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!

Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

Last Week's Games: Spelunky, Streets of Rage 2, Mortal Kombat, Battle Isle, Painting Chaos Raptors...

Spiders. It's always spiders.

This week, I’ve had to balance out my time for playing games with the fact that my daughter is around all the time now, so for that reason I’ve been spending a lot more than the usual amount of time playing Spelunky. This is a brutally hard game to play but as nothing worse than landing on a spike trap happens in it, it’s safe for me to play in front of a three-year old! She’s had a go with it as well, she’s not necessarily very good at it as she hasn’t got the dexterity to handle the controls of precision platforming, but she tries, bless her! I’m hoping to get a little further into the game than the mines, but so far, I’ve managed it twice and died almost straight away both times, so I need to be in it for the long haul. 

These were the characters when
me and Jessie played...

Another game that’s fun to come back to every now and then is Streets of Rage 2. Regular readers will remember that this is my favourite game of all time, and nothing has changed in the 26 years since I had it given to me. I hope, one day, to beat the game on Hardest difficulty without cheating; I’m not quite there yet but I’m not necessarily far from it either. Just a few more pushes… Also, it’s a good game to play with Kirsty and Jessie, since on the easier difficulties it doesn’t require much more thought than find someone and beat them up. I played it through with Kirsty one night in the week and got to the end of it, though Kirsty had run out of lives before the final boss rush.

I'll get there eventually. Maybe.

When I wrote about Mortal Kombat last week it probably sounded like I wasn’t enjoying it all that much, but I’m currently working from home and I keep putting it on every now and then. As a run only takes me about 20 minutes before I lose my final credit, it doesn’t take too long and I’m quite enjoying it now! It is a very difficult game though; I can get most of the way through the ladder, but as soon as I come to the endurance matches I get stuck, especially as they always seem to involve Kano – a very hard character to fight if you’re not on it with your blocking! I’ll keep trying though; it’s become a good pick-up-and-play game for me.

Reminds me of Advance Wars...

I downloaded and played Battle Isle, a very old strategy game on the PC. It’s a turn-based strategy game on a Hex grid; my kind of thing, but it’s got some old-style and very finnicky controls! To give an order you must click your unit, then hold the mouse button and move it in the direction of the order you want to give. Also, your shooting phase happens after the opponent’s movement phase – so you’re attacking where they were at the start of their turn; not where they are going to be at the end of it. That takes some getting used to, and I’ve only just discovered you can repair units in the buildings, but it’s early days with this one, so we’ll see how it goes.

It's been fun painting them but that's it for a while.

Finally, I finished painting my last squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. At least, it was supposed to be the last squad – I was always going to get another box of them but the intention was to build and paint three of them so I could have three squads of six. Having bought the new Chaos Space Marines codex and seen how the new points values affect what I’d planned for the army, it works much better to have another squad of five – making four squads of five – and have them lead by Haarken Worldclaimer. I’ll let you decide how to pronounce that name; my preferred method is to put a glottal attack between the two “A”s. I won’t be painting either of them for a while, as we’re in lockdown and it would be incredibly churlish of me to run around town looking for Warhammer models, but I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, including the Terminators from the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set…

Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Open TTD, Kingpin and Chaos Gate

I’ve been playing several different games over the last couple of weeks, so if this blog seems a little longer it is because these notes cover two weeks rather than one!

They’ve mainly been on my laptop. I played a bit of Wolfenstein 3D, killing Hitler at the end of the third chapter and playing through the prequel campaigns; I’m about half way through them now. It’s an odd experience; I’ve been playing WWII-related games for many years now, and this is the first time I’ve killed Hitler!

I’ve found that because the game requires a certain amount of timing and skill to complete, this isn’t the sort of game where you can play it for ten hours and beat the whole thing. After about an hour and a half, my concentration drops, and I make silly mistakes that get me killed; at that point I find it’s best to drop the game for a little while and come back to it another day. But it’s nice to have that option!

Not exactly historically accurate, but fun nonetheless!

I’ve also found that with a few exceptions, the level design of the game is generally very good. The graphics must have been impressive for the time but were hardly the photo-realistic polygons we’ve come to expect now, the sound was tinny and distorted, and while the presentation was thematic and did the job, it’s basic. The design team at ID software were aware of this and had to really concentrate on making the game playable – which they have, without a doubt. They might only have one level of view and and three guns to play with, but they designed the levels and challenges to really get the most out of their limited resources. So apart from a couple of clangers (one of the levels require you to find a secret in order to find the key, which when the secret areas are not telegraphed very well is a significant challenge, that you’ll only really achieve by luck rather than judgement. Or read a guide, like I did. It’s not fun to press the activate button on every wall on a huge stage on the off chance you’ll get the right one!) the game is designed very well.

I carried on with my game of Open TTD and I’ve realised some of the problems you can run in to when running a transport network consisting mainly of road vehicles – they get old and need replacing. I’m playing on a large map and I have a lot of road vehicles; it takes time and it is a massive faff. It’s part of the game, I suppose, and it gives you the option to replace those vehicles with improved versions, but I wish there was some way to automate the replacement! I’ve also reached a point in the game where some of the supplying businesses start to close; I’ve noticed it mainly with oil: there comes a point where the primary business doesn’t operate anymore, and a lot of the transport designed around it becomes redundant. Rerouting your entire network to compensate is a challenge!

Of course, as Kingpin was released in 1999, the
character models are absolutely hideous.

There were some other games as well. A while ago I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime, plus a couple of older Games Workshop games, Final Liberation and Chaos Gate. I’ll go in to specifics in a minute but for now let me say that as I downloaded these games from GOG, all three of them required fiddling around with the game files to run. This involved looking for advice from the community, finding out what patches I need, and making sure they were in the game files. Kingpin wouldn’t boot at all until I’d installed a patch, and Chaos Gate wouldn’t proceed past the point where I’d launched the mission because apparently it can’t handle particularly long file paths, so I had to make a new directory for it. Final Liberation was a little easier to fix; for some reason it doesn’t want to play the videos, so I had to go into the configuration file to disable them. This is a little sad as some of those videos were brilliant; not technically wonderful but the actors and producers were clearly in to what they were doing! I got them all working eventually but this is not something I expect to have to do with a product I’ve bought from a game distributor on the understanding that it will work.

I wasn’t too impressed with Kingpin, actually. From the marketing, I was expecting a kind of Grand Theft Auto without the cars, where you build up your criminal empire and take on the people who betrayed you. In fact, it’s a difficult shooter with some shopping and recruiting. I didn’t get far in to it; maybe it gets better at some point but starting a game like this with no weapons and being surrounded by enemies who are at least on par with you and often much tougher made the game frustratingly difficult.

The rest of the squad are in the Thunderhawk...

Chaos Gate was a lot of fun, though. It’s a Warhammer 40K squad-based tactics game, and I’m a lot better at them now than I was when I originally bought the game in 1999 so I set it on the middle difficulty rather than the easy mode I would usually look for back then! The graphics look a bit “Second Edition,”[1] and while the weapons make the right noises, I’m not sure how I feel about firing the rocket launcher and seeing the impact of it with absolutely nothing in between, but the game itself is pretty good if a little clunky. It must be one of the first games I played with a Permadeath function; if your squad members get killed, there’s no replacing them at all in the campaign. It even has an Iron Man mode, which I haven’t touched yet. I’ve got to the second mission, but I can’t seem to get through it without at least one squad member dying; I’ll keep trying though!

---

[1] If you know, you know.

Last Week's Games: Crossword and Thoughts on Hobby Games

Does anybody know?

Time has not been on my side this week with regard to gaming. Work, family and band commitments has meant that the time I managed to find to play games was restricted to this crossword game on my phone, which is a great little app to download and play every so often. It is sometimes quite strange that I can look at a clue for days and not know what it means, then come back to it a week later and have the meaning perfectly clear in my head!

There’s really not that much more to say about Crosswords, though, so instead of that I’m going to talk about hobby games for a bit. There’s quite a bit to say, so this blog is a little longer than usual. I’ve used the tag line on this blog a number of times, and I thought for today I would do a piece about exactly what I mean when I say hobby games:

They’re games that you usually play on a table top with a number of people, normally with some sort of tactile element to them such as cards, dice or moving pieces. And I do enjoy playing them, when I get the chance!

The first board game I can remember playing was Snakes and Ladders; still popular to this very day! While it is a very simple game in terms of its rules and structure, it’s a wonderful little way to engage with people, particularly children. My family played it a lot when I was young, and continued to do so all throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of playing Cluedo, and my brother could play Monopoly at a very early age! 

One of the few times I completed a 40K army.

Getting in to games as a hobby came about when I was thirteen and started collecting Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. I still enjoy it to this very day, over twenty years later, although I can never escape the feeling that I’m still finding my feet with it to a large extent! I don’t paint or play games with my models anywhere near enough to develop an instinctive knowledge of the games, rules or painting techniques, but it hasn’t gone anywhere and I’ve enjoyed it on and off through most of my life. I even worked for Games Workshop at one point, although I wasn’t particularly good at that either.

But it’s been within the last ten years or so that I’ve really taken an interest in hobby games as a whole. It started with the Games Workshop games, of course, but then my mate Dave introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh, and while collectable card games are probably the aspect of hobby games I enjoy the least, it was always fun to play with him every now and then. Around the same time I discovered Fantasy Flight games, and played some of their games over the following years before discovering other game developers and publishers. I had always wanted to find out what playing Dungeons and Dragons was like, so I bought a starter set, found a public group of people who meet every week to play Role Playing Games and got involved with that; that’s been a massive part of my social life for a long time! I also started building up a large collection of board games that, while few people seeing it for the first time have a clue what it’s all about, they do find them interesting to look at!

I always enjoy this one!

These days, I play hobby games as and when I can find the time, which currently is not often. I’m fortunate enough to have a steady roleplaying group that I meet with once a month, and I play a few games with my girlfriend and her friends now and then. I make the UK Games Expo an important date on my calendar every year! But I haven’t got the structure in my life at the moment to attend hobby shops and groups regularly. Still, the games are there if I need them!

Hobby games are in something of a “Golden Age” at the moment, where new games are coming out every month and it’s no longer the exclusive domain of unsociable nerds. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of it, and it can be quite tricky to know what I’m talking about, so I thought I’d give you a break-down of what I consider to be the four main categories, and my stake in them:

·        Board Games

·        Collectable Card Games

·        Role-Playing Games

·        War Games

It was my original intention to write it all in this blog post but I found the scope of that was too large for the format my blogs usually take, so I’m going to write them a bit at a time instead, and release them periodically. That should be a bit more interesting!

Backlog Beatdown: Killing the King with Warhammer 40000: Regicide

I bought Warhammer 40,000: Regicide last Summer when I was on a Games Workshop kick. It was my intention to go for a complete collection of all the Games Workshop licensed games, and Regicide had the added benefit of me having seen some coverage on it from TotalBiscuit. It looked more of an oddity than anything else, but I managed to see it through to the end.

On this level, you have to kill, not capture, the enemy...

The game is essentially Chess set in the 40K universe, using the Space Marines and Orks as chess pieces to simulate the battles.  How Regicide differs from Chess is that once you have moved, you can use abilities of your pieces on an Initiative Points system to attack your opponent. This works on a percentile mechanic, and usually amounts to shooting them, or attacking them in close combat if you’re in an adjacent square. It takes longer to eliminate a piece using this method, but if you focus enough attacks in one place, you can take out entire armies without having to capture anything; the usual method for Chess. This is augmented by additional abilities from the various pieces: Devastators (Bishops) have the ability to focus their attacks to do more damage at the expense of being able to move, Assault Marines (Knights) have increased attack power after they move and can also throw Krak (anti-armour) grenades, and so on. This creates an additional strategic layer to the game and sets it apart from either Chess or 40K in a way that, for the most part, works reasonably well.

The game is presented well enough; the graphics are fine and the sound is good. The music is thematic, and loops in a way that runs just underneath your attention level and doesn’t distract. And the sound effects are all in the right places; the guns have a nice kick to them and the close combat attacks sound nice and meaty. The voice acting is competently-performed, and has no surprises for anybody familiar with the 40K universe; tough hulking warriors for the Space Marines, and barely-intelligent growling from the Orks.

The takedown animations are suitably brutal...

The bulk of the game revolves around the Campaign; a series of 50 levels that put the Blood Angels against the Orks in various different deployments and scenarios. There are primary objectives that you need to achieve to beat the level: Eliminate a certain piece, move one of your pieces to a certain square, use a certain ability on a specific piece. There also are secondary objectives that you can complete to achieve a higher score, and these tend to be more specific: Capturing a piece rather than killing it, don’t lose any of your pieces, use a certain ability in a specific place. Depending on the mission these can be very tough, but they make for a fun challenge! However, the level design isn’t always on point. Granted, there is only so much you can do with an 8x8 board, but some of the objectives are designed in such a way that the only way to achieve it is to replay the level over and over again until the AI makes a mistake. That, coupled with the random number generation, means that some of the later missions in particular are won more through luck than judgement.

Sadly, this is all the game really has to offer in its current state. Skirmish games of Regicide – as close to chess as the game gets – is probably enjoyable against a live opponent but the servers are almost completely dead and it’s all but impossible to get a game. If you’re going to play ‘Hotseat’ (both players on the same computer,) you might as well just play chess or 40K. As the points you acquire from the campaign are used to unlock customisation options like different skins and weapons for use in the Skirmish mode, there’s not much incentive to get those either. The single player can be fun, but the sometimes unfair difficulty and RNG makes it frustrating more often than not, and renders the game very difficult to recommend on that basis. I enjoyed it, but it’s a 40K game; I was always going to like it. I don’t necessarily know if anyone else will.

Final Score: 2/5. If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

For the second time in as many weeks I find myself apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.

Well you're about to die, sonflower...

If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!

Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly 60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights, I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the week!

I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly engaged!

Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle
since that's who you play as.

However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an “energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!

I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!

Last Week's Games: Regicide, Kingdom Hearts, Chaos Cultists

First of all, sorry I’m a bit late with this one. I didn’t get much sleep on Sunday night and had a very long day on Monday, when I would normally write these. By the time I got home I was exhausted and I knew I’d find it very difficult to focus, so I decided to put it off for a day, get some sleep and come back to it in the morning. I guess, if I was writing for a magazine with a deadline, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that, but this is somewhat different. I have a fair amount of people reading these blogs, but the majority of them come in long after I’ve published them – they sort of trickle in off search engines. I doubt anybody reading this in a month, six months, a year, or several years (it happens!) is going to care that I didn’t put this one out on a Monday, but they will probably notice if my writing is below my usual standard. So here we are. 


Orks, mate. They'll blow you up.

I carried on with Warhammer 40K: Regicide, I was hoping to beat it last week! It wasn’t to be, sadly; I got to within the last couple of levels of the Space Marine campaign to find that the secondary objective for the penultimate mission is, once again, to kill – not capture – all the Ork pieces. Regular readers will remember that this gave me some problems a few weeks ago with the final mission of the second act, but at least the playing field was somewhat level for that one! Here, you are outnumbered by quite a lot, and you will lose if either your Librarian (Queen) or Captain (King) are eliminated. Not being allowed to capture the pieces makes the game very difficult in that regard; I haven’t quite managed it yet but I’m sure I’ll get there if I tackle it hard enough!

Not to judge Square characters by
their fashion sense, but...

Elsewhere I played Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting through the Agrabah level. Here, I noticed something a little odd about the platforming sections of the game – you don’t die from falling off the platforms. Instead, you fall to the bottom of the screen, or when appropriate, a different screen altogether. I’m not suggesting that it requires a suspension of disbelief, as quite frankly playing as a 14 year-old boy running around with a giant key, a one-piece swimsuit (I think) over a short jacket, shoes that are far too big for him and accompanied by Goofy and Donald Duck allows you suspend it enough to ignore the potentially harmful effect of gravity. But consider – when you lose all your health in the game, you click Continue and go back to the start of the screen you’re on. When you fall off a platform, you have to climb all the way up again, and if you’ve fallen into a different screen, this is actually quite a bit more faff than simply restarting the section. I don’t know, it may seem meaningless, but I think it’s a clever little bit of game design – they didn’t make it too easy to keep repeating the same parts over and over again in order to practice the platforming sections, so it gives a better incentive to concentrate.

Then on Monday, when I was having some work done on my car, I spent some time in Phoenix Games in Stourbridge painting my remaining Chaos Cultists. I used to go in to the shop quite a lot, and even ran a Dungeons and Dragons game for them for a couple of years. I don’t go in so much anymore, mainly due to family and work commitments, but Brett and Steve are always happy to let me sit down and paint while my car is being fixed. And it was nice to see Emile and Matt, who were previously in the DnD game, having a game of Konflikt 47.  I didn’t get my models finished; I wasn’t expecting to as I take my time with my painting. But I got a good way in to it and I might even pick them up again in the week while I’m off work!

I’ll see what I can get done next week!

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide, XCOM, 8-Ball Pool, Crossword, Sniper 3D Assassin

An interesting week this week. Six games to talk about!

I progressed with Kingdom Hearts, beating the Deep Jungle and making it as far as Agrabah before I stopped. At this point you have to do some back-tracking to allow the Gummi Ship to fly to other worlds, but I’ll take this opportunity to talk about an element of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 that wasn’t in the original – The Gummi Missions. This takes the form of certain objectives when flying the ship between worlds; like scoring a certain number of points, or taking out a certain number of enemies with a particular kind of gun equipped. I consider this an improvement, as previously there was no real reason to do the Gummi flights other than to get to the next world. It gives something extra for the completionists, and I would love to unlock them all.

This took me a few goes!

I also continued with Regicide, finally beating the end of Act 2 that I had been stuck on for ages! I progressed several missions in to Act 3 as well, the game being good at promoting the “just one more go” mentality, and it was quite late into the night before I realised I should stop! The screenshot was one I did myself (normally I pull them off Google Image Search,) because of something going on with Facebook over the weekend. I’m in a group called Gaming Dads, which given the levels of nastiness that can plague the internet is a really nice group to be in. Sadly, one of the members recently lost his partner after an illness, and her funeral was on Saturday. To show our support, we were supposed to upload a screenshot of what we were all playing over the weekend, with the tags: #tucker #wegotyoubrother. I chose this game because it was most convenient to do it on my laptop; I’m glad I finally found a use for Dxtory in the end!

I was ill on Thursday and had some time off work, and I played a bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I continued a game I’d started in November, and it didn’t go very well. In the space of a few missions I’d lost some of my best soldiers. It might warrant yet another restart but I’d been doing pretty well up until then, and I’d had to deal with a massive setback during the one time I beat the game so you never know.

An old picture but does the job!

But I was very interested in the games I’d been playing on mobile devices! I’ve been playing 8-Ball Pool a lot this week, and I think of all the games I downloaded onto my Kindle Fire 7, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most, simply because there’s a measure of skill involved rather than just clicking on things until you can’t click on things any more.

I downloaded onto my phone a couple of other games: Crossword, which is as it sounds – crossword puzzles. I’ve never been much good at this but I’m sticking to the easy puzzles for now, and the game does help you: The clues you solve correctly lock and have a beige colour on them so you know, and you can ask for a hint. You have a limited number of these but you get three every time you beat a puzzle so that’s not a major issue. Sometimes I use a website to solve the clues, which might be considered cheating, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to find different ways of saying things. It might help next time I play Scrabble!

Also I’ve been playing Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Shooter. This is a game where you’re given a target to shoot at, and you have to kill them with a sniper rifle or suitable weapon. I’ve been having fun with it but I’ve reached the point in the game where I have to start paying for things in order to carry on, as I need to buy a new weapon which I can only do with diamonds. I’m not sure how long I’m going to put up with being forced to watch ad after ad in order to keep enjoying it!

So, a busy week!

 

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts and Regicide

One rather prevalent theme running through this blog lately is not having time to play many games these days. It’s becoming somewhat cliché now, but it’s true; between everything and everyone I’m supposed to be dividing my attention between, I basically get Monday afternoons to sit down and play some games. And not always then! Last Monday I spent the vast majority of that time shopping, ironing, sorting washing out, doing a couple of bits and pieces for work that need doing, and of course writing this blog.

Some people didn't like the Gummi sequences.
I love them!

What didn’t help was that the game I chose to play was Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Remix on the PS4. Not that the game itself is bad – quite the reverse, actually. But because it was a recent acquisition for me and I hadn’t played it yet, I felt compelled to wait for the game to download before I could play it. I actually had the option to jump straight into the game, but from what I understand from others who have done this with all sorts of games, this rarely amounts to more than a title screen, and as I was talking to someone on Facebook Messenger at the time I thought I’d stick with that, for what turned out to be roughly three quarters of an hour for a 4.5 gig download. I know that waiting for games to download onto the modern consoles is a thing that happens now and shouldn’t be news to anybody really, but I’m not used to it yet! I’ve heard it said that it’s to do with the structure of the PS4; no matter how fast your internet connection is, it can’t receive more than a few megabytes at a time. Given that my laptop would have done that download in about a third of the time, I have no trouble believing that!

The upshot of all this was that by the time I’d got through it, I had about an hour to play the game on Monday night. But it’s always nice to play a game and enjoy every moment of it! Kingdom Hearts is an absolute joy to play; a successful integration of familiar characters if you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy games, and a lovely bit of fan-fiction if you like Disney characters. The version I’m playing at the moment is Final Mix, and I’m not entirely sure what the differences were supposed to be but the only one I’ve noticed so far is that the sounds on the background music was slightly different. The composition was the same but the instruments had been… improved? I don’t know. I like it for now, but I had it tested in Traverse Town. I’ve got a lot of investment in that theme; that gorgeous clarinet melody over the piano accompaniment is potentially the most welcoming, yet hauntingly lonely 16 bars of music I think I’ve ever heard and I didn’t want that messed with. It turns out there’s an extra keyboard (I think) sound added above the melody; I was sceptical at first but in the end I decided it adds to it more than not.

I was actually looking for a picture of the Death Company.
Had to make do with this instead.

When I had some spare time with my laptop I played Regicide for a while, the 40K chess game. I’ve been stuck on a level for a while now, where I have to eliminate three Ork Stormboyz (Knights) and one Meganob (Rook) with three Tactical Marines, (pawns,) Three Assault marines (Knights) and a Librarian (Queen.) The problem I am running in to is that I’m going for the secondary objectives as well, in which none of my pieces are allowed to fall. If you lose the Librarian, you fail the mission, but if you lose anything else you won’t achieve your secondary objectives. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’ve run in to a few missions like this where the only hope I have of achieving those objectives is to wait for the A.I. to make a mistake, and take the win from there. I’ve said in the past that games need to have a solid process and a satisfying outcome; you rarely get either when you rely on luck!

See you all again next week.

Last Week's Games: Regicide, The Savage World of Solomon Kane and Lost Cities.

After playing Eternal Crusade for a while, I had a go with another Warhammer 40000 game: Regicide. This is a 40K game based on Chess, with the different Space Marines representing the different pieces. Tactical Marines are pawns, Terminators are rooks and so on. Where it differs from Chess is that your pieces can shoot at each other with weapons and throw grenades for area-of-effect attacks, putting an interesting spin on the classic game.

Those obstacles block movement, funnily enough...

I’d previously tried this a month ago, but didn’t count it as my “new game” because I only managed to play through the tutorial. I had a go with a Skirmish match – as near as it gets to a standard Chess game – and I had some fun with it. The tactics need to account for having ways to attack the pieces other than capturing them like Chess. I was prepared for it to be an occasional curiosity rather than a game I’d put any substantial amount of time into, but there is a campaign I found strangely engaging due to the short length of the missions.

Some aspects of the game work, and some don’t. In the campaign, your pieces are deployed in a set, and you use them and their abilities to take out certain enemy pieces. It’s like a puzzle, as you manoeuvre your units in to the best position to capture a piece – an instant kill – while trying to avoid such a situation yourself. It also gives me some ideas for how I could run some short games of 40K; pitched battles are all well and good but the game is open to so much more! Where the game is let down, is with its Random Number Generation (RNG.) It uses a percentile ‘chance to hit’ system, which adds complexity to the mechanics but severely alters the strategy. It might seem strange for me to say this given that two of my favourite games of the decade are XCOM and Mordheim, both of which use RNG systems. But in those games you could affect the numbers it came up with – get closer, flank your opponents, develop your abilities etc. Regicide doesn’t have that, and the consequence is that meticulous strategy and puzzle-solving can be invalidated by the pieces being able to attack without having to capture. I’ve lost a few campaign games from making the right moves, but the key pieces falling before I can take the win, in a manner removed from the process of playing Chess. But then, I was never much of a Chess player!

Looks like a Witch Hunter...

I also returned to the Black Country Roleplaying Society after some time off, and joined The Savage World of Solomon Kane. From what I understand, this is a tale of swashbuckling and derring-do in a gothic horror setting, with Solomon Kane himself being a harbinger of righteousness. While he is the hero of the piece, he’s not above committing acts of outright villainy to achieve his aims! I’m playing an elderly sorcerer; able to perform magic but forced to maintain secrecy due to the world’s negative view of magic and witchcraft. And, we have the usual disparate party in the other players!

I approached this game with some caution as I know almost nothing about Solomon Kane, and I’m not fond of Savage Worlds as a system. But with roleplaying games, the enjoyment comes from the interaction with the other players, so I’ll give it a chance. It was a slow start this week due to character creation, but we’ll see how it picks up next week!

Apparently this is quite a common 'couples' game...

Finally, on Sunday night I played Lost Cities with Kirsty. This is a card game in which you compete to make the most money from exploring lost cities by creating long runs of cards, with additional twists: There are five possible explorations you can start, but starting those costs you 20 points potentially ends in negative figures. Also, you can bet to double your score at the start of a run – but this is applied after you’ve taken off the 20 to fund the expedition. It was a fun game while we were playing it, but the maths homework at the end was a bit of a chore!

Last Week's Games: Split/Second, Eternal Crusade, X-Wing, Catan, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Pathfinder

Quite a bit to get through this week…

Get ready to blow stuff up!

My new game for this week was Split/Second, a racing game recommended by Metal Jesus in one of his Hidden Gems videos. It’s an arcade racing game with a TV show-like aesthetic, where you drive in various challenges to compete for enough credits to advance to the elite races – and hopefully the next episode! What I like about this is that this is purely an arcade racing game; there’s no micro-managing your vehicle, no sense of realism in the game. It’s just you against the cars and the environment.

Oh yes, the environment. The main gimmick of the game is that you can, once you’ve drifted enough and been on someone’s tail for long enough to build up your power meter, trigger certain parts of the environment to cause problems for your rivals. More often than not, these come in the form of explosions that throw them off the track, but there’s some fun ones as well. In one of the earlier tracks, triggering a certain point causes a digger to swing its shovel around that creates an obstacle. It works for a couple of reasons: Firstly, you can’t just press the button to ruin someone’s day; it needs precise timing and knowledge of the track in order to make it work effectively. Secondly, certain of these trigger points change the entire layout of the track, so chances are you won’t be racing on the same bit of track on the next lap!

I played Split/Second for a couple of hours and I was really enjoying it so I’ll definitely be playing some more!

I carried on with Eternal Crusade, there’s a live campaign running over the next few days where you have to win five battles for a large reward of Rogue Trader Credits. These are used to buy weapons and armour that affect the character aesthetically. They’re no better or worse than the equipment you can buy; they just look different. This is the Micro-Transaction element of the game; you can pay money for these things but since it wouldn’t increase my level of enjoyment of the gameplay, I certainly won’t be spending money on them! But if I can get enough RTC to get an upgrade for one of my guns, I might do that. Otherwise they’ll just sit there gathering e-dust!

I found myself with a little more time to be out and about than I normally do, and on Wednesday I went in to Warlords and Wizards and had a game of X Wing with my old friend Mason. I’ve known Mason a while and his collection of Imperial ships has grown in that time! I took on his force with my Trenchrunners, and had a run of good luck in the beginning of the game. However, the ferocious abilities of Quickdraw, as well as the support provided by a local shuttle, meant it was a very hard game that I eventually lost. Great fun though, cheers Mase!

Then on Friday I had a game of Catan with a couple of young lads who go to the shop. They’re getting quite in to it now and with that comes a certain amount of skill. I got off to what I thought was a good start by heading straight for the ports, but they managed to break up my Longest Road, and one of the lads won the game on at least three bought victory points. Well done!

All sorts of different roles...

We also had a quick game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf; I had the app on my Kindle Fire and we sat down for a four-player game. I was the Werewolf with one of the other lads, and I tried to bluff it to claim to be the seer; they saw through it eventually but time had run out by then and we all voted for the Troublemaker. Great fun!

Finally on Sunday I continued Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords with Dave, Victor, Morgan and Ian. For the first time, I’ve run a campaign all the way up to level 8, and the lads were happy to level up!

I’m expecting a quieter week next week, so see you then!

Last Week's Games: Shogun: Total War, Warhammer 40K, Get Bit, Zombie Dice

Let's see who's standing at the end of this battle!

My new game for this week is Shogun: Total War. The Total War series is one of the ones I’ve been meaning to have a go at for a long time, and while there are a lot of games out there for it now, I have an almost obsessive need to play games in sequence, so I’m playing Shogun first. I played through the tutorials, which was just as well since the interface is unlike any strategy game I’ve ever played. I also had a go through the campaign, but I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I’m supposed to be doing; building up an empire is obvious but I found that battles are not to be entered into lightly! I did, however, have the foresight to set the win conditions up to something other than total domination. I remember playing Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Galactic Conquest mode with my sister years ago, during which I discovered that the problem with potentially endless campaigns is just that – they take ages, and you’ll lose interest in it long before you reach the end. I set up the win to take a certain number of provinces, and to survive for 70 years. But I think I might go back and restart, with a better idea of what I’m supposed to be doing.

I wonder if my need to play video games in sequence hampers my enjoyment of them somewhat. Am I missing some great games because I haven’t played the first ones? Anyone who’s played the Witcher series would probably say that I am; The Witcher 3 looks to be the best game in the series but I haven’t bothered with it because I haven’t played the first two to completion – and I’m unlikely to find time to do so! It shouldn’t matter with Total War because they’re stand-alone campaigns; not sequential storylines, but lately I’ve become interested in finding the core mechanics of the game before jumping in to the arguably-better later versions. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of this; I’ve missed the better games in the series because I wouldn’t touch them until I’d beaten the first. So I’ll see what Shogun: Total War has to offer. It looks really interesting and I have enjoyed it so far, but I want a little more out of it.

I continued playing Eternal Crusade on my laptop, but was pleasantly surprised when on Sunday I managed to go in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and play the real thing! I got to play a game of Warhammer 40,000, using my Salamanders against Chaos Daemons. We played the Ancient Relic mission, which requires you to take and hold one objective for six victory points. I won because the objective way in my deployment zone. It was a good game but we had to it call early, and for my next one I’ll be using a substantially smaller army because I found myself looking at the rules for the new edition of the game far too often; it’s only my second game. Nonetheless, I like how the vast majority of the new rules are working out; especially how the templates have been removed so there is a point to Frag missiles now!



The front cover of the original X-Wing game.

Robots. Swimming away from a freaking shark.

I also had a game of Star Wars: X-Wing against the same guy, and managed to win with my tournament list consisting of 1^st-wave ships and characters. I was pleased that running the Trenchrunners worked, and I also learned not to fire Proton Torpedoes against a ship that has lots of shields and R2-D2, who recharges them!

I played some board games with Kirsty as well. The first was Get Bit, where you have to play cards to have plastic robots with detachable limbs swim away from a shark. There were the beginnings of a really good game in there but I wasn’t familiar enough with it to be able to explain it well enough for Kirsty to really know what she was doing! We also played Zombie Dice, which requires almost no skill other than pushing your luck. It is, ironically, brainless fun, which at the end of a long day is exactly what we needed!