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!

Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Doom and Dark Void

 This week I’ve mainly been playing Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. I mentioned last week that I’m enjoying this game a lot more now that I’m in the frame of mind to go around the different areas grinding for Experience Points, but first impressions of the game are a little misleading in this respect, as there is really only one way you can go at the start of the game – the Nashkel Mines is the first major dungeon – and if you don’t go there reasonably quickly, certain party members leave you behind. I wouldn’t want to have to handle the first part of the game without Jaheira’s healing powers! Now that I’m well into the game, having cleared the Cloakwood mines – the second major dungeon – I’m touring round the Southern part of the world map, trying to tie up all my loose ends before I head to Baldur’s Gate itself.

Apparently he gets much
better later on...

The other thing to keep in mind was that while I was initially willing to allow some of my party members to die, I’m building a party around the six I have now that I’m happy with: The main character is a Paladin called Roisin, who I’ve given a two-weapon fighting style. Imoen, of course, is essential for her trap-finding skills and as her main weapon is her bow, she also serves as most of the party’s artillery. I picked up Branwen in Nashkel, and I held on to Jaheira as well – multiple healers in the party give it a little more longevity, especially in the later areas of the game where you need to cast several healing spells to heal a party member completely. Dynaheir is my wizard, and she is at her most useful when her area-of-effect spells flatten a combat encounter before it even starts. Finally, I have Rasaad, a monk who is new to the Enhanced edition of the game I have. He can do a decent amount of damage up close, but doesn’t seem to be able to take much himself – I had to use magic items[1] to bring his Armour Class down[2] to a reasonable level, and even then, he appears to get hit a lot and doesn’t have a particularly high hit dice.[3] Nonetheless, I’m happy with the party I’ve got now and I’ll hopefully see it through to the end!

I mean, I'm assuming this is an updated
version of the Revenant...

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Doom on the PS4. I’ve had this a while and I’ve just gotten around to playing it; I’m liking it so far! While the graphics and gameplay have obviously been enhanced by increasingly good technology since the 1993 originals I still play from time to time, the fast and frantic game play is still there and makes for some intense, thrilling battles. Hit-scan weapons are thankfully a thing of the past, but it’s a lot harder to dodge projectiles unless you’re really on it with your strafing! I’m not very far into the game yet, but it’s one I will come back to when I need a cathartic shooting spree. I don’t have a PlayStation Plus account though, so you’re unlikely ever to see me on Multiplayer.

Has the same 7th gen problem of having
unnerving eyes...

Finally, I downloaded and played Dark Void on Xbox Games with Gold on the Xbox 360. This is an interesting game that looks like it’s going to be a jetpack-based shoot-em-up, but then the main plot kicks in and it’s a 7^th-gen cover-based shooter with some jetpack elements added later. It’s based just before the World War II, where your plane crashes somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle and you find yourself under attack from strange metal beings called The Watchers. It’s alright; it’s tried to implement verticality into cover-based shooting which was a brave move, and I probably would have liked it a lot more were it not for the fact that I’ve just played through Uncharted 2. I’ve heard that Dark Void was something of a let-down in its potential, but I’ll try to beat it and see for myself!

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[1] Monks can’t usually wear armour.

[2] Baldur’s Gate is based on the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons’ weird THACO – To Hit Armour Class Zero – system, and any enhancement to your armour class goes down rather than up.

[3] D8, I think.

Backlog Beatdown: Rimming the Sky with Skyrim

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

Hagravens are vile creatures...

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

Ugh. Spiders.

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

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

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

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

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

Final Score: 4/5: Great game

Last Week's Games: Beating Lego Star Wars with a 4-Year Old

 Many of you will have noticed that I’ve had a lot of time this week playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga with my daughter Jessie. Last week, we managed to beat the story mode of the game! It was an interesting journey, to say the least; beating a game of any significant length with a four-year old as the co-pilot is a fresh challenge on what by now is a very familiar game to me, but we managed it! But I’ve covered Lego Star Wars a lot on this blog so I’m going to use this one to assess what Jessie thought of it:

May or may not be a
screenshot from the game.

She liked playing her favourite characters from the films, and as they all appear in the game at some point, she had a lot to choose from. She initially preferred the Jedi characters: apart from the fact that everybody loves the Jedi, these are the characters that are presented to you first so she’d got to grips with their mechanics and preferred to play as them where possible. She also liked playing as the droid characters, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. Later in the game, she liked playing as Chewbacca and Wicket because she thinks they’re cute, which is as good a reason as any. Of course, the Ewoks are adorable, but Chewie has some great additions to his character. He doesn’t handle any differently to Han Solo or Princess Leia, and you play as those characters a lot in the second half of the game, but his melee attack involves pulling Storm Trooper’s arms out of their sockets, and when he tries to put a Storm Trooper helmet on, it doesn’t fit properly.

Jessie also really enjoyed the parts of the game that didn’t involve combat, including the “build-its” and the puzzles. Putting those elements in the game was a great idea: In many cases, you need to do these to progress the game, but as they don’t involve any fighting, it was a great way to help Jessie feel like she was getting through the game. It also helped on those situations where the build-its have to be done during a fight, since I could use the “other” character to keep the heat off Jessie while she did the build-it – occasionally it worked the other way around as well! Therefore, Jess likes the droid characters: They’re necessary to get through the game by activating their switches and doors, but with little-to-no combat ability, the fighting can be left to someone else.

Post-Game Hero Shot.

She wasn’t so keen on the boss battles where it was necessary to fight. This only happens a few times – certain sections of the fight with Darth Maul, Count Dooku and the final battle with Darth Sidious – but the boss characters are harder to deal with for someone still getting to grips with 3D movement in video games, and she doesn’t like the feeling of being in way over her head. She liked it better in those boss battles where she could play as a droid, leave the fighting to me, and use the functional aspects of the environment to help the fight along.

She didn’t like the flying levels – those levels where it is necessary to pilot a flying vehicle – much either, because the speed of the movement and the smorgasbord of obstacles that very often litter those levels made them frustratingly hard. She did, however, enjoy them a lot more when it becomes an option to play with the Millennium Falcon. Even though it doesn’t handle substantially differently to most of the other ships you can play, she loved the idea of playing it!

Our Victory Pose!

It’s also worth noting that in most cases we wouldn’t do more than a couple of levels in a day. With games, stories, films, lessons or whatever it happens to be, the level of engagement lives and dies on its pacing, particularly with young children. Trying to beat entire sections of the game completionist-style would have sucked a lot of the fun out of it for Jessie!

I’ve got some other Lego games – Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter – and we might play these in the future, once Jessie has been introduced to them!

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

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

A nasty piece of work,
but brilliantly played.

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

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

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

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

A simple but very entertaining game!

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

Last Week's Games: Lego Star Wars, Skyrim

 I knew it! I knew it was a good idea to hold on to Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I knew I’d want to come back to it eventually!

As regular readers will know, my daughter Jessie has recently taken an interest in Star Wars. She’s now watched all nine mainline films and a lot of the Clone Wars series, and last I looked she was going through the Lego Star Wars series as well. At some point, I asked her if she wanted to play Lego Star Wars with me on the Xbox 360. She did, and thus began my next trek through the Star Wars Saga…

We haven't even touched
Free Play mode yet...

In all honesty, this is one of the many things that Lego games were designed for – a safe, easy game aimed at younger players, but enough implied humour to entertain older gamers, and collections and achievements for the hardcore completionists. If you’ve been following my blog long enough you’ll remember that this is one of the few games I’ve actually managed to complete 100%, so there’s nothing left for me to do in the game now – except to guide my young daughter through the game. It will take a while before she builds up the skill and dexterity needed to handle games much more intense than this, but Lego Star Wars is designed almost perfectly. Jessie doesn’t like fights – at least, not ones where she doesn’t know she can win – and is happy to let me handle most of the enemies. Instead, she likes using the force on the build-its, and the droid characters to do their various utility functions in the game. She’s still got a role to play in the game, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the combat, which she can do when pressed and really enjoys piloting the vehicles. She’s less fond of the vehicle levels, and there’s some tricky platforming sections she had to drop out of the game to allow me to complete. She also absolutely refused to take part in the section from Revenge of the Sith where Anakin fights Obi-Wan. But ultimately gaming is and always has been a large part of my life, and it’s lovely to be able to share some of that with Jessie.

Hagravens start out tough, but can be
dispatched with a well-placed hit...

The other game I’ve been playing for far too long over the last few weeks is Skyrim, and I’ve reached as deep into the game as I’ve ever managed before. It certainly requires some pacing! I became briefly involved with a discussion on Facebook about the quality of the game; it’s obviously very good but some questions were raised about the fact that there is so much optional content to pursue. I understand what they were going for; the mainline quest is what you must complete to beat the game but at the same time there are other situations in Skyrim and other stories to be told. If the aim was to increase the immersion of the game though, it doesn’t really work, as it requires you to suspend your disbelief that the main quest is happy to wait around for you to do it while you look for ten bear pelts, or get involved in some other side quests that have absolutely nothing to do with it. I also find myself spending a significant amount of time trying to sell or store all my loot, so I don’t overextend my character’s weight limit! For these reasons, I tend to like Skyrim best when I can set myself a goal – clear out a dungeon, resolve this particular quest, that sort of thing – and can therefore keep the game going, rather than be overwhelmed by how much there is to do. In terms of scope, yes, Skyrim is amazing. But does a world really want to wait around for you to happen to it?

You may also have noticed that there was no painting blog for December. Sorry about that! Through all the things I had to do during that month, painting was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I have been working on something for this month which I’m hoping to finish in time.

And there’s a very special blog coming this Sunday…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles, requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to play a relatively short game!

Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system
that goes across your field of view.

Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.

Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations, asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent, an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1] Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with games like this, nothing is as it seems…

Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.” There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of “haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.

No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the
blood splatter effects on the screen.

As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well; we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it, rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK. What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well. Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely, but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a unique if unsettling experience.

Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

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[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Might and Magic X, Syndicate

This has been a busy week for me with birthday arrangements, so I’ve not found much time to play many games – and the one I managed was another pick-up-and-play job.

How many of you have wondered what
Goro is packing down there?

I speak of course of Mortal Kombat, where after trying for weeks to beat the game with Scorpion, I finally managed to do it with Johnny Cage. It’s been an interesting journey for me since I have been recognising a lot more of the technical aspect of the game, rather than just brutalising the opponents, fun though that is. In Cage’s case, what won it for me was his special moves – for their additional effects as much as their damage. As with most of the characters, using them is not without risk, as they don’t return to their ready positions for a second or two, which makes them vulnerable to reprisals. With Cage, the Shadow Kick gives a great knockback effect, but if your opponent blocks it, they can very easily follow through with additional attacks. The Force Ball, however, won the game for me, because it stuns your opponent for a precious moment for you to either get your bearings or launch a follow-up attack. I never even did the split punch, as the command for it is fiddlier than the version that appeared on the Sega Megadrive and it was rarely useful.

As usual, the end of the game came down to the last credit (I wouldn’t have it any other way!) and a lot of it depends on what Shang Tsung morphs in to on the final level, but I managed to come through and beat the game. Cage’s ending, while not canon, nonetheless is representative of the direction his character made in the later editions of the game – in spirit, if not in activity!

The Naga Temple. Might need to grind some XP before
I tackle that bit again.

About a week ago I had a go with Might and Magic X on my laptop. Might and Magic sounds right up my alley in terms of game theme, but I’d never really played one before because the reviews I’d seen on the game were coming up at the bottom end of average at best. However, the games in the series were on sale, I bought it, and the other week I played it. I quite liked it, as well. It’s a role-playing game that basically works on a grid; even though it is a first-person game, the game works by moving your characters to certain squares on the grid and filling in the map from your line of sight as they go. On the one hand this is unrealistic, on the other hand, I quite like games that remember they’re only games, so I ran with it and was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having. The nearest game I’ve played to this so far has been the Legend of Grimrock, but the difference here is that the game progresses when you act, so whatever you can see will only move when you move. This works well for me as it gives me time to figure out what to do, as opposed to dealing with Grimrock’s horribly clunky interface in real time. Whether I’ll see it through to the end or not, I don’t know – it’s actually quite rare for me to do that with RPGs, as regular readers of the blog will know – but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

I played Syndicate at some point as well and managed to get through the level where you must make your way through the Downzone. This is interesting as you can no longer rely on your hacking powers to kill your enemies, as the better ones are shut down. It also ended in a boss battle where the enemy uses stealth, which took a few goes, mainly because he explodes when he dies, and because I didn’t realise this, he killed me too the first few times. It took the story in a direction where, as I’m sure is quite common in Cyberpunk games, the lines between good and evil are blurred, and you don’t know who to trust – a familiar trope, but it works well for these games.

Last Week's Games: The Ultimate Doom, Syndicate

This week I’ve spent most of my time playing the Ultimate Doom. I reached the end of the Inferno episode a week or so ago, and I’m now trying to play through the levels of the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed. I’d tried this before and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult these levels were, I don’t think I ever got past the first level when I played Doom before on the Xbox – and that’s when I was playing it on standard difficulty; I’m at Ultra Violence now! I ended up watching a video on YouTube to show me how to get past it, and while it helped me on the first level and shown me what to do on the second, I haven’t got the accuracy to pull it off yet. Hopefully I’ll do it in the future!

I've used this picture before, somewhere...

Now I’m aware that these levels are designed to be very difficult; indeed, the first two levels are supposed to be the hardest levels in the entire Doom franchise. I’ve also sung the praises of Id Software’s level design in the past, celebrating what they managed to achieve with very limited resources. So, are the levels on Thy Flesh Consumed well-designed? I reckon they are. They’re tough, no doubt about that, but they include some quite unique puzzles of deciding what to do and in what order, knowing where the weapons are, and what is appropriate to use and when. For example, before last week I’d never even have considered wasting ammo for the plasma gun on shotgunners. These days, I’ve developed an instinct for making sure all the hitscan-wielding enemies die very quickly, as they’re arguably more deadly than even the toughest demons.

If you don’t know, hitscan weapons are guns in early video games that don’t faff about with things like bullet velocity or trajectory – you point at the thing, press fire, and the shot instantly connects. In Doom, this is how the Pistol, Shotgun and Chain gun work, and why the Shotgun is pretty much the most commonly used weapon. If enemies have such weapons, which a number of early ones do in Doom, there’s usually a delay between the monster seeing you and shooting you to give you time to react – but if they get a shot off, you have no way of dodging it. This is different from the fireballs launched by the Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, as those enemies shoot projectiles you can see coming and can dodge. It’s also why the Spider Demon is the final boss of the game, rather than the Cyber Demon which guards the end of the second episode. Even though the latter has the stronger gun, its shots are easily seen coming, whereas the Spider Demon has a hitscan chain gun and you don’t get as much of a chance to dodge. (It’s still quite easy to beat if you don’t kill the other demons, as it will be distracted by them.)

So, defeating these levels will be a learning process, but I’m happy to accept the challenge!

Looks like quite a nice day, actually!

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Syndicate on the Xbox 360. I mentioned this last week and having played through a little more of it I can say that this is probably going to be another average game. It’s got some good ideas, like hacking the enemy chips to force them to break cover or shoot their allies. But in fight after fight, their use becomes quite routine, and the occasions where their use is obvious don’t contribute to the challenge of the game. I’d also probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t played the first two Bioshock games to their endings, as what they do to develop the idea of single player shooters added a lot more to the experience. Some critics have said Syndicate was rubbish, and I’m not disagreeing with them; most of them will have played better games than this. It’s not as bad as all that, and I’m having a decent amount of fun with it, but I doubt I’ll feel the need to come back to it once I reach the end.

Let’s see if I can beat a game before the end of the month…

Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: Speculations, Sine Mora, Warhammer Battlemarch, Anno 1602

It’s been a while since the last blog, sorry about that. The main reason, and one of the main problems I have with working from home,[1] is that I find it very difficult to justify doing any of my own things until I’ve done all my work. This amounts to filming a few videos, and uploading them, but until I’ve done that, I find it very hard to justify writing blogs or even doing my own music videos that some of you may have seen.

On top of that, I’ve been giving some serious consideration as to where this blog is going to go in the future. I came to within one post of stopping this blog altogether and moving it to Wordpress because I thought I’d overextended the picture limit on Blogger; this turned out not to be the case, but I have some other things to think about as well. Obviously, I talk about video games nearly every week, but I find myself with a lot more things to say about hobby games as well, especially now I’m at the point in my life where I can play more of them – if in a slightly different way to how I’ve done it in the past! I’ve been playing a lot more games with my daughter, for example, and talking about that is usually on a very different level to talking about games I’ve been playing by myself on a console or computer.

So, I might do some less-regular blogs regarding certain other aspects of playing games. With the hobby games, I rarely find myself with enough to say in one week to justify doing a new blog, but maybe after a month I could find some things to say. Painting is another one, I go through batches of not painting anything at all but if I could get something done every month it might be the spur I need to proceed – and with the new 40K due in a few weeks, I’m going to need to get a move on with my painting! And I’m still hopeful that I might be able to do an entire campaigns worth of blogs on certain of my board games, though that’s still in the pipeline for now.

A beautiful but deadly game...

So, what I have I been playing lately?

Quite a few new games, actually. I downloaded Sine Mora on the Xbox 360 a week ago and I’ve had a go on it; it’s been a long time since I’ve played an honest-to-goodness shoot-em-up and I really enjoyed the opportunity to play it. It seems to have an interesting story as well, though it is also ferociously difficult after the first couple of levels. The time-based mechanics are interesting, and the shooting and boss battles are fun, so I’ll keep coming back to it whenever I need to let my brain unwind from the day!



My painting isn't as good as that!

I’ve also had a go with Warhammer Battlemarch, the Warhammer strategy game released on the Xbox 360. This game is probably the closest a relatively modern release got to Shadow of the Horned Rat, which I absolutely loved back in the day and still dip in to every now and then. You have an option to play through an Empire, Orc and Chaos campaign, and for now I favour the Empire (that was my army when I played Warhammer!) The interface is a massive faff, but I get used to it, and I’ve been using a rather slow-paced shooting strategy where I get close enough to the enemy for them to see me and approach, shoot them as much as I can and if there’s anything left when they get close enough, finish them off in close combat.

"In 1602, we sail the open seas..."

Finally, I’ve been playing Anno 1602 on the PC. I played a demo of this years ago, I think even before the millennium, and even though I hadn’t played it since I never forgot it and wanted to give it another go. It’s a great colonisation strategy game; it looks gentle, but it isn’t afraid to let you fail if you’re not careful!

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[1] I’m not going to complain too much about that though, at least I’m working; some people aren’t so fortunate!

Backlog Beatdown: Being some sort of James Bond figure in Alpha Protocol

I’d been aware of Alpha Protocol through several Youtube videos I’ve watched, but the influencer who said it was good to the point of being worth buying was Metal Jesus. I’ve been playing it over the last couple of weeks and managed to reach the end:

Alpha Protocol is an action-RPG, with a greater emphasis on the action than we might expect from an RPG. You play as Michael Thorton, an agent recruited into Alpha Protocol, a clandestine United States Agency. You are sent to a mission in Saudi Arabia to assassinate a terrorist leader; when transpires that all is not what it seems, you go on the run as a rogue agent, working your way across Asia and Central Europe to piece together the evidence you need to clear your name. Along the way, you’ll make friends, enemies, and uncover a conspiracy to cause structural and economic disaster on a huge scale…

The game has two main elements. The first is the action sequences, where you run, gun and stealth your way through a series of field missions. The second is the dialogue sequences, where you have conversations with people, developing your relationship with them depending on what approach you take. How you handle these missions is up to you but for every choice, there is a consequence…

I'm having some faff uploading pictures
so I'm recycling my old ones...

Many games boast that latter point, but in Alpha Protocol it is true. There are three main campaign areas, and countries you visit later make references to the events that happen in the previous ones. How you treat various characters makes a difference to what extent they will support you later. And some people like certain styles of attitude better than others – people rarely respond positively to aggression, but some characters like the professional dialogue, whereas others prefer the confident and suave talking.

All of this promises much, but sadly falls just short of delivering. The action sequences work, but the shooting is a little off. The viewpoint is over-the-shoulder third person shooting, which is great for short-to-mid-range combat, and not much use for anything else. You can create a build that focuses on melee combat, for example, but melee combat in Alpha Protocol is not fluid enough for this to be a consistently good option. Thankfully I’d decided from the beginning that I was going to focus on pistols and assault rifles –the two most standard weapons in the game but the ones that gave me the most flexibility and strategy. Also, the interface is very clunky; even in 7^th generation games it should never take more than one button press to access your map and switching between weapons is a lottery, gambling on which of the directional buttons brings up which menu.

The dialogue sequences work OK as well, although given the huge number of variables involved with making this, there were some slips – talking about in-game situations before I’d found out about them, repeating lines of dialogue from previous conversations, that sort of thing. I’ve managed one playthrough so far so I don’t know how much difference taking different options makes; it would be good if it was substantial, but I’m not hopeful. Nonetheless, it’s voice-acted very well, the graphics look good for their time and the sound is fine, with the Brayko boss battle being particularly memorable!

But it's well worth showing this bit again!

With all that having been said, I’ve really enjoyed Alpha Protocol. I could have used a roadmap to unlock more achievement points by aiming for certain results, but I found it oddly liberating just to play through the game, pick the dialogue options and courses of action that made the most sense at the time, and seeing what happened as a result. I was content to let my mistakes be mistakes, for example one NPC that I had a lot of investment in died near the end of the game because I went the wrong way to try to rescue her. It’s by no means a perfect game, but it’s an experience that relatively few people have had, and one I was very pleased to get to the end of. I’d recommend giving it a go if you fancy doing something a little bit different with shooting and role-playing games.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.