Last Week's Games: Sensible World of Soccer, Of Orcs and Men, XCOM: Enemy Unknown

With things getting back to something remotely resembling normality (for me, anyway; the rest of the world might be saying something different!) I tried playing my new Xbox 360 this week. Some of you may remember that I had to buy a new one when my old one stopped working because the controller wasn’t connecting to the console. The daft thing is that I may not have needed to do that, because when the exact same thing started happening with the new one before I’d even played any games on it, I found a far more simple solution than I could ever have hoped to imagine – turn on the TV.

Yes, my controller only connects – and the Xbox 360 only comes on properly – when I turn on the TV. I don’t know how long this has been the case, but I would imagine it would be an update to the Xbox’s systems whereby it won’t come on properly until it detects some sort of Audio/Visual output. At that point, everything comes on and it works just fine. I don’t know whether that happened with my old Xbox, but I can’t remember an occasion where I tried it with the TV off and it didn’t work… so it may be that I’ve spent some money on a new Xbox 360 that I didn’t need! Ah well, I won’t know until I test it again and I certainly can’t be bothered to check right now. I’ve got a 250Gig hard disc out of it, and it’s always useful to have a spare in case I burn one or the other of them out.

Can he get one in before the half?

So, what games have I been playing? The first one I played was in fact the free download for early May which was Sensible World of Soccer. This is an old Amiga-generation (roughly 4^th) football game, with a top-down view, and one “fire” button to control kicking the ball – everything else depends on context. I’ve played it for a while, and I am hopeless at it. I can’t seem to aim my shots properly if I come at it from an angle, and the goalkeeper always saves the goal if I go head on. In the roughly 30 games I’ve played, I’ve won two of them; the first was an online multiplayer game where the connection was so awful I think the person I was playing let me win out of sheer boredom, and the other one was a game where I’d played the England team (and chuckled at the re-arrangement of somewhat familiar player names to avoid legal issue) against a deliberately weak side, I can’t remember what it was. The rest of the time I either lose, or at best have a goalless draw, although I offset this by playing as Birmingham City, so our forms match up somewhat. Nonetheless, the “pick up and play” mentality of this game means I’ll probably come back to it when I have a moment to spare!

Interesting "buddy" scenario...

I also tried Of Orcs and Men, a game lent to me by my mate Victor. This looks like a very interesting game, where the Orc and Goblin who serve as the player characters become unlikely heroes in the fight against a tyrannical Human regime. It’s an unusual twist on a tired trope, and thematically it works well. The gameplay isn’t what I was expecting, as you must put in a list of commands for the characters to enact in combat. The system reminded me of Knights of the Old Republic more than anything else, but God of War meets Tenchu this most certainly is not. Victor told me that the game starts a little slow but picks up later; I’m looking forward to coming back to it to see what else it’s got to offer.

I mean, canonically, XCOM loses the war anyway...

Finally, I returned to an old favourite of mine – XCOM Enemy Unknown. I’ve been trying to beat this game on Classic / Ironman difficulty for nearly eight years and have been beaten each time by a combination of random number generation and probably poor choices. I might give it another go, but try to employ the strategy it gives me, rather than trying to force my own through.

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!

 

No Game New Year: XCOM Enemy Within. Or not...

Because I'm behind in my posts, this one will take me up to probably last Wednesday...

For the last week and a half I've been having a few runs at XCOM: Enemy Within. I say a few runs because this game is HARD. I would like to say, by way of introductory remarks, that I love this game; I was so glad XCOM was re-made for the current generation and I am even happier that it found its way onto the Xbox 360. So if what I write here comes across as negative, it comes from the frustration of it being an incredibly hard game to beat.

For those of you who don't remember, XCOM was originally a series of games by MicroProse that came out in the mid-late 90's. The premise was simple: Aliens invade Earth, and as the paramilitary global organisation XCOM, you have to defend it. What wasn't so common for the time were strategy games. The idea was that you commanded the entire war, from the building of your base and its location, to the deployment of your troops and interceptors. And then when you'd done all that, you got to command your troops in a turn-based strategy game. I remember the game being very hard, and not getting all that far with it, but it was a lot of fun and very well put together for the time(1994!).

This was the case for the first XCOM game, which was actually called UFO: Enemy Unknown. I played this one a lot when I was thirteen, and for a long time after! I understand XCOM: Terror from the Deep, released in a similar manner, worked in a similar manner, though I never played it. Then in 1997 we got XCOM: Apocalypse, which was set much further ahead into the future and involved the use of different aliens, an enemy Human faction which was interesting, and for the first time a real-time strategy game. Without wishing to go off on one too heavily about the history of gaming, at that time there were A LOT of Real Time Strategy games being published and this was MicroProse's attempt at keeping with the times. I don't know why but I never really got in to this one all that much. Maybe it's my almost OCD-like need to play the games through in order, but I always found myself wishing I was playing something else whenever I gave it a go.

Then we got my personal favourite of the original series: XCOM Interceptor. This took the battle to Space, where you would build space stations and star-fighters to combat the aliens. All the trademark XCOM features were there - base management, research, defence, strategic deployment - but with one difference. Instead of the combat section of the game being a strategy game, Interceptor put you in control of one of your fighters in a space-combat simulator. While there were other games that did this particular mechanic better, it was nice to be a part of the action rather than just controlling it, and I had a lot of fun blowing up aliens and their bases - though I did find that, contrary to what I'd come to expect from XCOM games, the combat section of the game was very easy, with only the last mission of the game proving to be an insurmountable challenge. Then again, I did set the difficulty to Very Easy. I wasn't very good at games back then. I'm still not, as a matter of fact.

Sadly, Interceptor suffered three major flaws that I will now reveal to you in ascending order:

1. There were only three fighters on the XCOM side and only about five for the Aliens. Apparently this was due to time constraints, but when at the same time I also played X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which were much older games and managed more ships than that for both of their factions, it was a little disappointing.
2. There was no way to skip the battles. This isn't really a problem when you're at the start of the game and you're thinking, 'oh wow, I'm fighting Aliens!' but late-game when you've got eight bases and your scanners keep picking up small patrols, you find yourself wishing that you could let the AI handle small skirmishes like this so you could concentrate on the bigger picture. It doesn't break the game at the lowest difficulty level, which is how I played it, but it would have been nice to have had the option.
3. The Curse of Windows 98. A lot of older games have some version of this, relevant to the operating system of the time. But for those of us who don't play games on PC, let me tell you what this meant for Interceptor: It wasn't that it wouldn't work on Windows 98. On the contrary, it worked perfectly fine on Windows 98. It's just that it absolutely refuses to work on anything else. And what is really a kick in the teeth for this game is that the problems start to occur later on in the game. It pretends to work, but then when the Aliens start sending jammer probes to block your research, you can't do anything about it. You can send your interceptors, but when you launch the mission, the probe is not there, and you can do nothing to destroy it. But I thought I'd try to live with that and manage to play through the game with this added challenge (The probes disappear by themselves after a while.) But no. At some point, you start being attacked by space pirates, and when you finally uncover their base, you find the same impossible thing happens - it doesn't appear in the mission. This one is game breaking, and the reason I haven't played it since I discovered this in 2005.

As you can see, I'm rather bitter about that last point. MicroProse went out of business in 2000, and there was no development team to patch the game to stop this from happening. Some modders have now fixed this but I don't know enough about configuring PC files to implement these changes. It looked like XCOM was gone forever... (at least, officially. There were some 'spiritual successors' out on the indie market at some point. But apart from watching TotalBiscuit videos, I don't pay much attention to that either.)

Then in 2012, Firaxis and 2K Games released XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This was a re-make of the original title and by GOD, this was good...

The basic premise of the game was exactly the same. Aliens come down, you have to defend the Earth. However, the new game did a lot to bring the game in line with the current generation. There was a graphical overhaul with the inclusion of actual characters who would talk to you in an advisory capacity. A lot of the tedious micro-management from the old games - supplies, low-level staff etc - was taken out, allowing you to focus on the game. The missions from the old game were there, but there were also some new ones - Abduction missions, Escort missons, and Bomb Disposal. And the tactical section of the game was even more streamlined.

There were a lot of changes here that fans of the originals weren't happy with. For example, the previous games had an 'action points' system, where your troops had a certain number of points to spend on their actions for that turn, and you could squeeze maximum efficiency out of your troops depending on how much their actions cost. In the new game, your troops have a maximum of two actions - you can move, THEN shoot or use an item. It has to be in that order. If you try doing it the other way around, you'll find that your shoot or item ends your turn. Your troops evolve and get more skills as you're going along - and you're going to need those extra skills and abilities, because some of the enemies you come across are incredibly hard to deal with.

I managed to finished the game on Normal difficulty after a few false starts in about a month. And ever since then I've been trying to beat it on Classic (Hard) difficulty. And I usually fall flat on my face after a few months in game time. The game is very brittle to the point where if you make a mistake and your soldiers die, it is incredibly hard to pull it back after that. Permadeath is in action here; if your most experienced soldiers get killed and you've got no one to replace them, you've got nothing but rookies to fill in those gaps, and you find yourself missing the shotguns and rocket launchers that your veterans bring to the battle. Battles become stupidly hard, and more often than not you'll find it impossible to pull a campaign victory.

Ultimately the greatest strength of the game is also its most frustrating feature: You can lose. In this Call-of-Duty-era of gaming, this is not actually all that common. In a great many shooters for example, you can play the game for 10 hours and probably win because there is no penalty for dying other than having to start the level again. It's the same for open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto; there's rarely a penalty for dying that can't be solved by buying all your weapons etc back. In XCOM, I have definitely lost the game more often than I have won it, or even done reasonably well. If you run out of money, you can't hire more soldiers. If you can't hire more soldiers, you can't fight battles. If you don't hire engineers, you can't build satellites that stop the world going mad (usually how you end up losing.) If you don't hire Researchers, you will fall behind in the technology stakes. Get even one of these things wrong and you could potentially de-rail the whole game. Do this enough times and it does get quite frustrating, and that is why sometimes I put the game away for a couple of months - I'm just not getting anywhere!

That having been said, I would normally come back to it after a few months. Just one more go! Until XCOM: Enemy Within came out...

So the game I'm playing at the moment is Oblivion and this one is going to take me ages. I've always got things to say about XCOM so I'm going to leave Enemy Within until next week. I'll see you then!