Last Week's Games: Mount and Blade, and musing on videos...

I thought I’d talk about something a bit different this week…

Over the weekend I played a game that I’d had for a while but hadn’t gotten around to playing, called Mount and Blade. It was on my radar largely because TotalBiscuit had talked it up at one point, and it was a Role Playing Game so I was willing to give it a bit of time, but I hadn’t played it up until now because I was aware that it was a game that had no real end-game to speak of. Some games work very well like this – the Sims games thrive on it – but I like there to be a goal, something I can aim for. If a game doesn’t have that, I find it hard to justify the time I put in to it at the expense of games that do!

Because he doesn't look like Aragorn at all...

Nonetheless, I had a go with it and was pleasantly surprised to find an open-world RPG where the idea is to build your… prestige, I suppose, and become a part of a saga of warring nations, eventually becoming a key player in it yourself. It reminds me of somewhere between Romance of the Three Kingdoms and A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed my time with it but again, with there being no apparent endgame, I did wonder how long it would keep me engaged for.

I put that thought out on Twitter, including the remark about A Game of Thrones, and it wasn’t long before my Dad came back with “8 seasons?” by way of a reply.

That gave me an idea…

What if I recorded gameplay videos in episodes and uploaded them to Youtube, creating a “series” of videos that would document my progress through the open-ended game? I have a few games I could do this with, Mount and Blade being one of them but also Cities: Skylines, and it would be an interesting take on showcasing those games. I could aim for a series of 12 videos, and put it to bed after that, knowing that I could draw a line under the time I’d spent in the game and the progress I’d made up to then.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’d had the idea of recording gameplay footage, and I tried it a while ago with DXTory. Paid £60 for the licence, and everything. Unfortunately it didn’t go very well, for a couple of reasons that come down to one fact: I play most of my PC games on a laptop.

The problem that this runs into is framerates. My graphics card was one of the top end models at the time I bought it and should be able to run most games at 60fps (frames per second) without even trying. But you still need a pretty fast hard drive to write that data to, and the hard drive on a laptop isn’t that fast. It’s understandable; unless it’s specifically been built for gaming, laptops aren’t really designed for speed. They’re designed for long battery life and high storage, neither of which needs the hard drive to run very fast. The most I can get out of the framerate for most games I have is 30fps, or just under. Since most of the games I play on my laptop are turn-based strategy games, this isn’t usually a problem for me but I wouldn’t expect a warm welcome on Youtube if I can’t run high framerates!

The other issue is the file size. They’re huge. When a video is made in DXTory, the file is made up of what’s on the screen and everything the graphics card is processing. What this means is that even a 15 minute video takes roughly 100 gigabytes. I don’t have that kind of storage space!

However, last week I tried streaming Horus Heresy: Legions off my laptop for a while. It seemed to work; I only had two veiwers and I’m pretty sure they were both me, but I did it using XSplit Gamecaster. It’s just possible I might be able to do it off that, so this week I’ll give it a go, and see what happens. I might just end up on Youtube!

Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!

Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Last Week's Games: The Horus Heresy: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Lemmings

I spent the vast majority of last week enthralled with the Horus Heresy: Legions. I mentioned this last week so if you want to know what kind of game this is have a look at that, but for now I’m going to mention my progression. I’m getting quite good at the game now, and I can often hold my own against all but the toughest of decks. I built a few decks around Garviel Loken and whatever the daily mission objective was, but then it occurred to me to build a deck out of Loken and a larger percentage of Chaos Cards – the latter can be applied to any faction, as no legion involved with the Horus Heresy escaped corruption! This works reasonably well, if not particularly consistently. The Chaos Cards have some powerful effects but the higher level cards are also quite unpredictable, and some are as likely to do some damage to you as well as your opponent. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying the deck!

Garro has a cool healing ability, but the rest of his
force will need to hit pretty hard to win...

I also built a deck out of Saul Tarvitz and the Mechanicum. The Emperor’s Children has been an interesting faction to run since their benefits are usually tied to perfection – while powerful in their own right, the Emperor’s Children cards often have a special bonus applied when they use all of your remaining energy to play them. Tarvitz’s effect of lowering the energy you need to play a card by one makes this more flexible, and combined with the Mechanicum, who have some very powerful machines at their disposal, they are a force to be reckoned with. It doesn’t make much difference to my win:loss ratio, but it’s a refreshing change of pace that I need sometimes.

I rarely give a free-to-play game much attention, but I’ve put more time in to Legions than a significant number of games I’ve actually paid for, so it must be doing something for me!

One of the best In Medias Res beginnings I've ever seen in
a video game. You don't even know the hero's name at this point.

On the Switch, I continued with Final Fantasy VII, getting to the point where you leave Midgar after rescuing Aeris from the Shinra building. I’ve really enjoyed playing it again, and even more so now that I’ve been playing pen-and-paper role-playing games for a while and have a much better idea of a class-based system. This isn’t used obviously in Final Fantasy VII, but it’s helpful to remember what everyone is supposed to be doing and, apart from a couple of times when I’ve made a mistake with regard to what materia everyone has when I have the option to change it, I’ve been doing quite well.

Who's done Lemmings before?

Finally I’ve been playing a game that was among the first video games I ever played and has now been updated to a mobile port: Lemmings. I had a great time with this game when I was very young – to this day, I still remember my Dad laughing at the first level without really knowing what to do – and I’ve missed playing it ever since the Acorn Computer we played it on stopped working. This mobile port is not a re-make of the original game. Instead, it is an updated version of the game to bring it in line with mobile gaming. It is, for example, no longer possible to give instructions to individual lemmings. Instead, the game works on a grid-based system, where you click the square you want to affect with an instruction, and the first lemming to get there will do it. For example, if you want a lemming to dig through a square, you touch the square and press the button when it comes up. The lemming will either dig across it, or down it, depending on where it happens to be in relation to the square you’ve clicked.

It works quite well, though it lacks some accuracy that would be useful. There are certain situations where you have to work to avoid traps, and it would be really helpful to just get one lemming to where you need to be. The only way to really do this is to block the other lemmings, and you have to time it exactly right or you’ll let more through than you meant to.

So, a fun-filled week this week! Let’s see what next week brings…

 

Last Week's Games: Horus Heresy: Legions, Ultra Street Figher 2, Final Fantasy VII

In my quest to play all the Games Workshop licensed games, I downloaded and played The Horus Heresy: Legions. This is a collectable card came based around the Horus Heresy era of the Warhammer Universe, and was free to play so I thought I’d give it a go.

Who can play the better hand?

I’d never played a collectable card game on the computer before. I know Hearthstone is the standard but I’d never been tempted to play it. I’ve played the real thing – I used to play Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. I don’t anymore, because I don’t have the financial structure to keep up with the ‘meta[1]’ of the games, and even if I did, I don’t play often enough for it to be a worthwhile financial investment; I intended to do another blog in this later. So I had some expectations, which I had to shift to accommodate Legions. Your first card on the table is always your Warlord, and they come with their own abilities you can use in the game. Legions kicks you off by giving you Garviel Loken; the hero of the first Horus Heresy books. After that, the game works on an energy-based system: Each card is worth a certain amount of energy (1-10) that you need to play it, and you can only play as many cards as you have energy for. Your energy for the turn increases each turn you play, up to a maximum of 10. The idea of the game is to reduce the health of the opposing Warlord to 0, at which point the game ends and you win.

Apart from that, the main difference between video games and their table-top counterparts is the health system. Each card that represents a fighting unit has two numbers: Left is how much damage each unit does, and right is how much damage it can withstand. The number on the right goes down cumulatively to the attacks it takes, and when it reaches 0, the unit dies. This is different to the table-top games, where it is usually necessary to hit a unit hard enough to eliminate it entirely or it loses no defensive power at all – and rightly so, or the game would get bogged down while the players try to keep track of it. But I expect the whole point of playing games like this on a computer is to have the CPU make those calculations for you!

I’ve been having fun with Legions so far; I win about as many games as I lose. I don’t intend to spend any money on it, and I’m not sure how much more time I’ll want to put in to it, but for now it’s doing what I need!

I had another go at Ultra Street Figher 2, getting through most of the game with various different people and beating it with Dhalsim, of all people! He’s not the easiest character to use, however it becomes a lot easier once you remember that you have other options than to use his most powerful attacks – the lighter ones are often easier to aim. I also played Street Fighter with my daughter, which was lovely. She’s only 2 at this point, but she found it engaging! I think the thing with fighting games is that it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to be doing – beating the other guy up. There’s no tricky platforming, no levelling up or looting; you just press a button to make a thing happen which she enjoyed. I let her win a few times – I wanted her to enjoy it – and called time after 10 minutes. I guess for her, it’s about winning, but it’s also about doing something with her Dad, and with video games being a large part of my life, it’s great to be able to do that!

Beautiful...

Finally, I’ve been enjoying Final Fantasy VII again on the Nintendo Switch. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, except that it really does look good on the Switch! Let’s see if I can beat it this time!

---

[1] The system by which you’ve only really got a chance if you keep on top of the latest releases

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Cluckles and Cannon Fodder

Had a whale of a time on this bit...

I started this week playing a game I hadn’t played for a while: Kingdom Hearts. Regular readers will know I was playing this a lot about a month ago, but it fell by the wayside as I became increasingly keener to beat Regicide. I figured it was time to come back to it before I forgot about playing it entirely, though, so I put it on, did some faffing about in Traverse Town and the Hundred Acre Wood, and eventually played and beat the Monstro level. I’d forgotten about this maze-like platforming section, and had a decent time getting through it and beating the boss. There’s a certain sense of achievement in analysing their attack patterns! 

I'll say it again because it never gets old:
It's a chicken. With a sword.

After playing that, I felt like playing something quick, so I returned to Cluckle’s Adventure. I’ve covered it before in previous blogs but just to remind you, it’s a 2D platform game starring a chicken with a sword. It’s a great pick-up-and-play game, with the one slight caveat that I prefer to use a controller when playing games like this, since I don’t want to exhaust my keys with rapid presses that you very often need for games like this! I’m trying to collect all the stars in the game, which you do by rescuing all the chicks in the level. This bogged me down for a while but when I was playing last Monday I discovered which part of the scenery telegraphs a secret area. Once I’d discovered that, getting through the levels was a lot more straightforward, and I stand a reasonable chance of beating the whole game in the not too distant future!

Then later on in the week I had a go with a game I hadn’t played in a while: Cannon Fodder. I bought this game back in 2015 off GOG and haven’t played it often since then but I thought I’d give it another go. It’s a mouse-driven top-down shooter with some light strategy elements, originally released in 1993. The graphics are showing their age now, and I normally need a couple of goes to get it to run on my laptop, but it’s still good fun after all these years. You take a small squad (1-6 soldiers) out on a mission to kill all their enemies, or blow up all their buildings. All of your soldiers have machine guns, and you can pick up grenades and rockets along the way. It sounds simple, but the game is very challenging and the gung-ho tactic of sending your lads in guns a-blazing doesn’t really work. You have the option to split your squad up, which you need to do because if the enemy hits your squad with an explosive, most if not all of your squad will die. You then have to make decisions about how many grenades and rockets you’re handing to the squads you’re splitting, because if all the members of the team die, their weapons go with them. This leads to some very interesting pieces of decision-making, and is the core of the challenge of the game.

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
Literally. That's how the buildings count as destroyed.

Cannon Fodder was also available on the Sega Mega Drive and I borrowed it off a friend at one point when I was still at school. I’d never owned it prior to when I bought it in 2015 though; if I remember rightly, the game was not easy to come by. The use of some of the imagery in the game (the poppy in particular) was considered offensive by some, and it wasn’t available for very long. It’s odd to think of that now, where the last console generation was flooded with modern military shooters, but back in the 90s it hadn’t really been done before. There had been military games, of course, but in nearly all of them your player character was some kind of 80s action hero and there was usually a lives system; Cannon Fodder was the first game that I remember to use characters that were basic, common soldiers who died permanently when they got shot. Maybe at the time that was just a little too much for some people – especially those who would argue about the detrimental effect that video games have on kids!

Last Week's Games: Crossword and Thoughts on Hobby Games

Does anybody know?

Time has not been on my side this week with regard to gaming. Work, family and band commitments has meant that the time I managed to find to play games was restricted to this crossword game on my phone, which is a great little app to download and play every so often. It is sometimes quite strange that I can look at a clue for days and not know what it means, then come back to it a week later and have the meaning perfectly clear in my head!

There’s really not that much more to say about Crosswords, though, so instead of that I’m going to talk about hobby games for a bit. There’s quite a bit to say, so this blog is a little longer than usual. I’ve used the tag line on this blog a number of times, and I thought for today I would do a piece about exactly what I mean when I say hobby games:

They’re games that you usually play on a table top with a number of people, normally with some sort of tactile element to them such as cards, dice or moving pieces. And I do enjoy playing them, when I get the chance!

The first board game I can remember playing was Snakes and Ladders; still popular to this very day! While it is a very simple game in terms of its rules and structure, it’s a wonderful little way to engage with people, particularly children. My family played it a lot when I was young, and continued to do so all throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of playing Cluedo, and my brother could play Monopoly at a very early age! 

One of the few times I completed a 40K army.

Getting in to games as a hobby came about when I was thirteen and started collecting Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. I still enjoy it to this very day, over twenty years later, although I can never escape the feeling that I’m still finding my feet with it to a large extent! I don’t paint or play games with my models anywhere near enough to develop an instinctive knowledge of the games, rules or painting techniques, but it hasn’t gone anywhere and I’ve enjoyed it on and off through most of my life. I even worked for Games Workshop at one point, although I wasn’t particularly good at that either.

But it’s been within the last ten years or so that I’ve really taken an interest in hobby games as a whole. It started with the Games Workshop games, of course, but then my mate Dave introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh, and while collectable card games are probably the aspect of hobby games I enjoy the least, it was always fun to play with him every now and then. Around the same time I discovered Fantasy Flight games, and played some of their games over the following years before discovering other game developers and publishers. I had always wanted to find out what playing Dungeons and Dragons was like, so I bought a starter set, found a public group of people who meet every week to play Role Playing Games and got involved with that; that’s been a massive part of my social life for a long time! I also started building up a large collection of board games that, while few people seeing it for the first time have a clue what it’s all about, they do find them interesting to look at!

I always enjoy this one!

These days, I play hobby games as and when I can find the time, which currently is not often. I’m fortunate enough to have a steady roleplaying group that I meet with once a month, and I play a few games with my girlfriend and her friends now and then. I make the UK Games Expo an important date on my calendar every year! But I haven’t got the structure in my life at the moment to attend hobby shops and groups regularly. Still, the games are there if I need them!

Hobby games are in something of a “Golden Age” at the moment, where new games are coming out every month and it’s no longer the exclusive domain of unsociable nerds. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of it, and it can be quite tricky to know what I’m talking about, so I thought I’d give you a break-down of what I consider to be the four main categories, and my stake in them:

·        Board Games

·        Collectable Card Games

·        Role-Playing Games

·        War Games

It was my original intention to write it all in this blog post but I found the scope of that was too large for the format my blogs usually take, so I’m going to write them a bit at a time instead, and release them periodically. That should be a bit more interesting!