Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon again with Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

 I’ve been playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as part of the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Details of how I came to own this are detailed in my original review of Spyro the Dragon, and the same basic details apply, so let’s jump right into it:

Do you know what he is?

The plot of Spyro 2, such as it is, picks up from where the previous game left off. Spyro is looking to go on vacation with Sparx to Dragon Shores, but instead gets summoned to a fantasy realm called Avalar. There, he meets with Elora the Faun, Hunter the Cheeta and Professor the, er, Professor, who tell him that they’ve summoned him there to help to defeat Ripto, a diminutive but malevolent… I don’t know what to call him. Warlock, apparently. Anyway, he’s taken over Avalar with the help of his much larger minions Crush and Gulp, and since he comes from a world of Dragons who keep him in check, Spyro has been summoned to try to beat him. With the help of his new friends, Spyro chases Ripto across the Summer Forest, Autumn Planes and Winter Tundra, hoping to defeat the evil warlock and bring peace to Avalar.

The underwater sections added a
new dimension to the levels.

The gameplay is much the same as the original Spyro the Dragon, but the game was so good that this hardly matters. Spyro still has his old moves; he can charge, breathe fire and glide over long distances. In addition, he can hold projectiles in his mouth and manually aim them to spit them out again, and gain a quick hight boost while gliding. Later in the game, Spyro learns to swim, climb and even perform an overhead smash. It’s everything a sequel should be – everything that made the original game great, with enough new mechanics added to open the level design and vary the challenges.

The levels in Spyro 2 usually have an overarching objective – usually get to a certain point on the level, by which time you’ll have defeated the enemies that form the main antagonists for that level. There are also some orbs you must collect in order to open up certain sections of the game, and these are attached to your side quests. Some of these are quite mundane, such as killing a certain number and type of enemy, and most of them are fairly easy, but some of them are actually quite challenging, and apart from a couple of clangers where the solution is deliberately obtuse, they’re pretty good fun. The highlight for me was the Ice Hockey mini game early on! The flying levels make a welcome re-appearance as optional changes of pace, and they have time trials attached to them as well to make sure you’re bringing your A-game!

Gulp proves a significant challenge
when aiming for completion...

I also managed to complete the game 100%. This isn’t too hard to do, since there are no trophies tied up in multiplayer modes and the tasks are, with a few exceptions, quite easy – a fine game to play if you’re a completionist looking for something you can breeze few in a few hours. Just keep in mind that, unlike the first Spyro game, some of the areas are locked behind mid-game abilities so some backtracking is necessary.

The presentation is great too. The voice acting is spot on, the graphics show significant improvement from the original PS1 games with the Re-ignited trilogy and are absolutely gorgeous, and Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack is a great augment to an already fantastic game. The developers really hit their stride with the level design; a little more linear than the previous game but still with a sense of openness that put them ahead of their contemporaries. There are a couple of aspects that niggle – I’m not sure why, when returning to a level, you have to watch the cutscenes and in some cases do the main quest again; this feels like something that could have quite easily been left out.

All in all, Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage is a great game that anyone should be able to pick up and have a decent amount of fun with. It is not a hard-core experience, but it knows what it is, tells the story it wants to tell and is the game it wants to be.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Backlog Beatdown: Going on a Warhammer Quest with Warhammer Quest

 I bought Warhammer Quest when I was on a, er, “Quest” to buy all the Games Workshop licensed games – good or not – so that I could play them and make up my own mind. Interestingly, those games that I have played have rarely been “good,” in the usual sense, and Warhammer Quest is no exception – but I tend to like them anyway because of my fondness of and investment in the Games Workshop properties. Warhammer Quest is no exception to that either.

Skaven can be threatening in large numbers...

At its most basic level, Warhammer Quest is a dungeon-crawler set in the Warhammer world, in certain parts of the Empire. You have a group of four Heroes: A Human Marauder, a Dwarf Ironbreaker, a Wood Elf Waywatcher, and a Human Grey Wizard. They’re very simple roles – the Marauder is your attacking hero, the Ironbreaker fights best in bottlenecks, the Waywatcher picks off enemies with her bow, and the Grey Wizard pulls double-duty as the party’s healer and magic user. More heroes are available as DLC but it’s not an avenue I intend to explore in the short term. You travel to towns and get given a quest which almost always entails going to a dungeon (and crikey, there’s a lot of those in the Empire!) and are rewarded with experience, loot and gold. Your principle enemies are Orcs, but in certain parts of the game the Skaven make an appearance, and the Undead turn up from time to time – rarely as the main enemy though. There are thirty-one quests you can get from towns, plus each town has a dungeon in between that you can explore for more items and experience. You must at least pass these to get to the next town, so it’s always worth a look. Later in the game there are some special missions that are handed to you, and you must complete these in order to beat the game.

The screen can be spun around to odd angles.

This game was originally designed for IOS, and it shows. It controls on a point-and-click strategy game basis, though in practice there’s very little strategy to the game. You click on the enemies to attack them and they lose some health until they die; that’s about it. There’s no positioning tactics, no flanking bonuses – the nearest you come to tactical manoeuvring is deciding whether to put your two fighters at the end of a corridor to limit the enemy’s action economy, or use the Marauder to take the battle to the enemy in the room knowing that his multiple attacks mean he’ll likely drop at least some of the enemies, and he probably has enough hit points to take any reprisals. This was fine by me, as too much complexity overwhelms me after a while. It looks OK, the graphics are as good as they need to be for a game like this though all the cut-scenes are text scrolls which takes away from some of the atmosphere. The sound is pretty good as well; fantasy-level orchestral and choral scores, with some functional if predictable sound effects for the towns and weapons.

Losing your ability to act isn't much fun...

Warhammer Quest has several flaws, the main one being the Spiders – try taking these on in any significant numbers and they’ll use their webs to prevent your party from moving and slow the game right down, often forcing you to quit out of the dungeon and start again. Randomly spawning enemies every few turns are supposed to keep you alert but it happens a little too often – sometimes in the middle of an already painful fight! Some of the controls make sense on a tablet but could easily have been modified for PC. There should be a hotkey for the End Turn button at the very least, and some of the clunk could have been removed from activating abilities.

When Warhammer Quest gets it right, it can be a thrilling experience; this usually comes in the form of a reasonable but challenging timed mission. The rest of the time, it’s a solid, functional dungeon crawler. It breaks no boundaries and has little to reward you for seeing it through to the end, but if you like Warhammer or simplistic dungeon-bashing, this will keep you entertained for a few hours at least.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest, Magic Labyrinth, Ninja Dice and Dungeon Roll

I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons, hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.

Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter.

One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven, or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!

Where are the walls?

Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience, but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a 6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won the game by collecting five treasures!

I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least...

We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play (she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for a four-year-old!

Last Month's Painting: Lost Patrol

For this November I’ve being trying to paint the entirety of the Lost Patrol boxed set. As one of Games Workshop’s smaller releases, this wasn’t a huge task and I managed to successfully paint the entire set in slightly less than a month.

Not that many models, but for me, that's
pretty good going for a month.

Lost Patrol was a game released a few years ago as part of Games Workshop’s seemingly endless slew of board games based on its properties it was putting out at the time, and like the slightly-too-obsessed collector that I am, I had to have them all. Some were better quality than others, and from what I understand the actual game isn’t one of Games Workshop’s better efforts. Like Space Hulk before it, it was once again a small group of Space Marines vs a much larger swarm of Genestealers, trying to find the macguffin before they all die, though in this game they are Scouts rather than Terminators. Unlike Space Hulk, however, there were no new models designed for it – they were all currently-existing models. The game used a very simple rule set aimed at younger players, a noble idea, but it had the effect of stacking the game quite heavily in favour of the Genestealer player. And even though there are a huge number of ways the map can be arranged, there is only one scenario which limits its long-term appeal. The latter two are things I’ve heard, by the way. I haven’t actually played the game yet.

The Scouts were a lot of fun...

But we’re here to talk about the painting rather than the quality of the game, and here I faced some… not necessarily new challenges but re-visiting some old ones. I have, of course, been painting Space Marines for pretty much the entire time I’ve been invested in the hobby, even if most of them were Chaos. Tyranids have been less frequent though regular readers will recognise the aesthetic at least from the Space Hulk set. The only time I’ve ever done Space Marine Scouts before, though, was  nearly 10 years ago where I had the idea of building a scout army to represent the rebuilding of the Black Consuls chapter, and I’ve painted Human faces intermittently since then (I tend to prefer helmets.) I didn’t do a terrible job but my lack of experience with painting faces shows, I think – some of those eyes are very sloppy indeed! If painting is a skill I’m looking to develop, I might consider doing an army with exposed faces to give me a little more practice! Elsewhere, the Scouts were painted in Blood Angels colours, which was nothing new to me since I’d painted the Space Hulk set in the same way and my Word Bearer army is roughly the same colour with different trimmings.

And painting Genestealers this way is a
quick and effective paint scheme.

The Genestealers were interesting. As presented on the box art and the photographs on the back, they appear to be a splinter fleet of Hive Fleet Kraken; largely a bony white colour with red claws. With Hive Fleet Kraken, the carapace would usually be red, and the flesh would be more of a sepia-colour, but this way gave them a more skeletal appearance that would be terrifying in large numbers. After watching a video guide on Youtube and buying a red wash, I was struck by how little time it took to get an effective-looking set of models – to game standard, at least; I wouldn’t expect to win any painting competitions with this – and decided that if I ever chose to paint a Tyranid army in any significant numbers, this is how I’d do it. I’m pleased with the overall result, and I’m glad I now have an idea of what a large Tyranid army might look like for me, should it become an option to paint one.

I think what’s great about these boxed sets is that it gives you the opportunity to try painting models you wouldn’t normally paint. I wouldn’t normally choose to paint Tryanids but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed painting the Genestealers from Space Hulk and Lost Patrol – and expanding my horizons on where I can take my painting can only be a good thing. I’m not short of them but don’t know what the next one will be yet, we shall see…

Last Week's Games: Roleplaying Games, Warhammer Quest, Skyrim

It’s been a while since my last blog post. There have been a few reasons for this: The main one is that I’ve been involved in a theatre project for the last three weeks which has taken up a lot of my spare time. Barely a week has gone by since September where I haven’t had to adjust my working patterns to accommodate one thing or another. Also, my mental health hasn’t been at its peak over the last month. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing’s happened, but in the small amount of quiet I’ve had over the last few weeks, I’ve found it difficult to keep my mind focussed enough to find something interesting and relevant to say.

I’ve been looking at new campaign ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, with the aim of putting together a framework for a whole campaign without getting bogged down in small details. The idea is that if I ever get the chance to run it, I’d develop it one session at a time out of the framework and ideas I’m writing now. However, I’d really like to play as well so I’ve been looking in to trying to find an online group, using mainly Roll20 as a source. This hasn’t been successful; timing often gets in the way but also there are so many people trying to join games on Roll20 it often feels like applying for a job. But I’ll keep trying and we’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, I lost a friend I knew through roleplaying games the week before last. Andy from the Black Country Role-Playing Society passed away in hospital; I don’t know any more than that and I would prefer not to ask. Andy was one of the first people I was in an RPG with; he was one of the players in Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv. He was also in the first game I ran as part of the group. After that, he ran another Pathfinder game: Council of Thieves, in which I played a couple of fighters (I had to change my first one after I learned about builds!) It was a good game to be a part of, and I was able to help Andy run it by occasionally looking up a rule to resolve a dispute or explain a ruling in ways that made sense. I had to leave the game eventually when life got in the way, but Andy remained a constant and committed presence in the group and I’m sure everyone there will miss him very much. I’m glad I got to see him a few weeks ago when I had the opportunity to return to the group; you never know when it’s going to be the last time.

Imagine five, six, seven of these spiders
firing off their webs at you...

With video games, I’ve been having problems with spiders. In Warhammer Quest, I’m fighting some high-level spiders – Venomous Gigantic Spiders, or something along those lines. The problem I’ve been having with these is the way their AI is programmed. They have two ways of attacking you – bites, which can poison you, or webs, which stop you from moving. Bites are the nastier of the two moves, but they will only do this if you move close enough to attack them. If not, they’ll keep firing their webs at you, with the result that whatever is left of your party can’t move or act in any way. This slows the game down to the point where I had to quit out of the dungeons and start again, and since they can take quite a while to clear, this isn’t fun!

Apparently those things either side of its mouth
are its sexual organs. Doesn't bear thinking about...

I’ve also started playing Skyrim again, as an Argonian Two-Handed Weapon fighter. I’ve learned a few things from my time with Dark Souls and I’m a lot better equipped to take on the game now. I like how the game is developing, but I don’t like the Frostbite Spiders. Horrible things. They’re huge. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve tried to play through Skyrim and I can’t remember how far I’ve got in the game before, but my character is at level 18 now and I’m enjoying it so far so hopefully I’ll be able to see it through to the end this time.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest and Escape Game: 50 Rooms 1

 I don’t know if anybody noticed, but most of the games I’ve been playing lately have been long-form RPGs, strategy games and platformers which I’m taking a fairly decent amount of time to complete 100%. One of the problems I run in to when I’m doing this blog is trying to find something new and interesting to say about the games I’ve been playing in that time. However, this week, two opportunities presented themselves, with Warhammer Quest and, er, Escape game 50 rooms 1.

Warhammer first, then. I’ve described the game in previous blogs so have a look at those if you want to know what it’s like. But I discovered a cheat. Well, that’s not true, I doubt I’ve “discovered” anything; I won’t have been the first to have found this. And it’s not even a cheat, really, it’s… not a bug either, more an exploit in the game’s programming. Here’s what it is:

"I saw a rat! Where?"

At some point during the game your party goes to Altdorf, the capital city of the Empire. Here you are given three missions against the Skaven.[1] On the second of those three missions, you’re given half of your pay at the beginning – 750 gold. You then play through the mission, where you have to drop a gas bomb in the Skaven tunnels – a thrilling battle in itself, as you only have a limited time to escape once the bomb has been set, and when I played it, it literally came down to the last available move! Immediately after completing the mission, you’re taken to a cutscene (which in this game rarely amounts to more than a text scroll, from what I’ve seen so far) where you’re paid the rest of your fee; another 750 gold. If you exit the game at that point and come back to it, the scene triggers once more and you get the 750 gold again – and you can repeat this process as many times as you like for what I assume is a potentially unlimited amount of gold! I did it twice: the first was quite by accident, as I had to leave my computer pretty quickly after finishing the mission, and the second was to check what was happening. I didn’t exploit it any more than that – I prefer not to cheat through a game – but it’s there if you need it!

The other game I played this week was Escape game 50 rooms 1, which I downloaded onto my Android phone last week and I’d beaten by the following Friday. It’s an escape room game, where you must solve puzzles in order to proceed. You find various keys for various doors, items to solve other puzzles, and the occasional number and symbol puzzle. If you find the way to open the door, you move on to the next room.

What's the connection between the
TV and the fish on the opposite wall?

Some people might think games like this are trashy timewasters, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; it’s hardly A-Grade material. The number puzzles rarely look like the thing they’re representing. A key code panel, for example, will rarely have their numerical display in an Arial font! And some of the solutions to the puzzles are horribly obtuse. Even without that, fifty levels of essentially the same thing can get dull after a while, not that a mobile game is intended for extended play. But when it goes for it, really goes for it, Escape game works well. With most of the puzzles being confined to one room, there’s little wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused. The rooms you’re trying to escape from range from hotel rooms, to late 90s offices, to eerily decorated children’s rooms, to some quite frankly bizarre one-shots like ancient Egypt, a cave, and a grisly morgue. The creepy soundtrack, the abstract art, and the level design that looks ever-so-slightly off, creates the unnerving impression that you – the player character – are trying to escape from a place you don’t belong.

I’ve mentioned it here rather than giving it a full review; it’s a free download and it’s not a game I would consider I had to beat, but Escape game is a good experience that I’m pleased I’ve had.

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[1] Rat Men, if you don’t know.