Backlog Beatdown: Being alone with Thomas in Thomas Was Alone

What a delightful game this turned out to be! I can’t remember where I first heard about it; most likely TotalBiscuit, but I remember the idea of moving coloured blocks with some amusing narration was intriguing, if nothing else. I didn’t play it for the longest time because I was trying not to buy more games than I could beat, or at all, but then when I bought a Wii U and found it available on its virtual console, I thought I had to give it a go.

So this game shouldn’t be news to anyone really but what Mike Bithell managed to do was create a game with very simple puzzle-based mechanics and use a fantastic musical score (David Housden) and an incredible performance from Danny Wallace as the narrator to maintain engagement. It follows the story of Thomas, a little red rectangle, as he tries to escape the world he is in. On the way, he meets some different coloured rectangles, each with their own shapes, sizes and personalities – which are never heard, only narrated, in a manner similar to a children’s TV show circa 1980s/90s – and they have to use their various shapes and capabilities to help each other through the world. It takes what could have been an abstract and not-very-interesting concept and breathes life into a gaming world which at the time (2010-2012) was sorely missing some colour and wit. And it works. The music offers a sense of peace and calm, and you can’t help but be invested in the story of Thomas and his friends, as it continues to unfold in a manner which leaves just the right amount open to imagination. The game does have a rather convoluted plot, but it’s not pretending to be sensible – and you’re far more interested in the relationships between each of the characters anyway.

Easy to figure out what needs to happen here -
but how do you get them all up there?

With all the gushing people tend to do over the production, it would be easy enough to assume the score and narration carry the whole game. Thankfully, this is not the case: Thomas Was Alone is a very competently-designed game which has a good learning curve that gently introduces the player to the various different mechanics, and moves on when it is ready. The puzzles are rarely complicated, and require but a moment or two of thought. Some of the more challenging levels require some precision over their execution, but this is nothing a little patience doesn’t solve and there is a sense of achievement in completing them.  Sadly the controls weren’t quite as responsive as they needed to be, I don’t know whether that was to do with the Wii U or the game’s design but it hindered me few times.

The game isn’t very long, but it doesn’t need to be: If you blitz through it as a speed run it’ll take no more than a couple of hours, and even though I took my time I don’t think it took me more than four. I was happy just to pick this one up and have a play from time to time; it was a refreshing change to be able to do a bit at a time without having to level up, or follow a contrived plot, or even take it remotely seriously. It knows what it is – a game about moving coloured blocks – and even though the score and narration do a lot to keep the player engaged, the game is not so long that it outstays its welcome. When it ends, you feel it could conceivably keep going for another few levels, and any game that leaves you wanting more is a great game by any stretch of the imagination.

There is longevity there if you look for it. You can time-attack the levels and there is an online ranking system. The Wii U version – and presumably whatever platform you now buy the game on – comes with an option to play the game with a DVD-style commentary; I haven’t looked in to that yet but it’s great that Bithell managed to squeeze even more life out of such a game. I might look into his other game, Volume, in the future. Until then, we’ll see what comes next…

Hacking AND slashing with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z

I’ve spent the last few weeks playing my way through this game. How did I come to own it? Believe it or not, my thing for the year is to try to finish one game for ever letter of the alphabet. This has resulted in some strange purchases, and some scouting around for games that begin with Q, U, Y and Z. I had a vague memory of watching a TotalBiscuit Youtube video on this one, and bought the game thinking that if it had been awful, I’d have remembered it.

And actually it didn’t turn out too bad in the end. You play as Yaiba Kamikaze, a rogue ninja who is looking for revenge against his rival Ryu Hayabusa who killed him. Yaiba has been brought back to life as a cyborg with a mechanical arm and a ‘cyber-vision’ eye. To get to Hayabusa, he’s got to battle his way through hordes of Zombies of varying types. He’s helped along the way by his navigator, the girl with a massive potential for over-sexualisation Ms Monday, and wound up as he goes along by a smarmy Spaniard called Del Gonzo. It is well presented with a cell-shading style, and while the script is puerile, the voice acting is reasonably well-done. Del Gonzo, in particular, has some fantastic lines and his voice actor delivers them with just the right amount of panache.

The obligatory 'Rage' mode...

The gameplay is solid enough. It’s in the genre commonly known as Spectacle Fighters, which as far as I know means a scrolling beat-em-up with impressive moves. Yaiba can switch between his sword, cyber arm or a flail at any time by pressing the attack button assigned to each one, and can also harvest extra weapons from some of the larger enemies. Each attack has a different function – the sword is quick and best used for glancing blows, the arm does a lot of damage but is slow, and the flail goes around Yaiba and is best used for attacking a group of enemies surrounding you. But combining attacks in a different order can make for some pretty impressive combos. There is a block/counter button, and can be used to great effect but with my usual approach to things I never really got used to using it. There’s a lot of fun to be had in slaughtering your way through a Zombie horde, but some of the fights are actually quite tough and there’s an ‘old-school’ feeling of accomplishment as you get through a fight you’ve been stuck on for a while.

Unfortunately the game is let down by a couple of things that get in the way of you enjoying it. The screen isn’t balanced properly and enemies can be hiding in the sides, attacking from a place that you can’t see them. This isn’t usually a problem because the enemies in the sides of the screen are the least of your problems most of the time, but the fight with Hayabusa is a lot harder than it needs to be because he comes flying at you from where you can’t see him winding up the attack; I won it eventually but more by luck than judgement. According to TotalBiscuit the PC version has a ‘wide-shot’ mode that stops some of this from happening, but rather than have to put a graphical fix in there, why not just get it right in the first place?

Also the game is boss hard. Even on normal difficulty, some of those boss battles are ferocious and the final boss of the game took me nearly three days. I’ll admit to using a wiki to find out what I had to do to beat him, or I’d still be doing it now. Is that cheating? Perhaps, but remember that even though I knew what to do in the final fight, it was a massive effort to make it happen.

All in all though I’ve enjoyed my time with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. It’s not the best game I’ve ever played but it is fun in its own way and I’m glad I didn’t overlook it. The game has more content and added difficulty, but for now it’s time to move on.

Backlog Beatdown: Plants vs Zombies: A Zombie Game that I Really Liked...

You guessed it; this was another Xbox Live Arcade download. Quite a recent one, as it happens. Plants vs Zombies is a game that managed to get very popular, spawn a number of sequels, a host of clones and is quite well regarded in the world of videogames. And yet, it managed to slip almost completely under my radar. I started playing it at a time where I was playing through the original Baldur’s Gate and wanted something to break up the pace of computer role-playing games; games that you can just pick up and play are valuable things indeed in the wake of all that!

I’ve really enjoyed my time with the game. The premise is simple: Zombies are crossing your lawn and you have to plant various kinds of flora that will stop them. You generate your resources from sunlight and certain kinds of plants. Some plants to direct damage to the zombies, some have other effects such as freezing them or slowing them down for a few moments. Some plants function entirely defensively, blocking zombie attacks from the front or the top. You also have single use plants that take out a number of zombies at a time. The trick is picking the right plant for the right job!

The Zombies have different types as well. There are the regular run-of-the-mill zombies who don’t put up much of a fight, but things get interesting when the different zombies are introduced. Some wear armour (in the form of a traffic cone or a bucket on their head!) and take a lot longer to kill. Some of them have spears, ladders and pogo sticks that can jump over a number of your plants; usually only the first but you need to make sure the pogo zombie dies before he jumps over all of them! Some have slow-moving vehicles, some tunnel under your defences and attack the other way.

Thankfully, this game doesn't take itself too seriously...

But the genius of the game is about how you plan your planting in relation to what you know is coming. Before each level begins, you get a brief view of the level’s zombies and then choose from 6 of your available plants to make available to plant. Generally, it’s good to have a balance of resource generation, firepower and status effects, and the best ones to take are the ones that have been introduced on that level, but you get to know which work well and which don’t. Also, the plants have different costs; some plants do a lot of damage but will cost a lot of sunlight (the game’s principle resource) so you won’t be able to plant many until you have the infrastructure to support them. And there are new mechanics being introduced on almost every level, so there’s always something different to do.

The game is challenging but not insurmountably difficult. If one of the Zombies eats his way past all your defences then you lose, but in most cases there is a ‘lawnmower’ there acting as a last line of defence that kills all the zombies on that line. There are a couple of times when you’ll lose, because of a new zombie type you didn’t know how to deal with, or a huge wave of zombies you weren’t anticipating, but you can always attempt the level again thinking ‘just one more go.’

You’d think this would all get old after a while, and the game is better enjoyed in short bursts, but you’d be surprised how much variety you can put into a game like this. There are ‘conveyer belt’ levels, where instead of picking your plants you get a selection of plants on a conveyer belt and have to build your garden around that. The game ends in a ‘boss’ level that works in this manner. There’s even a bowling stage!

All in all Plants vs Zombies is a very good and well-designed game, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There’s plenty more to do in the game but I really want to get some more games finished so I’ll probably come back to the other game modes at a later date, to bring my achievement points up a little higher!

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar First Impressions

So Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is now in full swing. It’s an interesting game. The substantial departure from the iterative nature of the last four editions of Warhammer means that the game has changed entirely for better or worse. Some people like it, some people hate it, some people and some don’t know one way or the other. That being the case, I thought I’d give you my first impressions:

 

Context

The army I’ve chosen for Age of Sigmar is Stormcast Eternals, and my current pool of models come from the Age of Sigmar Boxed Set. I’m also participating in an 8-week ‘Slow-Grow’ league at my local game store Phoenix Games, where the wound limit for the games are going up in increments of 25 every 2 weeks. Therefore, these remarks refer to the fact that I’ve mainly played 25 wound games so far.

 

What I like

A lot of people complain about the apparent lack of strategy in the game, but as I was always rubbish at Warhammer anyway, I actually like the fact that the amount of strategic manoeuvres and choices you make in the game are reduced. On the balance of having so much strategic choice that you could potentially win the game before it starts just by choosing what models to have in your army and deploying them properly, and so little that the entire game is decided on dice rolls, Age of Sigmar definitely leans towards the latter but there is enough going on to keep a ‘casual’ gamer like me engaged.

My Lord-Relictor. Don't mess.

For example, for a 25 Wound force, I picked the Lord-Relictor, Three Retributors and Five Liberators. The rationale was: because I had eight models in the whole army, I was almost always going to be outnumbered. I therefore stuck the Retributors at the front, the Relictor at the back and the Liberators in-between. Therefore, the enemy force would have to tackle the Retributors first, who are deadly in combat. The Relictor could use his power to heal the Retributors to keep them in the fight a little longer, and the Liberators could mop up whoever was left afterwards. That’s been my strategy for the four games I’ve played so far and it works reasonably well.

I also like the way the combat works. It’s clear what you need to hit and wound – no faffing about with tables – so that bit’s simple. The challenge comes from deciding what order to do the fights in. It’s about second-guessing what order your opponent will do everything in, and what you can afford to lose. Do I use my one remaining Retributor, or my Liberators for my first attack? The Retributor probably won’t do much damage on his own and will leave the others open for an attack, but if he’s attacked, he won’t be able to fight at all. Do I attack the Khorgorath or the Blood Reavers? The Khorgorath is doing a lot of damage, but if I kill enough of the Blood Reavers, they may then fail their bravery check and I’ll take out even more in one turn. It’s these kind of decisions that make up the fun of the game for me so far.

What I don’t like

Currently the only thing I don’t like about the game mechanics are the balancing issues coming from having to integrate every faction into a brand new system. I know moaning about balancing issues in any Games Workshop game is like complaining that grass is green, but in previous editions they tried, at least. In Age of Sigmar, you can take anything, no matter how elite or rare they purport to be, as long as they’re in the same faction. And even then, they’ve lumped a lot of the factions together so their war scrolls can be combined. You don’t even need to take a commander model, since you can nominate any model as a general. My first game of AoS didn’t go too well, as the guy I was playing used an Empire force of an Elector Count, three Demigryffs and a Hellblaster Cannon, and there was not a single modicum of restrictions in the rules to stop him.

Needless to say I enjoy it a lot more when there is some balance in the chosen forces!

Conclusion

Age of Sigmar is a very different experience to Warhammer. There’s less going on than I might expect from a conventional wargame, but as I’m not very good at them, I’m kind of enjoying this ‘lite’ version of it. There will be questions raised about balancing issues; there always are. But when I’ve won, I feel like I deserved it because of my force selection and manoeuvres, and I’ve been having a decent amount of fun with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops!

Finally Finished my Khorne Bezerker Army...

One of the ways I manage to keep myself engaged with hobby games after well over half my lifetime is the variety of models that I get to paint. I rarely stick with one army or faction, preferring to flit between one system, or army, and another. That way, I get a different challenge each time I paint; I get to paint different models, different scales, and different colours. It keeps me interested, but it also means that I rarely have a so-called ‘full-sized’ army.

This is something of an abstract concept, so for those of you who don’t know: Each game has a ‘standard’ size, usually measured in points or the system’s equivalent. With Warhammer 40K, that’s usually 1500 points. With Warhammer, it’s 2000, though that has changed with the advent of Age of Sigmar, not sure what the standard size is here. With Lord of the Rings, it’s something like 700 points, and with Batman Miniatures Game I think it’s 300.

The Red Fury, in its full glory.

So it’s no surprise to anybody who knows my approach to hobby gaming that even though I’m well into my 17^th year of doing it, I’ve only managed to create a full-sized army 3 times.

This is the third: The Red Fury.

An army of Khorne Bezerkers, why not? I came up with the idea for the army around halfway through 2011, when I wanted to build up a force to take to every Games Workshop in the country and play a game with it. I intended to build it up a lot more quickly than I did, and it really was my first army where I’d planned it out from the start; I knew where I was going with it, what models I wanted, and what strategies I wanted the army to achieve. Here’s the army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	130	1496
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Axe of Blind Fury	35
	Veterans of the Long War	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15

 

The heavy vehicles pound the enemy from a distance...

So the concept was simple: Pound the opponent from a distance with three 5-inch blast templates per turn, and destroy whatever was left in close combat afterwards. The Rhinos add to the firepower with their Havoc Launchers, and the Daemonic Possession on the tanks protected them from being stun-locked out of combat.

Unfortunately, I designed the army while 5^th Edition 40K was still in full swing, and while upgrades to the Bezerkers sorted out the discrepancy in points, I still completed it four years and two editions after the fact. It’s got no way of dealing with Fliers, for example, and since most armies these days have at least some form of flier it can cause problems. With the introduction of Hull Points in 6^th edition, tanks became much easier to destroy. And of course the idea of relying on blast templates and close combat weapons is something of a departure from the fact that the most damage I ever do to anything in 40K is with small-arms fire.

While the Bezerkers wait to eviscerate anything that gets too close.

Nonetheless, the Defilers and Vindicators do their jobs well as destruction machines and are absolute magnets for bullets. Oddly for an army that relies on close combat, I play a defensive game and allow the opponent to take the fight to me. I enjoy hiding my Bezerkers in ruins, out of line of sight. This forces my opponents to approach me if they want to win, because if they don’t, I can use the tanks to blast them from a distance.

This isn’t a strong army, by any stretch of the imagination. A hardcore tournament player would take me to pieces in moments. But it does what it does well enough, and hopefully proves a beyond-beginner level of challenge for most people. If Chaos are getting a new codex for 7^th edition, I’ll be interested to see what changes it will bring and how it will affect the dynamic of an army like this. Until then, I’ll try and get some games in, and see what happens when an unstoppable force whoops an immovable object’s ass.

Lead by this beast of a warrior (Games Day 2009 model)

You may also notice a difference in the painting of some of the models; this is again due to the changing editions of the paints. The Bezerkers started off being painted Mechrite Red, but by the time I got around to painting the last squad, two of the Rhinos and the two Vindicators, that colour had been replaced by Mephiston Red which is a little brighter. I was a bit miffed about that, but I wanted to see this army through to the end so I tried not to worry about it too much.