Backlog Beatdown: Rimming the Sky with Skyrim

 I bought The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the Xbox 360 way back in 2013. It’s been released on just about every major platform going since then, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade; I’ve owned the game for roughly eight years and I’ve only just gotten around to beating it so I don’t know what I was going to do with extra content and multiple copies of the game!

Hagravens are vile creatures...

Skyrim is a game that needs little introduction. After waking up as a prisoner on a cart and narrowly escaping execution, your character discovers an almost unique ability to absorb the souls of dragons. They find out they are the so-called Dragonborn, and that they alone can harness the power of the shout to stop the evil dragon Alduin from raising the dragons from the dead and conquering Tamriel. Along the way, they must learn to control their powers, contend with warring factions, and explore caves, dungeons, and constructs to build up their power, all building up to the final confrontation…

Ugh. Spiders.

I chose an Argonian for my playthrough and was going to go for a lightly armoured double-handed weapon fighter build, but as is very often the case when people play Skyrim, you end up as a sneaky archer. I managed to get somewhere between the two and was very glad of my ability to breathe underwater and heal quickly! I’ve played Skyrim several times already but as all my previous save files were on a different hard drive, I started a fresh character to see where a new adventure would take me.

The thing with Skyrim is that you really need to pace yourself. There’s no point going straight for the main quest; I’m sure a skilled enough player could speed run the game in about five hours but there’s a whole world out there to explore, and there’s little reason to miss out on the content on offer here. I levelled my character up to 50 and there were still outstanding quests to resolve by the time I’d finished the game – I’d refrained, for example, for taking a side between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. This was a choice I’d made in the game, as I couldn’t honestly say I supported either side. The Imperials were the invaders of the land, but such strongholds they had were being maintained reasonably well. The Stormcloaks had the home advantage but had a ruthless streak in them that made them very difficult to support. That I managed to beat the game without resolving this conflict goes to show how huge this game is! Do a quest here, clear a dungeon there, take a bounty somewhere else, sell your gear wherever you can. Set yourself some goals and play for however long you want to play.

Clavicus Vile is the exception
to the otherwise static voice acting...

The graphics work well enough for a ten-year-old game, and some of the scenery is beautiful; Skyrim feels like a living breathing world to get lost in. The music is great, and the sound effects are good, the voice acting is alright for the most part, if not particularly inspired. The game does suffer from a few bugs that can get in the way of beating certain quests, and I had to weather a few hard crashes, but nothing that stopped me from beating the game – not that I’d have realised I had, if I hadn’t known that this was the end of the main quest. It was only once I’d got to this point that I realised – there are very few cut-scenes in the game, and the ones that are there are interactive to a certain extent. All the exposition is done within the game. There’s no ending sequence, no credit roll, you just… win. I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down by that, but after sinking nearly 120 hours into the game, the journey made it more than worthwhile.

Skyrim is better than average and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’m not sure it’s the pinnacle of RPG experiences, but it does what it does well. I found a way of pacing myself so that it worked well for me – but don’t forget it took me eight years to get there!

Final Score: 4/5: Great game

Last Week's Games: Skyrim, Lego Star Wars, Monster Match

 This week I find myself running into the same problem I always do whenever I’m trying to play through a long-form game – trying to find something new and interesting to say about it. Fortunately, while playing Skyrim this week, I played through A Daedra’s Best Friend. This is ostensibly yet another side quest, however it adds to what – memes aside – the games has been sorely lacking up to this point: a sense of humour.

A nasty piece of work,
but brilliantly played.

After exiting Falkreath by the West exit, I was met with a dog called Barbas. He tells me that he’s had a falling out with his master, and requests to accompany him to meet him and make amends. I followed the dog – who uses a distinctive American accent quite remote from the Nordic dialects we’ve been hearing so far – to a dungeon I’d already looked at earlier in the game: Haemar’s Shame. I went through the dungeon again, killing all the vampires and at least one spider along the way, until I met with the shrine of Clavicus Vile himself: Barbas’ master. And my word, what a character. He speaks to you in your mind with slight Cockney twang, as an entity that loves nothing more than causing chaos by granting wishes in the most self-damaging ways possible, and will only agree to take Barbas back if you retrieve an axe for him…

There are multiple ways this quest can end so I’ll leave the actual description of it there, but even though the gags in this quest are hideously dark in places, it is a refreshing change to the grim fantasy world presented for us so far! This was the first situation for a while where I wasn’t chasing quests to level up my character or progress the main plot in some way; I genuinely wanted to see where this quest was going. It wouldn’t work if the whole game was like this, but a little humour in a game can like Skyrim go a long way, create some very memorable moments, and break the cycles of questing and quite nicely.

If you were wondering how they'd do the
"I am your father" bit when none of the
characters actually speak, here it is...

I carried on with Lego Star Wars with Jessie, and we’ve reached some areas that are surprisingly challenging to traverse, especially when you’re still learning the nuances of 3D movement in video games! The highlights include The Empire Strikes Back sections: Traversing Dagobah has a wonderful moment in it where you play Luke Skywalker in the middle of his Jedi training. As Luke isn’t a Jedi at this point, the usual mechanics don’t apply for certain parts of this level – he can use the force, but not well. To use the force normally, he must pick up Yoda and put him on his back. This came to a head when Jessie – who desperately wanted to play as Yoda and had grudgingly resigned herself to the fact that putting him on Luke’s back was as good as it was going to get – had to use the force to lower some Lego Mushrooms so that R2-D2 can use the gate at the end of the scene. The problem was that this required some quick timing, and Jess kept getting attacked by bats. It took a few goes, to say the least! The other part we enjoyed was the boss battle with Darth Vader, which was nicely designed in the way that Jessie – who didn’t want to fight, so was playing R2-D2 – was able to be useful by turning on steam vents and raising platforms. It will help to build her problem-solving skills if nothing else!

A simple but very entertaining game!

We also enjoyed a tabletop game called Monster Match, in which you must roll two dice and try to match the numbers and body parts they present to the cards on the table. We had to modify this down a bit – the cards score between one and three points each, we had to take that out – but it helps to build up her number recognition. As an aside, Jessie bought this game for me for Father’s Day last year. We had a go with it then, and she didn’t enjoy it much at the time; it’s lovely to see how well she’s coming on when we see her enjoying it now.

Last Week's Games: Roleplaying Games, Warhammer Quest, Skyrim

It’s been a while since my last blog post. There have been a few reasons for this: The main one is that I’ve been involved in a theatre project for the last three weeks which has taken up a lot of my spare time. Barely a week has gone by since September where I haven’t had to adjust my working patterns to accommodate one thing or another. Also, my mental health hasn’t been at its peak over the last month. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing’s happened, but in the small amount of quiet I’ve had over the last few weeks, I’ve found it difficult to keep my mind focussed enough to find something interesting and relevant to say.

I’ve been looking at new campaign ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, with the aim of putting together a framework for a whole campaign without getting bogged down in small details. The idea is that if I ever get the chance to run it, I’d develop it one session at a time out of the framework and ideas I’m writing now. However, I’d really like to play as well so I’ve been looking in to trying to find an online group, using mainly Roll20 as a source. This hasn’t been successful; timing often gets in the way but also there are so many people trying to join games on Roll20 it often feels like applying for a job. But I’ll keep trying and we’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, I lost a friend I knew through roleplaying games the week before last. Andy from the Black Country Role-Playing Society passed away in hospital; I don’t know any more than that and I would prefer not to ask. Andy was one of the first people I was in an RPG with; he was one of the players in Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv. He was also in the first game I ran as part of the group. After that, he ran another Pathfinder game: Council of Thieves, in which I played a couple of fighters (I had to change my first one after I learned about builds!) It was a good game to be a part of, and I was able to help Andy run it by occasionally looking up a rule to resolve a dispute or explain a ruling in ways that made sense. I had to leave the game eventually when life got in the way, but Andy remained a constant and committed presence in the group and I’m sure everyone there will miss him very much. I’m glad I got to see him a few weeks ago when I had the opportunity to return to the group; you never know when it’s going to be the last time.

Imagine five, six, seven of these spiders
firing off their webs at you...

With video games, I’ve been having problems with spiders. In Warhammer Quest, I’m fighting some high-level spiders – Venomous Gigantic Spiders, or something along those lines. The problem I’ve been having with these is the way their AI is programmed. They have two ways of attacking you – bites, which can poison you, or webs, which stop you from moving. Bites are the nastier of the two moves, but they will only do this if you move close enough to attack them. If not, they’ll keep firing their webs at you, with the result that whatever is left of your party can’t move or act in any way. This slows the game down to the point where I had to quit out of the dungeons and start again, and since they can take quite a while to clear, this isn’t fun!

Apparently those things either side of its mouth
are its sexual organs. Doesn't bear thinking about...

I’ve also started playing Skyrim again, as an Argonian Two-Handed Weapon fighter. I’ve learned a few things from my time with Dark Souls and I’m a lot better equipped to take on the game now. I like how the game is developing, but I don’t like the Frostbite Spiders. Horrible things. They’re huge. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve tried to play through Skyrim and I can’t remember how far I’ve got in the game before, but my character is at level 18 now and I’m enjoying it so far so hopefully I’ll be able to see it through to the end this time.

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

Larger than it looks...

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

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

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

Dragoooon!

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

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

Last Week's Games: The Elder Scrolls: Area, Super Castlevania IV, Fire Pro Wrestling World

Now that I've seen this, I've got Medusa and Hemlock
by Cradle of Filth buzzing around my head...

This week I’ve been playing a bit of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This was the first Elder Scrolls game released in 1994; I’ve had a dalliance with some of the Elder Scrolls games that have been released since then but have never seen one through to the end. While a lot of the ideas that ended up in the later games were there from the beginning, the interface shows its age! I’ve had a reasonably good time having a go with the different character races and classes, which is easier to do in Arena than it was in Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim because the first dungeon (in which you start as a prisoner, so it’s good to see the Elder Scrolls series started as it meant to go on) can kill you quite quickly if you’re not careful! I got to know the area very well; where all the loot drops and enemies were, as I explored it multiple times with different characters. I eventually settled on a Wood Elf mage; I’m aware that the stats of a Wood Elf don’t necessarily support the Mage class, but I found that it had enough physical power to outlast a lot of the other classes I’d been playing. I guess this is one of the areas where video games differ from table top RPGs; when there’s only one player character, you must be able to handle more than the situations your class would normally deal with! I eventually managed to get to the end of the dungeon but then emerged into the town in the middle of the night and got killed by the enemies hanging around the town; often before I even knew they were there! Thank goodness I thought to save the game. It was also amusing to see that the Khajit were originally human in appearance, rather than the feline appearance they later acquired. 

Tricky though this bit is, it's nothing
compared to the next bit...

I also tried Super Castlevania IV on my WiiU again. I played the level where some of the old music from the previous games had been remixed for the 4^th iteration of the game – including a track that was involved in one of Jim Sterling’s “F**Konami News” gags, so that raised a smile from me! That level has some very tough platforming segments, so I didn’t get very far, but my three-year-old daughter noticed what I was doing and wanted a go. I set her off on the first level; she hasn’t quite got the dexterity to handle platforming yet, but she was having a fine time making Simon Belmont walk up and down the stairs on the first screen! She enjoyed the results of whipping the skeletons too, though she hadn’t got the reaction times to do it quickly, so I often ended up doing it. But it’s all good; at this point she just enjoys doing things with her Daddy!

Alright mate, put it down; you'll get DQ'd!

Finally, I had a go with a game I’ve left far too long without trying: Fire Pro Wrestling World. It’s been a while since I had a wrestling game to play with, and the WWE series that started with Smackdown has, if I understand the commentary on it correctly, disappeared into its own bottom trying to make the best and most comprehensive creation mode while forgetting to make the gameplay itself any good. Fire Pro Wrestling, free from the shackles of having to use licensed wrestlers or keep up with constantly-evolving graphics engines, has certainly put a lot of thought into the gameplay. The controls are more of a timing-based system than WWE’s button-mashing, and you have to balance light and strong attacks, or you will very easily be countered. I’m currentlyplaying through the mission mode, where you have to achieve a certain condition by the end of the match (not always a win!) This is a great way for me to get used to the different wrestlers in the game, and to learn the mechanics. I even streamed some of it earlier today and put on a rather embarrassing show, but the one person watching it sat through most of it so I’m not complaining! I’ve really enjoyed Fire Pro Wrestling World so far, and I hope I’ll continue to do so!

No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

---

[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year: A Brief Summary of the Last Month or so...

First of all, I must apologise profusely for not posting for the last few weeks. There’s a whole host of long and not very interesting reasons for it. A lot of it is to do with the fact that I’m a guitar teacher, and what I really ought to be writing is the 130 reports for the children that I’m teaching in the area. While I struggle to motivate myself to do it, I also find it very hard to justify doing anything else when I’m not doing it. So I haven’t been writing blogs because I know I ought to be writing reports – even though I can’t motivate myself to do it.

Anywho…

I’ve been playing a lot of games over the last few weeks, some I got further into than others but none have I managed to finish yet. In the spirit of the challenge I really ought to be getting rid of the ones that I’ve not kept at, but I can never really bring myself to do it; there’s a chance I might come back to it later. The main games are:

 

XCOM: Enemy Within

This is an updated version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love this game, I really do, but it is so hard to do on classic difficulty that to be honest I rarely get further into the third month of the game before I derail the whole thing by getting my entire squad killed and not having anything remotely resembling competent understudies.

 

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

I’ve tried this game a number of times and I’ve struggled to get in to it, but this time I decided that rather than play to a theme, play the character I want to play – in this case a sneaky Dark Elf thief – and I find that I’m enjoying it a lot more. But in an open world game where there is so much to do, I often find myself wishing I was playing something else after a few sessions several hours long where I don’t appear to have done anything to progress the game at all.

 

Far Cry 2

If there is ever a game I should have given up on it’s this. It is a good game, I’m not denying that, and I’m fairly sure has more to offer in its single player campaign than many of its contemporary modern-military shooters, but somehow I can’t motivate myself to keep going with it for more than a few sessions. I think once I’ve finished the game I’m doing now, I might give it another go, or later in the year… I kind of owe it a chance to finish!

 

Speaking of which…

 

Dragon Age: Origins

This is the game I am currently playing. I’ve had a few false starts with this but I’m enjoying it now. I’m playing a Dwarf Fighter character with a specialisation in two-handed weapons because I wanted to maximise damage output as a tactic, and so far…

Well, the fantasy setting is nothing if not generic, Elves and Dwarves, that sort of thing. Darkspawn – the games thematic bad guys – are from what I have seen so far a different version of the usual Orcs. And the idea of a specialist force of soldiers, in this game called the Grey Wardens, created for the purpose of keeping these Darkspawn at bay is certainly nothing new. Is it even an interesting spin on the idea? Well, no, not that I’ve seen so far. We’ve all done Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, early Final Fantasy games before. There’s nothing new here that I’ve seen so far after a good 20 hours of play.

That being said, it is done VERY well, which is something we can always rely on Bioware to do. I’ve played bits of the first Mass Effect game, but honestly I find myself reminded more of Knights of the Old Republic – with better interactions between the characters. The difficulty, which I rather foolishly set to Hard, is deceptively gentle at the start of the game, but becomes very hard later on – particularly with boss battles, which I rarely feel equipped to deal with. And the idea of recruiting an army to fight the Darkspawn is something I’m looking forward to finishing off, if only for a refreshing change from fetching… maguffins, I think, is the word, or quest items. The game play itself is fun, as are the quests and the feeling that, while there are things going on in the world that are bigger than you, they might all be relying on you to save them…

This is a little bit general but I’m going to be on this one for a long time so I might as well leave it there for this week. I’ll go in to specifics hopefully at the end of the week, where I can discuss things in more detail as I hopefully find out more about the game.