Golden Axe: Taking 21 years to beat a 40-minute game.

Most people who play games have done Golden Axe. It is one of the staple games of the Sega Mega Drive, in a time when side-scrolling arcade beat-em-ups were being ported to the home consoles. I first played it when I was eight years old. I’m now twenty-nine and I’ve just beaten it for the first time. I shouldn’t be too pleased with that, but now that I’m in a better position to concentrate on what the game is doing and how to respond to it, I stood a much better chance of beating it and finally managed it yesterday.

Here’s a setting so generic it’s almost cliché: Evil monsters, lead by the horrendous Death Adder, have taken over the land and kidnapped the King and Princess. Three Heroes, from whom Death Adder has taken their family, their friend Alex and also in two cases their outer clothing, swear to bring vengeance down upon the evil commander. They are Ax Battler,[1] Gilius Thunderhead and Tyris Flare.

Mechanically, the characters are quite similar. They all move at roughly the same speed and have the same moves: While the move animations differ for each character, they all have a regular attack that can develop into a combo, a dash attack and a magic attack. It is only on the latter that there is any significant difference: Magic is generated by carrying potions. The more potions you are carrying at the time you cast the spell, the more damage you do, but each character has a different track of developing magic. Gilius the Dwarf, only has three levels. Ax has four. Tyris has six, but you need to collect four potions just to get her past the first level of spell.

Once I could tear myself away from the many
pictures of Tyris Cosplay girls, I found this one.

I chose Tyris for my playthrough. Apart from my usual habit of playing the female characters if there is one available, I also found she has the best dash attack – purely because the attack goes futher. The regular attack combo is all well and good but locks you in place for too long. The dash doesn’t do a huge amount of damage by itself but it means you’re moving more quickly than most of the enemies, so you can attack two or even three of them before they have the chance to react. The Magic attacks are powerful but with these brawler-style games, it is helpful to remember that these attacks also have a function: breaking stun-lock. If the enemies are attacking from both sides you often find that they’re attacking more quickly than your stun animation allows you to react. At that point, you can cast a spell and no matter how much damage it does, it also has the effect of knocking enemies away. It’s also useful for boss battles – not necessarily for damaging the bosses, but for clearing the screen of their lesser minions which can be a pain to deal with.

The dash attack, though, is where you do the real damage. The minimal amount of damage coincides with a knockback effect, which if you do it close enough to a ledge means that you can take out the minions with one hit. This is particularly true for Skeletons, second only to Dark Souls in how much of a pain in the anal cavity they are. They usually attack in numbers and take a good few attack combos to go down – but there’s no getting up from being pushed off a cliff.

This, I found, was the ONLY way to defeat the last level – the one where, having rescued the King and Princess, he sends you on your way to kill Death Adder’s mentor, Death Bringer. On the way through the castle you find narrow paths and ledges, and with several enemies appearing out of nowhere and attacking you at once, the best thing to do is to knock them off the edges. Problem solved.

The ending sequence is what I’d expect for this level of game; not brilliant, but the fun was in getting to the end and finally beating a game after 21 years. I probably won’t play this game alone again, but if someone wants to play the game 2-player co-op, I wouldn’t say no.

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[1] Ha!

Backlog Beatdown: Catherine. The game to play if you want to spend long portions of your evening going 'What was that all about?'

This is one of the weirdest, yet most enjoyable full-price games I’ve played on the Xbox 360 so far. Given that I own a LOT of games, that’s saying something.

I was inspired to pick up this game from Youtube’s The Completionist. I’d been aware of the game before now on the Xbox Live marketplace, but even though I thought it looked interesting, it was priced at a higher mark than I wanted to spend on a blind buy. Watching Jirard review the game changed that as I had a much better idea of what I was getting myself into, and when I could find a cheap-enough copy on Amazon (it’s not for sale in any of the game shops I usually attend,) I bought it quickly before anybody else did. Finding a physical copy of this game is not easy!

I actually had to click 'gameplay' to get an image off
Google that wasn't fan-art, Cosplay girls, or various
other people called Catherine including Zeta Jones.

The gameplay is divided into two sections, the main one being the Nightmare levels where you have to guide the lead character Vincent through a set of block-shifting wall puzzles to beat the level. It sounds simple, but the genius of this game kicks in when it starts adding variety to the blocks. Regular blocks can be moved and stood on. It’s when the game starts adding blocks that can’t be moved, or trapped blocks that will kill you if you don’t get off them straight away, or ice blocks that you can’t stop on, that things get really interesting. You have to plan your moves or you will box yourself in – but as the floor is always collapsing from underneath you, you can’t take too long about this or you will lose the level by falling off the wall.

I say this a lot but there’s something satisfyingly ‘old-school’ about games like this. Puzzle-action games[1] aren’t common in the triple-A market and you’d only buy a game like this if you knew what you were looking for; as such they’ve had something of a decline in popularity over the last decade. But it is a rare time with the Xbox 360 that I’ve had a genuine sense of satisfaction from finishing a level, as it is down to your skill as a player that you manage it. The game is hard, but not insurmountably so and while you’re essentially doing the same thing all the way through it, there’s always new mechanics to the blocks being introduced.

The other section of the game takes place in a bar, where Vincent hangs out with his friends. This, along with cut-scenes that would give Metal Gear Solid a run for its money in terms of length, is where the story unfolds: Unsure of whether to commit to his long-term girlfriend Katherine, Vincent accidentally cheats on her with a young sexy woman called Catherine. This is a part of the cause of the nightmares, where everybody appears to each other as sheep, and if they fall from the blocks they die in real life. Vincent’s anguish over having cheated on his girlfriend, his deteriorating mental state as he repeatedly gets drunk and loses sleep, and his gradual realisation that some of the people he speaks to in the bar are also having the strange dreams[2] is played out remarkably well. How you speak to and respond to people in the bar, and also text you keep getting from both girls, affects the ending of the game, of which there are a total of nine.

Yes... an Arse monster. Funnily enough not the
freakiest thing in the game...

In all cases, the game does not outstay its welcome. Even with the added block mechanics, solving wall puzzles does get old – but the game ends before that happens. The conversations in the bar happen on a timed basis, so you can’t talk to everyone because at some point, some of them will leave, forcing you to continue with the game. The cut-scenes do an excellent job of moving the story forward; the whole game is paced really well.

I’d more than recommend giving this one a go. I’ve got a lot more to unlock than anyone will manage on one play-through, but like most games, now that I’ve completed it I’m going to put it to bed until I feel like coming back to it.

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[1] The game is often referred to as a Puzzle Platformer, but as that kind of game almost always includes a jump function and Catherine doesn’t, I’ll call it what I want.

[2] Oh it’s not a spoiler, you’d have figured it out straight away.

Backlog Beatdown: Oh, oh, oh, Oh Borderlands we rruuunnn!!! (Sing to A Sort of Homecoming by U2)

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s because I’ve been playing Borderlands and it took me absolutely ages to complete…

I bought Borderlands in late 2013, before I started No Game New Year. I can’t remember why, most likely because I’d heard it was good and I needed a game to make up a special offer of buy two get one free. Borderlands is a first-person shooter action game with role-playing-game elements. The latter only applies in the woolliest sense; you have quests, variable weapons and armour, and you level up. The obvious comparison is with Fallout 3, but while Fallout prides itself on being gritty and realistic, Borderlands is very much high adventure and silly. And it took me a while to get in to it. I started the game several times and would get as far as the Pisswash Hurdle before I’d start wishing I was playing XCOM. But this time, after watching The Completionist get through the game, I thought I’d give it another go.

This time, I was better equipped to deal with it: Borderlands is a game best enjoyed in short bursts. You can have fun shooting up Skags, Bandits and Spiderants (your main variety of enemy for the first three quarters of the game) and doing fetch quests, and I was enjoying myself. But the pacing is rubbish. For every quest that advances the plot, there are several more side quests that make you feel like you’re jumping through hoops.

I chose Lilith for my playthrough. Her Phasewalk
ability got me out of a lot of tight situations!

The obvious counter-argument here is “Why don’t you skip all the side quests you don’t need to do and advance the plot?” Well, apart from looking for the achievement points, I’m in two minds about this: The game would have been better paced if there weren’t so much side questing. Yet if I skip it, I’d miss probably two thirds of the game. And I wasn’t in a hurry to get through the game. So I played for one, or two hours at a time, doing a few quests, increasing my headshot count and my skill with sniper rifles, and whenever I needed I break I’d stick the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on and have a go through Streets of Rage 2. The quests in Borderlands rarely presented a massive challenge; it was only the Arena levels and the final mission that gave me any significant trouble. I think this was because I’d done all the side quests and levelled up to the point where there wasn’t much challenge left in the game, but I have no problem with that; that’s the whole point of levelling up!

The pacing issues changes once you get to the end. After you beat the missions on The Salt Flats, the game gives you entirely plot-related missions, and a sense of urgency that you didn’t have before. At this point, the game becomes difficult to put down. The principle enemies you have at this point – the Crimson Lance soldiers – are far more challenging than the other enemies in the game and there’s a sense of achievement for taking them down, rather than mindlessly killing bandits. Also, the game becomes quite linear. This is no bad thing, as instead of skirting around obstacles you have to think about how you’re going to tackle them.

The final Boss Battle with The Destroyer took a while, because I didn’t realise there was more than one place you were supposed to be shooting. Once I’d figured it out, I did it one go, and was rewarded with the ending. I know Borderlands has been criticised for having a rubbish ending. It’s true that there is much left unexplained and that you don’t get what you came for in terms of your original objective. But to be honest, I didn’t mind. It fits in with the tone of the rest of the game and leaves a lot open for the DLC and sequels. The only thing that left me unsatisfied is that I would love to have known who the Guardian Angel was, and her level of investment in it.

I have the Game of the Year edition, meaning that I have the four DLC packs as well. I haven’t touched these yet; once I’d reached the end of the game I was ready to move on to something different. I might come back to it at some point. I certainly have no immediate desire to rush out and buy Borderlands 2, which I’ve heard is much the same game with some slight differences. I’m all Borderlandsed out at the moment!

Incidentally, I bought Catherine for the Xbox 360 during my playthrough. This brings the total number of games I’ve completed vs the games I’ve bought to 4-3 to me for this year. I’m toeing the line!

Star Wars: X-Wing Tournament at Titan Games Stourbridge

I took part in my first X-Wing Tournament today; it was a day of fierce competition and tense matches! I was running a Rebel squad, and my army list was as follows:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21	100
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
Y-Wing: “Dutch” Vander	23	37
Concussion Missiles	4
Cluster Missiles	4
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R2 Astromech	1

 

So, a lot of my strategy was centred on Dutch’s special ability, which is to allow a friendly ship within range 1 to acquire a target lock as soon as he does the same. I invariably deployed in a square formation, usually on the right corner of the board. Here’s how I got on:

My first opponent was Gareth, who was running the one thing I wasn’t expecting: Swarming rebels. Rebel fighters are usually quite expensive but when the Z-95 Headhunters were released for the Rebels, it became possible to buy ships for twelve points each, and since each has to take four hits to go down, tackling them head on is a messy business indeed. Gareth had six of them and also a Smuggler YT-1300 for some extra clout. I managed to take out one of the Z-95s, but after that they blocked anything that remotely resembled a clever move and I lost the game outright.

My second opponent was another guy called Matt, and he was running an interesting combination: two TIE fighters, a Firespray and a TIE Phantom. I recognised that there was going to be a lot of talent on the field, given that Imperial squads usually run numbers, so I decided to press my advantage by taking out the two TIE fighters first. Here the Y-Wing came into its own, as I managed to Ion Cannon the Firespray into an asteroid so that he couldn’t use his considerable firepower. After destroying that, the focus came onto the TIE Phantom and that proved to be a pain in the bum, since I just didn’t have the manoeuvrability to get a clear shot on it. I did my best with the Ion cannon, but in the end time was called and I won the game on points.

My third game was fun and extremely tense. Andy was running a peculiar set-up of Soontir Fel, Howlrunner, Backstabber, a Black Squadron and an Academy Pilot. This struck me as odd as it was the first time I’d fought a squadron with no duplicate pilots, which meant that for once it mattered which one I should take out first. Andy suffered from trying to fly the four TIE fighters in close formation; a powerful move if you can pull it off but if not you end up crashing into each other. This gave me some more time to get into position, and while my first Rookie Pilot didn’t last very long, I was fortunate enough to be able to take out Howlrunner quite quickly. Backstabber was the next to go, but the rest of the match was a deadly game of Cat and Mouse as we tried to outmanoeuvre each other. I wasn’t able to destroy anything else but neither was Andy, giving me a win on points.

My final game was against Russ, who was running two B-wings and an A-wing, rather cleverly deployed. I thought I was doing OK to begin with; I lost a Rookie but manage to take the lesser of the two B-wings with me. However, by this point I was exhausted and my concentration was slipping; I managed to make the mistake of flying my Y-wing the wrong way. I ended up off the board, which meant I had one Rookie left to take on two Named Pilots. He never had a chance, but I made Russ work for it!

So, two wins, two losses, and out of fourteen people I came ninth. I’m quite pleased with that, since as it was my first tournament I thought I was going to get absolutely destroyed. There’ll be time enough later to think about how I could improve my squad, though. I might get an A-wing next, and see where that takes me!

Backlog Beatdown: Shooting Many Robots with, er, Shoot Many Robots.

After beating both One Finger Death Punch and Mortal Kombat, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to get off my ‘Pick It Up And Have A Play’ horse yet, and played an arcade game I downloaded sometime in 2013: Shoot Many Robots.

This game reminds me of Metal Slug, and with good reason – it is a classic action platformer. You run, gun and jump your way to victory, using power-ups and upgrades to your weapons. Your enemies are robots, but curiously enough for a video game, most of them seem to have been designed look like they were built for function, not combat. They’re dangerous enough, but it’s a refreshing change to fight something that doesn’t look like it was deliberately designed to kill you.

Side-Scrolling BadAssery. What's not to love?

Make no mistake, this game is good fun. There’s a reason this was so popular in the 80s and 90s: The format worked so well. You run through a Post Industrial environment shooting anything that moves, and picking up anything that doesn’t move. The design of the characters and music put you in the shoes of beer-swilling rednecks who’d love to be doing nothing better, which adds to the light-hearted yet determined nature of the game. And as with the old games, Shoot Many Robots will let you get through the first few levels without trying, before forcing you to think for a moment about what you’re doing and how you’re going to beat the next level. There are obligatory boss battles, and even though some of them have a kind of ‘recycled’ feel to them, this is nothing new for this kind of game either.

But as this game is on the Xbox 360, the developers had to make some token effort to innovate, and they do this by putting in an economy with which to buy new weapons and equipment, a ‘level-up’ system similar to Charlie Murder. As far as I know, all the latter does is unlock some of the game’s later gear. Your characters can carry two weapons: A primary gun with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon which is usually more powerful but with limited ammo. But it’s the helmet, armour and trousers where it starts to get interesting, as they affect the way the character moves. Some gear speeds you up; others have more damage resistance but slow you down and can lock some actions like slides. Certain upgrades allow jumps to resist gravity, and you can even acquire a jetpack to keep you in the air for a few seconds. This is more useful in some situations than others. At times you’ll love floating over your enemies bringing death from above; at others you’ll miss the tightness of the controls of the regular gear.

The game also has some multiplayer modes including up to 4-player co-op. I didn’t bother with this, as I don’t usually play games with people these days. I would imagine it would be somewhere between having a laugh with a few friends, and a frustrating pain in the bum as you have to wait for each other to upgrade your gear before you can actually play the game. I think it would have to be played in the right spirit, and with the right people, but if you can find both of those things you should have a good night in at least.

Having been watching YouTube’s The Completionist, I’m developing an appreciation for the kind of gamer who wants to power through games and unlock everything. It’s not my style – I prefer to go get to the end of the game once then come back to it if I really want to – but I can see why some people make that their hobby. Shoot Many Robots is a game that caters for both demographics; getting through the game on Normal difficulty was fine for me, but the individual levels give you a star rating out of 5 and maxing out all the stars on a higher difficulty level will probably give the game a lot more mileage for the completionists among us.

So, quite a good game. Not the best, but far from the worst, and it’s done it’s job for me.

Backlog Beatdown: MORTAL KOMBAT!!!

As a franchise, Mortal Kombat needs very little introduction. It is one of the principle beat-em-up games that became popular in the 1990s, one of the few franchises to survive the decade. The version I’m playing is the 2011 re-boot. I’ve had it for a while, and I’ve always had a lot of fun with it. Here’s why:

The game design is brilliant. Usually when a game developer talks about taking a game franchise ‘back to its roots,’ it means they’ve completely lost the plot and are trying to make a dying series work to keep feeding their cash cow. The difference is that with Mortal Kombat, it actually worked. It bought back the 2D fighting system but improved the graphics. It acknowledges the contrived storyline developed over seven games, but brought a new and well-done story into the re-boot. It’s done away with the multiple fighting styles and weapons, and made an excellent job of utilising what was left. It’s done away with most of the characters we didn’t care about (basically any that were introduced after MKIII) and filled its roster with characters from Mortal Kombat I-III. Finally, it brings the gameplay back to what Mortal Kombat was all about, which, quoting one of the developers, is: “I’m going to kick the shit out of you and rip your head off.”

There’s been a lot of debate over the years as to which fighting game franchise is better, with Street Fighter being its obvious rival. Having enjoyed both games, and others besides, I’m not going to get caught up in that. I will, though, say what I enjoy about Mortal Kombat in general and this iteration in particular:

Of all the fighting games, I think Mortal Kombat has always had the richest lore. Even though the plot is ridiculous, it works. For one thing, there actually appears to be a reason for this particular fighting tournament: It is the safeguard against the invasion of Earthrealm by the sinister Outworld. There are multiple factions playing each other off for power, wealth and supremacy: The Shaolin Monks, the Lin Kuei, the Black Dragon, the Tarkartans, the Shokans, the Special Forces, and then there are the people who are fighting for their own reasons and agendas. The characters have unsteady alliances, bitter rivalries, and tragic back-stories, but this time there seems to have been something of a sense of humour in them. It’s like the writers said to themselves “Yeah, we know this is camp and cheesy, let’s play that up as much as we can.” The end result is that, for the brief time you spend with each character, you know what they’re fighting for – and you enjoy it.

EVERYONE loves Scorpion...

The fighting is pretty good as well. The controls are designed with the controller in mind, as opposed to Street Fighter which is very much still designed for the Arcade. The game does a good job of giving you a basic move/combo set, but leaves it up to you to discover how to spam the combos and special moves to become unstoppable. Balancing is an issue, though. The basic ‘Ladder’ mode has ten fights. You’ll do the first six without trying, even on Hard mode (my preferred difficulty.) After that, there’s a massive difficulty spike as the AI suddenly becomes competent one moment, and spams all the boss character’s special moves the next. Shao Khan in particular, the game’s final boss, takes a long time to beat if you don’t know what you’re doing, and even then, it’s a lot of luck rather than judgement. That’s always been the case with Mortal Kombat for as long as I can remember, and isn’t news to anybody.

There’s a few different modes I’m going through at the moment, and I always enjoy playing it online, but now that I’ve beaten the game with all the characters that start off unlocked, I might put Mortal Kombat to bed for a while. That’s the kind of game this is – you can enjoy it for a while, then come back to it months or even years later and have just as much fun, if not more. I can always look forward to coming back to it!

Backlog Beatdown: Kicking Ass with One Finger Death Punch

Free from the constraints of No Game New Year, on New Years Day I downloaded One Finger Death Punch from Xbox Live. You may remember early last year, this was one of the games that tempted me away from NGNY. I didn’t go for it at the time, but I was reminded of it when I had a look at TotalBiscuit’s Top 10 games for 2014. He mentions this game in his top 10, and I remembered his WTF is video and wanting to try the game out for myself. Well, why not?

Most people reading this probably know the score, but if not, here’s how the game works: Enemies come running at you. When they get close enough, you press the X button to attack to the left and the A button to attack to the right. There’s absolutely nothing else to it. No movement, no special moves, nothing that involves anything other than pressing X to attack to the left, and A to attack to the right.

Simple? Yes, definitely. But it is so much fun.

Two buttons. This game is brilliant.

There’s a lot to be said for a game that only does one thing but does it very well. Mechanically, it’s

fantastic. As the attack animations happen instantly, timing is essential but there’s no faffing about waiting for a move to wind up. However, if you miss, you’re left vulnerable to attack for about a quarter of a second, which for a game of this speed is a very long time. The player character and enemies are stick men; an odd decision, but it fits the light-hearted nature of the game and keeps the attention where it needs to be: On the action.

Variety is provided by the different ways in which the levels and enemies are organised. Most levels are ‘Mob Levels,’ which simply require you to kill all the enemies. But there are some that require you to do it in a certain amount of time, smash a certain number of items, or do the level in black and white so that you can’t distinguish different enemies and there are even some levels that give you a Light Sword or Knunchaku. Some enemies require more than one hit – from potentially more than one direction – to take down, and others, called ‘Brawlers,’ cuts away from the main stage and requires you to press X and A multiple times in a sequence to beat them. Your character can pick up weapons, which increases your reach or gives you a ranged attack. Outside the levels there is a ‘map’ screen where you can choose what levels you play and activate the skills you acquire in certain levels. These ‘power-ups’ usually involve either being able to use weapons multiple times, or slowing the enemies down in some way. All this content from a game that uses two buttons.

But doesn’t it get old? Well, the whole game takes around 4-5 hours to complete, and you’re probably not going to get through it all in one sitting unless you’re determined to do so. But that’s not the point of this game. It would work very well on a Mobile device because it’s absolutely fine just to pick it up and play. There’s no exposition, no plot, no reason for you to be doing anything other than the fact that you are. The levels are generally over in about a minute, so you can do as much as you like depending on how much time you have. Finally, your score for the level depends on how many times you missed – the fewer, the better – and whether or not you took any damage yourself. You can always replay the levels and aim for a better score, if you’re interested in tackling the game this way.

As for me, I’ve got to the end of the game on the easiest difficulty. While I’ll probably come back to it at some point if I need something to fill half an hour, I will mark this game off as beaten. But if you’ve got £2 to spare, I recommend you check this game out. We could all do with some more games that don’t take themselves too seriously!