Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide and Ticket to Ride

A difficult boss to beat. Some might say...
He was tricky.

I was quite busy with games this week! I carried on with Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting as far as the Coliseum. It was a pleasure to go through Wonderland again, and the harder difficulty setting means that the fights are challenging – I had to use a continue for the first time. I also noticed that, as I’d chosen the Guardian class at the start of the game, Sora’s abilities were developing differently; I was getting different powers to assign to my action points than I was used to for the warrior class I usually pick. I did this because the characters that you meet along the way are usually fighters, so I could conceivably swap Goofy out for, say, Tarzan and still have a balanced party.

Unusually for me, the highlights were the boss battles, the Trickmaster and Cerberus. I had to analyse their attack patterns and find out what attacks work best and where in order to defeat them. The Trickmaster took a few goes! Maybe I’m enjoying boss battles more as I progress through games in general, possibly because I’m taking them as a welcome change of pace that I actually have to think about.

Not quite the mission I was on but
it looked a lot like this.

I also carried on with Regicide, the 40K chess game. I cleared the level I was stuck on last week! On the other flank of the board were three Ork Shoota Boyz. These weren’t part of the mission objective, but the objective targets were deployed in a defensive formation that was tough to crack. Out of a need to try something else, I attacked the Shoota Boyz, and found something that I’d forgotten about – In chess, you have to move; you can’t forgo your turn. So once I’d eliminated Shoota Boyz, I forced the Storm Boyz and the Meganob to move and break formation. At this point, the battle became a lot easier. It still took a few goes – a lot of it is still reliant on the random number generation – but the different approach helped!

I breezed through the next couple of missions, before getting stuck on the last one. The last mission in Act 2 of the Blood Angels campaign involves having to take down almost an entire chess set of Orks. You have all your pieces except your king and its pawn, they have all theirs except their queen and its pawn. Your objective is to take down the Warboss (King.) I once again fell down on the secondary objective, which in this case was killing – not capturing, the conventional method – all enemy units. I’d worn the Ork forces down to just the Warboss and a Meganob. Unfortunately I’d misunderstood the objective and killed the Warboss first, ending the mission but as the Meganob was still alive, I failed the secondary objective. What a way to mess it up!

Finally, on Friday night I sat down for a game of Ticket to Ride with Kirsty, Fran and Phil. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: one of the main indicators of good game design is how small the gap between picking it up for the first time and understanding how it all works; the other three had never played the game before and were playing very well by the end! My three tickets at the start of the game had stacked, and I took over much of the West Coast of America quite quickly. Not wanting to deliberately throw the game for the benefit of the people who’d never played, but also not wanting to dominate the game without them even realising, I then took another two tickets which stretched out to the East side – not quite to New York, but near enough. I reasoned that if I could achieve those tickets as well, I would definitely have earned a win! I nearly managed it as well, but then Kirsty, who felt she was well out of the runnings by then, blocked the last route I needed to take! So I lost the points for the two tickets I’d been brazen enough, which cost me the game. Fran won in the end, and we will have her quote of “Eat My Steam, Bitches!” running through our heads forever more.



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

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

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

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

I mean, literally, this is it...

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

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

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

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

Last Week's Games: X-Wing, Ticket to Ride, Castlevania, ZombiU

This week I played a surprising number of games…

The first one was Star Wars: X-Wing. I’m playing through the main campaign mode and I’m about two thirds of the way through the first episode; I’m enjoying it so far. I like how there’s always a specific objective you need to work within the game parameters to achieve; there are escort missions, combat missions, missions with specific targets to destroy, rescue missions and everything in between. You might be forgiven for thinking that’s standard, but the game doesn’t hold your hand. You get a briefing, and then you get dropped into the mission – after that, you’re on your own. You get some support in the form of wingmen and updates from your computer, but you need to work out how you’re going to tackle the mission; the game doesn’t tell you and your wingmen won’t win it for you. Quite often, you’ll work it out through trial and error – but that’s a positive thing; it puts some necessary thought into the process of beating a level.

Also, there’s a risk of you getting captured or killed in the game. Again, you might think this an obvious point, but let me explain: If your ship gets destroyed when you’re on a campaign mission, one of three things will happen. If you auto-eject, you’ll either be rescued by the Rebels or captured by the Empire. If you can’t eject because of bad luck or a systems malfunction, you die. If either of the latter two happen, your character can be revived, but he loses his rank and experience and is demoted to Flight Officer, the second lowest rank.

In this edition of the game this doesn’t make much difference, but in previous editions, this could potentially have an effect on your wingmen. You could have several pilots on file, and before you launched a mission you’d have the opportunity to deploy these pilots into the ships that would be flying with you – the higher their rank, the more competently they would fly. You’d run the risk of them dying but you’d also have a wing of pilots you’d created and nurtured yourself. They even had pictures! This was removed from the Windows version of the game I’m playing, presumably to streamline the experience, but it also removed the potential for some X-COM-like storytelling in there in addition to the main campaign.

Great game.

I also spent some time in Warlords 'n' Wizards, a new hobby shop in Netherton, and managed to have a game of Ticket to Ride with one of the lads there. Most people who play this know what a great game it is. I won the game, but with Ticket to Ride, the time between playing the game for the first time and understanding what you have to do is quite short, and the guy I was playing picked it up very quickly, so he had a lot of fun as well. That’s the mark of good game design, in my opinion! I might talk about it more in depth on a slow week, but it’s a very well-designed game that everybody should play at least once.

Hard game!

I dug out the WiiU and played a couple of games on that as well. The first was the original Castlevania, and I’d forgotten how brutally hard that game was. I’m going to have to exploit the WiiU’s infrastructure to scum-save the game, because there’s no way I’m going to finish it any other way. Some might say I’m not getting the true experience if I play it with an option to save, but these old games were designed in a time where the length of the game was extended by its difficulty. I’m having fun with Castlevania – but I’m not looking to get bogged down.

The other one was ZombiU. This was an interesting take on the Zombie game genre, because it functions like a Rogue-lite: you take a survivor up until the point where you die, and then when you take over as another survivor, you have the opportunity to fight your previous character – now a Zombie – and pick up your old equipment. I’ll talk a bit more about it next week!