What's not to like?

The final game I played this week was a board game: Takenoko. This is a game in which you must build a garden for a panda to live in. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually really good – you have to build up the different colours of the garden in a certain configuration, grow a certain amount of bamboo in a certain place, and have the panda eat a certain set of bamboo in order to score. I played it with Kirsty, and I’ve said it before but it’s always a sign of a well-designed game when the gap between your first turn and learning how to play the game is relatively small. It only took us a few goes, and we were building gardens according to our cards, and trying to have the panda eat certain types of bamboo, this that and the other. I won in the end, but only by a point. Kirsty realised quite late in the game that her scoring cards were relatively low, where as most of mine were mid-range, which gave me more points. It was too late for her to do anything about it by then, but I considered afterwards how looking for a lot of low-scoring points cards might be a viable strategy with three or four players. I suspect that you wouldn’t want to get bogged down with higher-scoring points cards when your opponents have three or four completed ones already!

That was it for this week, I’m a little short of time next week so we’ll see what I can get done!