The Tenth Year Anniversary of my Gaming Blog...

The thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: “Strewth, I’ve been doing this blog for 10 years!”

My coverage on Batman Begins
remains my most-read blog...

For ten years, I’ve been talking to you about games I’ve been playing, wins, losses, video games, my thoughts on game design, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a long time to keep something going, and while the return isn’t necessarily representative of what you might expect for someone who spends that long on the internet (at the time of writing I’m coming up on 60,000 views across the entire ten years and 325 blogs, and it’s never represented any financial reward) I’ve enjoyed it, people I share it with enjoy it, people I don’t share it with enjoy it, so in some capacity or another, I’ve kept doing it.

My speculation on the 6th edition of 40K was
probably my biggest blog for comments...

Mind you, it did take me a long time to come up with a regular format for the blog that I was happy with. My original intention was to document the games I was playing in Games Workshop, as it still was at the time. I did it for a while, but I didn’t go in regularly enough to blog it in a consistent routine, and even when I did, it sucked some of the fun out of the games knowing that I was going to have to write about them later. The same applied to when I tried to create a journal for the Roleplaying games I was just starting to get involved with; documenting my first character’s journey through Pathfinder’s Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv was entertaining at first but quickly became a lot more work than fun. It didn’t help that I was trying to do the same thing with a music blog every time I did a gig, which meant I was doing a lot of writing! Funnily enough, even though more people I knew in person read my music blog than my gaming one, my gaming blog was engaging a far wider audience. I kept writing on and off about some hobby games I was playing, and some video games I managed to beat, even writing about a game of pool at one point, but it took a long time before I found a format that I was happy to do regularly.

I covered Lego Star Wars in the
original No Game New Year...

Then in 2014 something happened: I came across a Youtube video from a guy called Brian Castleberry who had been talking to his friend Norm Caruso a.k.a. The Gaming Historian about a concept called No Game New Year. The idea was that they had built up a huge backlog of games, some of which they rarely played, so they set themselves a challenge and invited others to join: Don’t buy any new video games for 2014. Instead of that, we were supposed to play through all our old games, keep the ones we liked, get rid of the ones we didn’t, and really try to tackle our backlog. There were roughly 30 people on board to begin with, but by the time the year ended, only a few of us remained, including me, though I had come close to falling off the edge by erroneously buying a new copy of Final Fantasy VII! I don’t know how much of their backlogs the other people involved in the challenge managed to clear, but what I did notice was that without permission to buy new games, they were actually playing games a lot less – and doing more things with their families. That can only be a positive thing! Part of the challenge of No Game New Year was that we were all supposed to update each other on how we were doing with either a video, blog post or even just a Facebook status, (we had a group for it which I still share even to this very day!) so I tried to do the blog in a weekly format. It worked for a while, but I eventually found myself with very little to say without repeating myself, so I changed the format slightly and only wrote about games when I’d beaten them. This is the format of what eventually became Backlog Beatdown, my longest-running series that I created after No Game New Year.

Age of Sigmar was a refreshing change...

I went through some significant life changes in the following few years. I’d taken up singing lessons, started a self-employed music business, became a regular at some of the open mics in Wolverhampton and became a Dad. I found a lot of my spare time was taken up with all of that, so I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in hobby shops as I had prior; most of the games I played were video games and while I kept the roleplaying groups going a little longer, I had decided not to write about those experiences anymore. The fact that I’d bought what was at the time a reasonably powerful laptop capable of playing PC games was also conducive to this, so I kept my blog going with Backlog Beatdown.

Mordheim's been one of my favourite games
of the last decade...

As part of my quest to try to play all my games, I found myself listening to the Co-Optional podcast while I played, featuring TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and a guest for the episode. It was a three hour show in which they would all talk about, amongst other things, the games they had been playing that week. And somewhere around September 2017, I found myself thinking “wow, people are actually interested in this!” and decided to have a go at it myself. Thus, I began my biggest and most popular series of blogs: Last Week’s Games.

Painting this boxed set was an achievement...

The idea was simple: write down what games I’d played in the week and find something to say about them. This usually amounted to two or three games every week, and if I found anything to say about the painting or hobby gaming I’d been doing that week, I’d write that down too. I’d try to release them on Mondays, (regular readers will know that it doesn’t always work out that way!) and run it as a weekly series that I’d share on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to include some of the hobby games, including the one Roleplaying group I managed to stay in. Quite quickly, though, I needed to put a restriction on how much I was writing, because I didn’t want it to become more work than fun. What I decided to do was keep the blogs to exactly 700 words each: this is about a side of A4 paper and is about as much time anybody has to read anything. I quite enjoy editing the blogs to fit in with the word counts, and I rarely stray from it. It was a challenge to do this every week without repeating myself, and I didn’t always manage it, but I did find a massive uptake in my readership – I was getting a lot more views with regular content than I had before. Most of them were from overseas, funnily enough; Russia and Italy are two countries that often have people reading my blog!

TotalBiscuit - Gone but never forgotten.

This carried on for about a year, up to the point when I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time. I found myself needing to re-balance what I was doing in my spare time, owing to the adjustments I had to make to accommodate both mine and my partner’s working patterns and my daughter, to whom I was able to provide a home for the first time. But in the new year of 2019, I started the blog going again and apart from a couple of wobbles where I found myself caught up in all sorts of things with little to say about gaming, I have kept it going ever since.

Murder in the Alps - an interesting, if
not-well-paced mobile game...

At this point I would like to interject that around 2014, as a result of No Game New Year, I created a list of all my Xbox 360 games. I’ve developed it to include all my systems and games and keep track of how many I own, have played, beaten and 100%ed on an Excel spreadsheet. The original plan was to share it on the blog; I never did this because looking at the numbers is frankly embarrassing. But it did give some structure to what I’ve been playing and when, rather than blindly buying and trying games every so often!

Pandemic became oddly prophetic...

All of this makes me wonder where to take the blog from here. I’ll keep Last Week’s Games going, I still enjoy that, and I’ll keep Backlog Beatdown going when I remember to do it! (At the time of writing I still need to write a review to Gears of War 2 which I played last Autumn.) But the way my life and hobbies have changed over the last couple of years has given me some different things to say. For a start, I don’t talk about painting on Last Week’s Games anymore; I put that in a separate blog called Last Month’s Painting – I don’t paint anywhere near enough to make it a weekly series!

Nice to let games become
a family thing...

Also, having huge stacks of games around my house is all well and good, but here I find myself with more to say about how that relates to my daughter. She was pre-school age when I first bought her a board game, and she enjoys playing with me. It’s very interesting to observe her level of engagement, and her enthusiasm for certain games over others developing as we’re going along, to the point where it’s something she wants to do to entertain herself, rather than something she wants to do with me specifically – though that’s still an important point. I’m at the age now where many of my contemporaries are starting families – in many cases already have – and they’re wondering how their hobbies and interests can relate to their children. It’s nice to be able to talk about my experiences in that area, and it may become something I focus on in the future, but I certainly don’t want to make a job out of playing with my daughter so I’ll approach that with a certain amount of care.

The UK Game Expo is a lovely opportunity
to see my long lost friends from Swindon...

There were some plans that fell by the wayside. I wanted to start attending tournaments and blog that, and I tried doing a blog series called Tournaments and Tribulations. Unfortunately, that never really got off the ground, as my week allows little time to rock up at tournaments and spend weekends playing games! My experiences in this area are mainly confined to games I’ve played at the UK Games Expo. I also wanted to do a series of blogs where I go through the campaigns of some of the Dungeon Crawling games that I own (Space Hulk, Descent etc.) That never happened either, though it would have been a mission to coordinate even before Covid-19 became a thing we were all going to have to get used to hearing about! I’d still like to try it out at some point though.

The Horus Heresy: Legions is a game that
took up a fair amount of my time.

It’s also been suggested to me that I record video footage of games I’ve been playing and put them up on Youtube or something similar. I have thought about it and even had a go at streaming The Horus Heresy: Legions at some point. The problem is that making videos takes a fair amount of work and time that I don’t necessarily have, and the equipment I own isn’t up to it – I can’t get a decent framerate out of my laptop if I’m running recording software on it; domestic laptops aren’t designed for that, and I don’t have the hardware necessary to record footage from my consoles either. I could address both of those issues, but that would be a large investment to make for not necessarily a huge return – most games I play are several years old, and common interest in them has waned.

And there’s the fact that somewhere, out in the world, there’s a small sub-set of people who still like to read the written word every now and again…

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Last Week's Games: Kingdoms of Amalur, Spiderman, UK Games Expo

I’ve been surprisingly busy over the last few weeks, and for this reason I haven’t managed to get a blog out in a while. Today’s post covers roughly three weeks.

Feyblades. That Ettin had better watch out!

I had a go on the Xbox 360 with a game I hadn’t played for a long time: Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning. This is a Role Playing Game set in a somewhat typical fantasy setting, where your player character has died. They are brought back to life, and they now have to discover the mystery of how that happened and the extent of their power – to interfere with people’s fates. It is a good game with a strong combat system, with some bugs and uninspired enemy design, and I enjoy coming back to it every now and then. There’s a lot to do, though, and like many RPGs I wonder if I will ever see it through to the end!

This is a fun costume to unlock!

I’ve also played Spiderman on the PlayStation 4. This was a fairly recent purchase for me, bought with some saved-up Nectar Points from Sainsburys, and will probably be the most up-to-date game I buy for a long while! Now, I have fond memories of Spiderman 2 on the PS2, and from what I understand, no Spiderman game has surpassed it yet. However, this iteration of the game has done a pretty good job so far, with an improved combat system and voice acting. It includes a lot of features included in modern open world games, such as skill progression trees and side activities to do alongside the main campaign. Where Spiderman trumps almost all other open world games is that getting around is an absolute joy. Swinging through New York is a crucial element to any Spiderman game, and once you get used to how it is implemented in this version, you can cover vast distances and pull all sorts of tricks and stunts to keep the movement flowing and rapid. Almost all of the missions involve doing this to a certain extent, but because it is so much fun to swing around New York, it rarely feels like pointless busy work. I’m a little over 60% of the way through it so far, and this is one of the very few games I feel I have a hope of 100% completing, so I’m going for that.

You’ll remember last month I made some remarks about doing some videos for Youtube. I’m now putting those plans into fruition, since XSplit Gamecaster seems to be a lot friendlier on the file size when recording these videos! At the moment I’m capable of recording some raw footage with microphone commentary. Due to work and family commitments and lack of video editing software I wouldn’t suggest expecting anything substantial yet, but I’m working on a few scripts and concepts that I’m hoping to bring to life in the short-term future.

Also last weekend I went to the UK Games Expo. Some of you may remember from last year that this is very much a highlight of my year, and this year was the best one yet. I played loads of games, made some new friends and generally had a great time. It is my intention to write about what I got up to there but I’m going to divide my coverage of it into three categories:

Tournaments and Tribulations: A brief return for the series I intended to start last year, where I talk about the games I played as part of tournaments and how I got on.

First Impressions: My friend Tom and I participated in several demo games across the Expo, so I’ll write about what we thought of each one. Some of these are still in the final stages of development and have not been released yet.

Games We Played: On the Saturday Night we met up with some folks I’d never met before and played a whole load of games I’d not had the chance to play for a long time, if ever. This will be similar in format to the first impressions with the added fact that these games have already been published and released.

That’s a lot of writing to do, I hope I have time!

Last Week's Games: Divine Divinity, UK Games Expo 2018

I had a very enjoyable weekend at the UK Games Expo, I got to play a lot of new games and had a fantastic time. I’ll give an overview and the highlights here, but some of it will need to go in a separate blog. Even so, there’s lots to cover here, so this blog will be a little longer than usual:

Having had most of this week off work for the half-term holiday, I had time to play some video games; I cracked on with Eternal Crusade, but I played a new game as well: Divine Divinity. It’s an action-RPG in the style of Diablo. Indeed, it starts in pretty much the same way; you find yourself in a small town plagued by some misgivings from the local area, and after some initial fetch-questing, you descend into the dungeon to sort it all out.

Down in the Dungeon...

What I like about this game is that there’s no hand-holding; no easy first level, no tutorial. It’s you vs the game almost straight away, and I am fine with that. One of my pet peeves of video games is having to play it for an hour before the actual game starts. But in Divine Divinity, once you’re in the dungeon, you’re on your own. And I had a really good time; I chose the Wizard class, I managed my resources, killed enemies, got the treasure and went back to the town to take breaks when I needed to. I’ve noticed that with some RPGs, the dungeons are designed to give a sense of realism and pacing, and while the latter is crucial for a good game, sometimes the need to stop playing the game to advance the plot makes it feel somewhat artificial. While plot can add to a game, developers should never forget that the core of the game is the gameplay, and when it’s done as well as this, I could happily spend the entire game dungeon-bashing without any semblance of plot. I’ll be coming back to this one!

I make an effort to return to the UK Games Expo every year! It’s very often the highlight of my year. Here’s how it went down:

Yep, it was as rickety
as it looks...

On Friday, I had entered two tournaments: Catan and Dominion. It had been a long time since I’d played in tournament, and in previous years I felt I’d missed out on some of what the expo had to offer by avoiding them, so I signed up to play some games. I never expected to do very well, which is just as well because I didn’t, but I played seven games in a day which is more than I think I’ve ever manage in my life!. I’ll cover what I can remember of the details in a new semi-regular blog series titled Tournaments and Tribulations, but at this point I’d like to say that the atmosphere was almost the complete opposite from what I expected from tournaments. I’ve played with so-called hard-core players before, and I’ve struggled to enjoy it. I didn’t know the games very well so I expected to have a rough time, but the vast majority of people I played were very nice, patient and helpful, and that made my day as much as anything else.

Adam and Chloe - Showing me a new way
to play Hey That's My Fish

 

On Saturday I met up with some old friends from Swindon: Adam, Chloe and Tom. After going around the expo for a while we went to the gaming hall; I was happy to introduce them to Hey, That’s My Fish! We played a couple of games, and I won both of them. Chloe made an interesting observation: She suggested that we play the second game blind, with the tiles upside down. This would have been covered in playtesting, but it made a remarkable difference to the game. Without being able to call our moves based on the number of fish we’d get, we instead played a lot more aggressively, blocking each other off, and making sure we had a long run of tiles to collect when we were blocked. We also borrowed Riff Raff from Thirsty Meeples; a game in which you aim to be the first to put all of your wooden pieces of cargo on a rickety ship without them falling off – if they do, you need to catch them. Adam and Chloe won that between them. Finally, we played A Fistful of Penguins; a gambling game in which you compete for money by rolling different combinations of animals on dice, and using penguins to re-roll or add dice. I can’t remember who won those games but it was a good laugh!

A Fistful of Penguins.
Penguins are purple.

Tom stayed for Sunday and Kirsty was there as well, so we watched a couple of shows. Dark Room was excellent; John Robertson was exhausted after what must have been a long weekend for him, but his improvisation and crowd interaction was spot-on. We also saw Knightmare Live. I’ve now seen the show three times, and it was good to see some different rooms being developed. The team guiding the dungeoneers was the best I’ve ever seen it; they were from Shut Up and Sit Down. The two lead actors, however, weren’t quite as on it with their improvisation as they usually are, and I think there was a presumption that the vast majority of people had seen the show before. This blunted their usually excellent performance, but it was a very funny show nonetheless.

You can see the pattern emerging in our
preferred choice of gaming animal...

 

 

 

Earlier I’d bought Ice Cool, and Tom showed Kirsty and me how to play. It’s a really good game about flicking penguins through the halls of a school to get fish, while one penguin tries to stop them. It takes about ten minutes to play, and is meant for children, but it’s great fun and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I won the first game, and Kirsty won the other by being very good at catching our penguins!

So, a brilliant weekend, and I while my bank balance can certainly wait for the next one, I can’t! See you next year.