Backlog Beatdown: Ending the Fable with Fable 3

Fable 3 was one of the first games I bought for the Xbox 360, and for the longest time I didn’t play it. I wanted to beat Fable 2 first, and by the time I did (during No Game New Year!) I was all ‘Fabled’ out. I had heard that it wasn’t as good as Fable 2, but I wanted to play it myself before I passed judgement. Here’s what I found out:

I think this game is to RPGs of the 7^th generation of consoles what Final Fantasy Mystic Quest/Legend[1] was to the 4^th. Enjoyable enough, but sorely lacking in a lot of what makes RPGs so compelling to people who play them. Fortunately for me, that’s things like crafting and customising equipment, picking the correct combination of skills and feats for character customisation, and min-maxing stats. None of that is in Fable 3. Here, you always know what you’re supposed to be doing, even if that never varies from fetch quests and getting from point A to point B without getting killed along the way. There’s no point in building a character to a certain archetype either; the Fighter, Rogue and Mage tropes are all there but in Fable it is invariably more efficient to take a balance of all 3. You just… progress. And that’s fine by me.

The game looks beautiful. It goes from gorgeous rural landscapes to gritty industrial sections and still feels like part of the same world. But graphics are rarely the selling point for me. As long as it’s not hideous, I’ll happily play a game that looks reasonably average as long as it’s fun to play.

Let's not forget whose show this was...

Is Fable 3 fun? Yes – but not necessarily because of the gameplay. The combat has been criticised for being too easy and unbalanced, and while I think some of those issues may have been fixed in updates, the combat encounters sprung upon you are rarely welcome. The fun in Fable 3 comes from the story, which is good, and the voice performances of the lead characters which are excellent. The show goes to Steven Fry, who reprises his role as Reaver with exactly the right balance of menace and panache, but the huge list of big names – almost a who’s who of British actors – do a sterling job of bringing the world to life.

 

And then we get to the end of the game…

Peter Molyneux has been criticised for over-promising and under-delivering, and this is no more apparent than in the last few hours of the game. You overthrow the tyrannical ruler of Albion and become the Queen.[2] At this point, your country is under attack from the Darkness and will be attacked within a year, by which time you need to have raised 6,500,000 – it purports to fund an army, and a citizen will die for every gold piece you don’t raise. You have a number of moral choices to make in the form of petitions given to you by the community, including some of the NPCs – do you choose the good option, which almost always costs you money, or the evil option, which potentially saves you money but reduces the moral standing among your people? I chose the good moral choices thinking I could make up the excess later, but here the game presents its real challenge: People are always asking for money, and it’s not easy to make enough of it to defend your kingdom.

The only way that you can potentially have it both ways is to buy every property in the game, rent it out and spend a lot of time faffing about (the game credits you every 5 minutes or so) to raise the money. That was my strategy, but the game mis-represents the time you have to do this. There’s no warning; there’s something like half the year left between the last time you could affect the treasury and the final battle. By this time I’d raised less than 20,000, and when it was over, most of the people in my kingdom were dead.

Always a lot of money - but never enough.

I guess that’s a learning experience that I’ll take into the game next time, if there’ll be a next time. Not that I’m bitter, or anything – it’s more of a practical issue. I bought the game second-hand, and whoever had it before me didn’t look after the disk very well. It’s tanking the motors on my 360 just to run the game, probably not thanking me for it, so unless I really fancy going through the game again and meta-gaming it right up until the end, I’ll probably put the Fable series to bed, having now completed all 3 games.

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[1] Quest if you’re in the US, Legend in the UK.

[2] As I’ve said before, I almost always play female characters in video RPGs.

Backlog Beatdown: Blowing stuff up with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

How I came to own Ace Combat: Assault Horizon was a bit of a weird one. I first became aware of it watching Angry Joe’s review of it; this was so long ago that I couldn’t remember the score but it I remember thinking at the time it looked pretty good. I hadn’t played a flight sim/combat game for a long, long time – not since the original Air Combat on the Playstation, and since that game was released before analogue controls were standard, it didn’t handle all that well. But I happened to see a copy of it in Dudley Market, remembered the review, and because I fancied something a little different play decided to pick it up and give it a go.

Playing it, I actually found it to be pretty good. You play as a number of Ace Combat fighters – a fighter, a bomber and a helicopter pilot at various stages of the game. While some of these sections are handled better than others – Turret sections are rarely welcome, for example – the game is generally very good, challenging and varied enough so that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

I had to get rid of the cockpit view as it just got in the way.
How actual pilots cope with it I don't know.

I am aware that this is part of a long-running series and that Assault Horizon was an attempt to give it a more ‘Arcade’-y feel. The chief innovation in this game was the ‘Dogfight’ mode, which you could initiate if you got close enough to your enemy. As I understand it, the idea is that it’s very difficult to deal with enemy planes up close and personal means that quite a lot of the combat is done at a range. Dogfight mode attempts to rectify this; If you get close and press LB+RB, the camera zooms in on the plane you’re following and you have to keep your missile lock on him long enough to fire one. It essentially becomes an on-rails shooter at this point, and gives the game a somewhat cinematic feel, although you quite quickly recognise where it’s used to set up the set pieces in the scenery.

There is a certain strategic element to this, as you have to pick your spots carefully. The Dogfight mode is designed to make the fights with the more skilled pilots less of a slug-fest – and if your objective is timed, using it takes up time you don’t have. It’s therefore wise not to do it with everything, and try to take some of the smaller planes out with your regular missiles. Recognising when to do Dogfight Mode and when not to is the key to beating the harder levels.

The helicopter missions have been criticised for being rubbish but I actually quite liked the change of pace. This also had a certain strategic element to it. Your missions were rarely timed but it was good to plan your approach, as taking on too many targets at once would rarely end well. It also made flying through terrain a challenge, as the enemy missiles would get you easily if you fly too high. Then again I really enjoyed Desert Strike when I was a kid…

The Bomber missions serve mainly as another change of pace; glorified turret sections and skilled piloting segments would probably not be too much fun by themselves but it balances nicely into the whole single-player campaign.

As for the campaign itself, I don’t play many modern military games, but if I did, I expect they would look a lot like this. An antagonist – not American, who knew – is using a new type of super-destructive missile and it is your job to stop it. The story segments are reasonably-well voice-acted, apart from the lead character who’s a bit of an everyman. The character you remember is Gutz, your wingman, simply because his absolute refusal to take anything seriously makes him the most memorable character.

Now that I’ve finished the campaign, I think I’m done with Assault Horizon. It would be nice to be able to play it in multiplayer but no one’s playing it right now. I might come back and play a harder difficulty if I feel so inclined, but the game was as long as it needed to be and it’s time to move on.

Backlog Beatdown: Bringing the Chaos to Blood Bowl

Yesterday I beat Blood Bowl for the first time after about three years of owning the game. I made it a game I ran alongside playing through another game, as it is best enjoyed in small bursts and the fact that it is saved on my hard drive meant that it was a quick dirty game I could just play without having to be arsed to change the disc.

I can only assume this screenshot was taken from a
version I don't have, because at no point did the
game EVER look this good...

 

So I tried covering Blood Bowl for a while during No Game New Year, and I felt the need to make a note of who scored what etc so that the narrative developed in the blog. There were two main problems with this approach:

1.      It was a lot more busy-work than fun, and

2.      I chose Humans.

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Humans, you understand, but I always missed playing the Chaos team.

So for this playthrough, I chose a Chaos team and named them Children of the Gor. It was supposed to be Children of the Gore, but I ran out of space before I did the ‘e’, and since Gor relates to Beastmen anyway it wasn’t a huge loss. Their tactics, unsurprisingly, consist of the following two steps:

·        Find something,

·        Kill it.

Or to put it another way, rely on your blocks to utterly destroy the opposing team. A very unsubtle way of playing Blood Bowl, but one that worked very well after a while with the right combination of upgrades. It tends to work best against Humans, Goblins, Dark Elves and Orcs, funnily enough. Against Wood Elves and Skaven it would either work or it wouldn’t, and it tended to depend on whether I could take enough of them out the game before they scored too many points. With Dwarves the tactic itself didn’t work well, but as long as you can keep them to one side of the pitch or the other you could usually find a gap and take the win. Lizardmen were a pain in the bum because they had the combination of small fast skinks and Saurus warriors who were easily a match for most of my Beastmen.

For the first time, however, I actually planned how my team was going to develop. In any game with a Dice mechanic, there is one rule you should never forget: If you can get screwed by the dice, you will get screwed by the dice. So I chose to take the upgrades that would present the dice with as few opportunities as possible to screw me. Beastmen come with Horns by default (+1 Strength with a Blitz action,) so wherever possible I gave them Block, Tackle and if I rolled it Dodge. Once they had an outside possibility of remaining upright for more than a couple of turns, I then proceeded to look at Damage Output. Chaos can always take a Strength and Mutation upgrades so I chose Mighty Blow and Claw if I could; that did a lot to take at least some of the opposing players out of the game. The only exception to the plan was when my level-up roll allowed me to take a stat increase; it is almost always worth doing this.

Let's have some better commentary next time, eh?
If I hear that quip about Margoth Doomgrin one more time...

I took the team right the way through the 15 competitions in the campaign mode, winning all but 2 of them and having them on top of the rankings. It was a nice feeling to finally win the Blood Bowl after all this time!

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Blood Bowl’s crap! All the reviews say so.” Well, yeah. But do you know what? I love it. It’s one of the few games I own on the 360 that I’ve always been happy to come back to whenever I feel like it. Yes, by the standards of most of the games of that period, it is absolutely appalling – no variety in the gameplay, very little customisation and the multiplayer is non-existent. But I’ve always enjoyed the game. I’ll hang on to it because there are still some achievement points for me to get, (none that relate to multiplayer for obvious reasons,) and it’ll be there ready to come back to when I want to.

Backlog Beatdown: Solving the Mystery with The Wolf Among Us

I downloaded the first episode of The Wolf Among us as part of the Games with Gold series last year. I didn’t play it until recently because I realised that I was going to want to play the other four parts as well, and as the free release of the first part was a clever ploy to snare me in to buying the rest of it, I thought it would be better to wait until I was able to do so.

I was very glad I did, because this game is GOOD. I would say that Traveller’s Tales games are good at telling the story, but that isn’t news to anybody. It hooks you in and keeps you engaged. The conceit of the setting – fairy-tale creatures living in 80’s New York trying to conceal their true identities – is not new but is very well done here. The characters are memorable and well-voice-acted, and the plot is strong. I won’t say too much about it here because you really need to experience it for yourself, but I paid roughly £15 for the whole package and enjoyed every moment.

Bigby in a heated discussion between Snow White
and Ichabod Crane. Yes, really.

But the game does have… an issue. Apart from the word ‘game,’ everything said in the previous paragraph could easily describe a TV series or a film. And playing this game is an experience not dissimilar to that. You play as Bigby Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, in what is essentially a point-and-click adventure game. The controls are basic; almost all guided by button prompts. Exploring the scenes make no secret of the intractable items, and conversations are timed – you have a limited amount of time to respond to the different characters. Sections where Bigby is in danger are handled by quick-time events, which is fine for the context of the game, but present very little challenge because in most cases the only penalty for failing them is returning to the start of the sequence.

So the question is, are you OK with all of that?

And the answer is yes I am. I played some of the more popular adventure game franchises in the 90s – Monkey Island and Broken Sword – and while those games will always have nostalgic value for me and anyone who played them, I admit that they would not do well in the current generation of gaming. Most of the puzzles needed to be completed in order to move on, and if you didn’t know what to do the whole game would grind to a halt. The Wolf Among Us doesn’t allow the pacing to be interrupted in this way; it’s obvious what you have to do, and even if you don’t manage it, the game will move on anyway with slightly different dialogue and outcomes. For this generation, that kind of pacing is fine. But I remember beating the first Broken Sword game by almost making it a co-operative effort with my friend; we’d play through until one of us got stuck, then hand my copy of the game over to the other, telling what we’d learned and swapping over like that until we’d got to the end. That wouldn’t happen in The Wolf Among Us!

Tweedle Dee, and Tweedle Dum. And Bloody Mary,
who is an absolutely brilliant villain.

I would have liked to have to have seen some of the decisions you make have a more salient effect on the plot. Situations that can be handled differently depending on your responses, but the effect is how people handle you later in the game. The plot remains the same, no matter what you choose to do.

There are unlockables in the form of entries in The Book of Fables – a series of profiles of the characters, settings and history of the plot. As some of these are based on your decisions and what order you do things in, you can’t get all of these in one play-through; you have to back-track through the relevant sections to get them. I cheated by using a guide for this, but only after I’d completed the game anyway.

The Wolf Among us is a great piece of interactive storytelling and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. It’s not very challenging, but it flows well and is a good example of current-generation adventure games.

Backlog Beatdown: Dusting off Dust: An Elysian Tale

Dust: An Elysian Tale has the coincidence of being both a game that tempted me away from No Game New Year a few months into it and was given way free with Xbox Games with Gold a couple of months later. I saw TotalBiscuit’s first impressions review and I wanted to give it a try, then when I got it for free I forgot about it for a long time.

However, last week I thought I’d give it a go. And what a delightful game it is! It is at its heart a platform game with RPG elements, and makes no apology for it. It’s got good graphics, excellent gameplay and a great story. It’s seriously like the best Super Nintendo game I never played.

The art style certainly looks ‘cartoony,’ but is as good as any 6^th-gen game might have been if they’d bothered with 2D platformers. You play as Dust, an anthropomorphic rabbit-like creature that has all the hall-markings of a troubled hero but still manages to sneak in a sense of humour. You’re joined on your quest to save the world and remember who you are by your sword Ahrah which talks to you, and an irritating flying creature called Fidget. You meet a cast of NPCs that are a mixture of anthropomorphic rabbits, bears and toads. You battle a range of enemies that breaks out from the usual mix of ‘like Tolkien, but…’ The visuals are gorgeous, the backgrounds are amazing and the character models are really well put together.

This game really does kick ass...

In terms of gameplay, the controls are fluid and responsive, but its trump card is the brilliant combat system. There are three ways to attack[1]: You can press X to attack with your sword and develop a combo using a combination of X and Y, use Y to create a ‘Dust storm’ which allows a short amount of flight and slightly damages the enemies, or you can use B to have Fidget cast a spell. The real fun comes into combining the effects of the different attacks. For example, in the early stages of the game, pressing B will have Fidget splash a magic missile style of attack, that doesn’t do much damage. Combine that with a Dust Storm and the missile multiplies and flies all over the screen, doing a lot of combined damage. You only have a limited amount of time to do either – your spells and your dodge is limited by an energy bar, and you can do the dust storm for around six seconds before you’ll injure yourself, but you can recover them by landing your attack combos as well. This all makes for a rapid attack system that looks and feels very impressive.

Elsewhere, the platforming is challenging but not insurmountable, the puzzles are not hard to work out but are a little tricky to put off, and the treasure is useful but not essential. This is one of the best parts of the game’s design – you don’t have to feel obliged to do all the side quests and collect all the treasure. If you do, great, and that can add an extra level of fun for the completionists among us, but the game won’t punish you for wanting to get to the end.

I won’t talk much about the story; it’s great but needs to be experienced by yourself. I will, however, mention the sound. The background music is gorgeous; it strikes the balance of being memorable enough for it not to be merely background noise, but not so much that it becomes cheesy or ridiculous. A lot of work went into those compositions, and it shows. The voice acting was very good, and they didn’t ruin it by trying to draw facial animations. And the game’s sound effects are visceral and effective; all the bells and whistles happen in the right places.

All in all, a very well-designed game that does its job, is fun to play and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I might return to this at some point for a completionist run, but the game is as long as it needs to be and I’m ready to move on.

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[1] Controls refer to an Xbox 360 controller

Golden Axe 2: Better balanced, and a LOT easier...

A sad fact of my gaming life at the moment is that while I’m busy spending hours deciding what 40+ hour RPG to get invested in next, not being able to decide and spending even more hours on Gotham City Impostors to get one achievement, I found myself wanting to play a game I could just beat. No need to think too hard, I just want to kick ass. Enter Golden Axe 2…

Regular blog readers (all eight of you) will remember that Golden Axe was the last game I finished, and that it took me 21 years from first playing it to beating it.

The sequel didn’t take me quite that long.

As was the case in sequels of the time, nothing much had changed about the nature of the game. It was still a fantasy-based side-scrolling beat-em up. The plot was more or less identical; it just had a different antagonist. The levels were slightly different – there was a little more variation to the backdrop this time around – but still a fantasy based setting. And it was still the same three characters: Ax, Tyris and Gilius. And why not? The formula worked so well the last time, and it wasn’t all that common to mess with it in those days.

So what has changed? Well, I saw two main changes from the previous game:

The first was the way the magic works. Skirting past the fact that the little Wizard creatures you have to beat to gain power can now actually harm you, magic is now a little more flexible in terms of how much you use. You can press the button to get a basic spell, or hold it down to charge up to the amount of power you have. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good that you don’t have to commit to using all of your power the moment you cast a spell as in the previous game. It’s not so good because as it will take at least some time to charge even the most basic power, it’s now almost impossible to use magic to break stun-lock. It doesn’t happen as often in this game but it would have been nice to have the option!

The other thing that has changed is the way that attacks have been balanced. In the previous game, it was all about spamming the dash attack. In Golden Axe 2, different enemies require slightly different approaches and the dash isn’t always the best one. The Lizardmen, for example, are best dealt with using a jump attack. The Headless Swordsmen are ferocious but they tend to go down more easily if you come at them from an angle and use your attack combo. It’s still a case of spamming your attack, but there is some flexibility over which one to spam. The minions, and the Skeletons in particular, can be a pain in the bum, but that’s the time to be using your magic – to deny them their advantage of numbers.

This results in a game with a lot less cheap deaths than Golden Axe. Stun lock occurs a lot less, any of the characters work well and there is a lot more variety when it comes to strategy. However, it also meant that I beat the game on my third attempt, having gone through all the characters and chosen Gilius this time, and that only took about 40 minutes in all. I suppose I could go for a score attack if I really wanted to give myself a hard time – you tend to be graded on how much damage you did to how much you took – but that would suck all the fun out of the game for me. Golden Axe 2 is a better designed and objectively more fun game than Golden Axe – but I’m glad it was part of a bundle and I didn’t spend any significant amount of money on it.

Unless someone really wants to play two-player co-op with me, I probably won’t come back to Golden Axe 2; the job is done in my opinion. It was fun while it lasted, but in this case, the game didn’t last too long.

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!