No Game New Year: Street Fighter IV, Arcade Edition.

After the debacle with Final Fantasy VII, I was rather miffed that I wouldn’t get to see the game through to the end and therefore felt the need to kick something’s ass. Hence the choice for this week’s game:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition

Another free download from XBL Gold, Street Fighter is an intellectual property that few are unfamiliar with. Most of us have played an iteration of Street Fighter II back in the mid 90s. Some have even seen the films; Street Fighter: The Movie is probably my favourite film for “so bad it’s good.” But I haven’t played a full Street Fighter game since then.

Not managed to beat anyone playing as Fei Long yet...

I have heard that, out of the fighting games on the Xbox 360, Street Fighter IV was the most technical. Certainly the set combos are hard to do, which means I probably won’t do very well with the challenges in ‘Trial’ mode. I’ve mainly been playing Arcade mode, and of course online. I’ve been having good fun with both, in Arcade I particularly enjoy the cut-scenes at the start and end of the game depending on who you’re playing. Some of the characters aren’t too familiar to me and it’s good to get a bit of context with each one. While I don’t very often win Online, (I’m around 40% wins at this point,) I think I’m competent enough to offer a challenge to all but the most hardcore players.

That being said, I’ve noticed a couple of small but significant ways in which Street Fighter IV is different to the other fighting games I’ve played on the Xbox 360:[1]

Firstly, Street Fighter differentiates between fast and slow attacks more than any fighting game I’ve played. Normally, a character’s faster or slower moves would be a standard part of the move set, but Street Fighter actually has buttons for the different speeds of attack that offer a balance of speed and power. This can result in some technical situations where you have a split second to counter a slow move with a fast one; it’s risky, but it can be done – more so than with the other fighting games.

Secondly, the controls are difficult. The basic controls work OK, but the combination of directional waggles and buttons needed to do the Super and Ultra moves are really hard to do – and that’s if you can even remember them. Of course, there’s a reason for this: If you look at other fighting games for the 360 you’d find their control system optimised for its controller. Street Fighter, on the other hand, was very much designed for an arcade stick. Some of the moves, for example, require you to do a 360 degree rotation of the analogue stick – quite hard to do with just your thumb. And some of the moves require you to use all three punch or kick buttons. They’ve tried to get around this by mapping this function to the left bumper and left trigger. When you get a combination that requires you to make two complete rotations of the left analogue stick then pull the left trigger with the same hand, it’s nigh on impossible.

I’ve only played as four characters so far: Ryu; Ken, E. Honda and Ibuki. The first two are good all-round characters and stand a reasonable chance against anyone, but I’ve really been enjoying E. Honda. He was actually my favourite character from the earlier games and not much has changed! He’s easy to underestimate because he’s fat and slow, but his strong kicks have a surprising amount of reach and do a lot of damage. And if he gets in close, he can do a lot of damaging combos as well. Plus, his diving headbutt provides him with some much needed speed in the game. He’s got me my highest proportion of online wins so far! Ibuki, on the other hand, I haven’t been enjoying so much; she relies too much on speed in what is already a very quick game and doesn’t fit my play style at all.

Of course, this being a Capcom game, I’ll have to download a lot of DLC in order to complete the game fully and earn all the achievement points, which isn’t going to happen for a while. Now that I’ve completed the game with four characters, I’ll probably mark the game off as complete and move on to something else next week.

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[1] Which for the record are Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us.

Matt's Tactics: Cower and Camp

I had a 750pt game of Warhammer 40,000 in the Dudley store this afternoon with a young man called Sam. I played my Khorne Bezerker force against his Astra Militarum, or Imperial Guard as most of us know it. Here was my army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	110	748
	Power Weapon	15
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Ichor Blood	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5

Sam had a Vanquisher, two Sentinels, a unit of Rocket Launchers and two 10-man squads with a Command group. The scenario was Purge the Alien (1 victory point for each unit completely destroyed) and we rolled the diagonal deployment. The terrain was laid out quite densely for a 4x4 board, with buildings in every corner, but I was still going to have to run my Bezerkers at him before I did any damage, and running in to a gun line of Guard is a very dangerous game indeed…

Sam literally came out all guns blazing by firing the Vanquisher cannon at my Bezerkers who were taking cover behind the building. In but the first turn, he managed to wipe out five from the first squad, and – due to some rather fortunate scatter dice rolls – four from the second. That was over half my army and I hadn’t even made a move.

Hiding in the building was the best they could do? Really?

What I decided to do was move my remaining Berzerkers right in to the building where they were out of line of sight. There were now few enough of them that I managed to do this with all eight models that remained (My Chaos Lord was among them,) forcing Sam to move his models in order to wipe out my remaining troops. Curiously enough, Sam didn’t rise to the bait. I’m not sure what he thought I was going to do if he did, but not once during the remainder of the game – which would have lasted at least another four turns – did he attempt to take the fight to me.

On the third turn I bought on the Defiler. On the turn it arrived, I fired the Battle Cannon onto a unit of Guardsmen standing at the back of the board doing very little. I killed all but two of them, who promptly failed their leadership check and ran off the board, giving me two victory points – one for the squad, and a secondary one for first blood.

Sam directed his rocket launchers at my Defiler after that, immobilising it and eventually destroying it – but it was too late. With only one victory point, and no hope of getting another, the game was mine once I’d rolled for Random Game Length; I won 2-1.

Sam took the defeat well, fair play to him. And a win is a win, no matter how it comes about – but somehow I can’t help the feeling I didn’t really deserve this one. Khorne Bezerkers are supposed to be ferocious super-warriors who seek out battles and slaughter, and I won the battle by getting half of them killed and hiding the others out in a building like a bunch of frightened guinea-pigs. The shot with the Defiler was a gamble, and if it hadn’t worked I probably wouldn’t have won, but that literally was the only reason I did – by having the bigger gun and getting in the first kill.

The one positive thing I will say about it is that the Bezerkers at least did their job in being fearless. Had anybody else taken that many casualties in one turn, they would have needed a panic check – chances are they would have failed, run off the board and given the game to my opponent. So I guess it was a viable tactic, and one that probably wouldn’t have worked with any other unit. It’s just not what you envisage when you take Khorne Bezerkers to battle!

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!

No Game New Year: Dark Souls

It hasn't escaped my attention that my blogging has been somewhat inconsistent of late. Usually the reason for this is that I haven't had time to write a blog about what games I'm playing. So to counter this, all subsequent No Game New Year posts - or indeed anything I write on the subject of getting through video games - will be 700 words or thereabouts.

With that in mind...

Dark Souls

So for the past couple of days I’ve been playing Dark Souls, a game of some renown amongst the so-called “Hard Core.” For the rest of us, Yahtzee sums up the core of the game quite well: “[You] must best a series of castles, dungeons and bosses by doing the equivalent of firing yourself from a cannon at them an infinite number of times.”

It’s true; the game is very hard. Horribly unforgiving, it doesn’t suffer fools or their mistakes. This action/horror RPG is frustrating to play, depressing to experience and has probably by now caused several cases of advanced delusionary schizophrenia.

And do you know what? I love it.

 

I’ve played most of the RPGs for the Xbox360 and a significant number of them for the Xbox and other systems. The high-fantasy swords and sorcery basically-the-same-plot-each-time-but-with-slightly-different-controls are enjoyable enough for the first few hours but get a bit samey after a while, when you realise you’ve been playing for two hours and made absolutely no progress in the game.

Dark Souls is different. Its setting is of a dying world largely populated with undead, lending itself to its dark, oppressive atmosphere straight away. There are no elves, dwarves, orcs or equivalent: Here you’re a former human, now an undead soul, trying to battle your way for something remotely resembling a purpose. I say this because I know no better. There’s not much exposition that explains the plot, and such that there is comes from talking to the VERY small number of NPCs you happen across on your travels. It actually is your story.

It also does away with a lot more of the common RPG tropes, which is very refreshing. For a start, the Tutorial - such as it is - explains the game mechanics and that is it. No button prompts, no hand holding. It will take you up to the first boss, and then you’re on your own. There’s also no village you use as a home base. Sure, there are bonfires, which is about as good as it gets for the purposes, and there are NPCs and Merchants scattered around the gaff, but nowhere you would feel safe or even free from the imposing environments. There’s none of this tedious mucking about with crafting, no lore explained to you in 24-page long books you can’t be bothered to read, no ‘relationship’ mechanic. It does a good job of keeping the focus where it needs to be: On the aforementioned Castles, Dungeons and Bosses.

Yes, this caught me out first time...

On that subject, there’s plenty going for it here as well. A lot of the regular enemies are easy enough to kill but can still make very short work of you indeed if you are careless. Anything tougher than a regular hollow man (who makes up the majority of enemies in the earlier section of the game) really does need thinking about in order to come up with strategies for beating them. The fact that I’m playing The Sorcerer adds to this, since I’ve got to decide whether to use my very limited magical resources for an easy kill, or risk attacking up close with my melee weapons and taking more damage. Dying – which I do a lot – sends you back to your last bonfire without any souls (awarded after you kill enemies, and brilliantly used as both currency and experience points) and though you do have a chance to recover what you’ve lost if you manage to get to the same point on your next run-through, it does shut down anybody who thinks they can get through the game by scum-saving.

So while it is perfectly possible to play this game for two hours and not get anywhere, it’s not because the game is designed with faffing around in mind. If you die, it’s because you’re rubbish. Or you’re careless, which is the same thing. Or it could be because you haven’t analyzed the attack patterns of the enemies yet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s something very old-school about this – and a welcome change of pace from the games I’ve been playing for the 360 this year!

No Game New Year: Charlie Murder

Charlie Murder was another game I downloaded off Xbox Live Games with Gold. I started playing it because I knew I only had a few days before my girlfriend came up for the weekend, and usually once she’s gone I have the urge to play a different game. I have no idea why things work like that, but they do! So I decided to play what howlongtobeat.com told me was a relatively short game.

The band sound as good as they look...

I think the game is best described as a side-scrolling beat-em-up with RPG elements. You play one of the five members of the titular Charlie Murder, a hardcore punk band that was murdered by a rival death metal band Gore Quaffer. You can have anything up to four players involved with the game playing as the other members of the band, and the main differences between the characters seem to be their special attacks. The ‘singer,’ Charlie, screams blue murder, as does his backing ‘vocalist’[1] Kelley “Skelekitten” Skitten. Guitarist Lester Deth makes fire shoot out of his guitar, and bassist Tommy Homicide makes acid-coated buzz-saws run across the floor. Finally, the drummer ‘The Rexecutioner’ makes bits of his kit fly around and hit things. You have a basic set of attacks, which when done in the right order can develop in to combos, and you have to battle your way through to the “battle of the bands” through witches, ninjas, pirates and devils to name but a few.

I probably would have enjoyed this game a lot more had I not spent most of the summer playing Streets of Rage II, which is the best game ever created and as far as I’m concerned was as good as side-scrolling beat-em-ups ever were or ever will be. The most enjoyable aspect of the game for me was, of all things, the story. This very rarely happens with me, because by the time I usually get to the end of a game that prides itself on its story, (40 hour RPGs, anyone?) I find the scale has been blown right out of proportion. But the game's story really did have an affect on me...

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the plot (it’s about right):

The game's protagonist, Charlie Murder, is a member of a garage punk band of the same name. Charlie kicks one of the founding members, Paul, out of the band, and begins to experience chart-topping success creating music in a new genre with new bandmates. Under the name Lord Mortimer, Paul forms his own band, Gore Quaffer, and makes a pact with a demon, raising an army of demons and undead in order to destroy Charlie Murder.[2][3] Charlie and his band are killed at the beginning of the game, fight out of hell, and are reborn on Earth amidst an apocalypse caused by Lord Mortimer and his army.[5][8] In order to stop the apocalypse, Charlie Murder must defeat Gore Quaffer in a Battle of the Bands.[4]

During the game, a series of flashbacks detail the game's backstory. As Charlie and his new band mates experience success without Paul, the latter becomes increasingly upset, eventually vowing revenge. The flashbacks neither paint Charlie Murder in a wholly positive light, nor Paul in a wholly negative light.

Now, spool time back to what is at this point eight years before the ever-moving now. I was playing in a band called Jack’s Legacy. There were four of us in the band, for the most part we were all good friends and we had the potential to be the best band in the world. That sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, or casting aspersions on everything I’ve done since then – but we just were that good. Sadly, a few months before we really hit our stride, our drummer joined a different band, which was no better than Jack’s Legacy, but a lot more busy. The inevitable happened, and a conflict of interest came up with the band’s schedules. This and some of the most underhanded shit-stirring I’ve ever had to deal with on the part of the drummer resulted in some blazing rows, missed gigs and an almost uncontrollable amount of bitterness on my part. We went our separate ways, and I’ve never spoken to him since then. And as the drummer has the luxury of not having to give a shit about what I think since the band broke up in February the following year, I doubt I ever will.

Can you see how the story in this game resonated with me? It struck a little too close to home. While I certainly never made a diabolic pact and murdered the rival band, I did sometimes wonder for a couple of years afterwards what might happen if I were to turn up at one of their gigs and smash up their equipment. I never did that either, I would never actually do such a thing, but it gave me a moment of grim satisfaction to think about it… but seriously, there is a flashback cut-scene where Paul, devoid of a band, is playing an acoustic guitar at an open mic while the audience is more interested in Charlie Murder on the TV screens behind him. I’ve definitely been there.

 

The game is presented very well and I was interested to see how it all worked out in the end. I got the ‘bad’ ending, and I suspect it was because I missed one of a set of five collectables. (I defeated the appropriate boss which left behind an eye; I didn’t realise you had to grab it, and by the time I came back the boss was gone.) But I got to the end credits, which was really all I was looking for with this one. There are more achievement points available for multiple play-throughs, but here my problems with the game start to come out of the woodwork:

First, I don’t think the game is anywhere near as good as Streets of Rage in terms of its fighting. While there are different combos available, there’s very little – if any – combining different attacks to do a huge amount of damage. There are different enemy varieties but you rarely have to alter your tactics in order to beat them. There are points in the game where you have to think about what you’re doing – boss battles, harder sets of enemies – but only because it’s hard, not because there’s a specific tactic you need to beat it.

Second, the pacing of the game was all off in terms of its checkpoints. I’m glad you have unlimited lives, don’t get me wrong, but having to go back and play a good half an hour’s worth again because you died seems a little cheap.

The RPG elements basically involve experience points, loot and shopping. There is a huge variety of collectables, clothes and accessories you can use to enhance your character, but having to equip everything slowed the game right down for me when I’d rather have been kicking the tar out of something. The XP system is reminiscent of role-playing games, but since the enemies scale up with your levels, it doesn’t make much difference. It’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, in that respect.

Finally, while the art style is excellent – and I will always praise a game for trying to do something other than gritty realism – it’s not really my taste. It all looked a bit… washy and grimy for my liking.

I might give it another go at some point, but for now, I’m pleased to have got to the end of the game so I can play something else, probably next week.

See you soon!

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[1] Of course, I use the terms ‘singer’ and ‘vocalist’ loosely…