Backlog Beatdown: Saving my Bacon with Hogs of War

So Ebay may very well become my downfall in managing my video game backlog. I’ve been ordering all sorts of titles mainly for the PS1, inspired by the game collector and Youtube star MetalJesusRocks. I’ve bought around 15 games so far and I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the ones I’ve played, most of which I’ve previously owned at some point and it’s leaving me in a nostalgic haze.

And what a delight it was to play Hogs of War again…

The idea was best summarised by the Playstation Magazine Demo Disc it appeared on: “Imagine Worms in 3D. Now put pigs where the worms should be, and…” It is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a squad of usually five pigs. They have a limited amount of time to move around and position themselves to attack the enemy, as almost all the attacks are done from a stationary position. The hogs have a certain amount of health each, which is drained with each attack it takes, and the last team standing is the winner.

I had War Pigs by Black Sabbath going round in my
head all the way through my playthrough of this.

Much of the strategy of the game comes from choosing where to put your pigs and deciding what weapon to use. The sniper rifle, for example, does as much damage as a direct hit from a bazooka, however it can only fire in a straight line and leaves you open to a follow-up attack if you don’t kill your enemy straight away and are in an awkward position. The bazooka has area-of-effect damage and can be fired over terrain, but requires you to ‘charge’ your attack to the appropriate amount of power you need for the shot; if you don’t get this right your accuracy will suffer and you’ll very likely miss your shot entirely. Deciding what to use, when to use it, and where to use it from is the key to getting through some of the harder levels of the game.

The game has a campaign mode, where it puts you in a linear series of 25 levels taking over the continent of Saustralasia. Your hogs are somewhat limited in what they can do at first, but you gain ‘medals’ throughout the game as rewards for completing levels and surviving, and you use these to upgrade your pigs. You can take them down a Heavy Weapons route, or Espionage, Engineering and Medic. You can choose them to suit your play style if you want, but you’ll find it much easier to have two of each (you start with a total of 8 hogs) and swap them in and out of your squad as you need to. A fourth promotion brings them up to Commando level, which specialises in all weapons, and the final level is Hero, who can use more or less all weapons and has a few special ones to work with as well.

The true strength of this game is its sense of humour. Your team of pigs is selected from one of 6 ‘Nations,’ very stereotypically based on the English, French, German, American, Russian and Japanese. They all make amusing and borderline-racist remarks when they make their attack in hilariously overblown accents. Plus the cut-scenes, usually “Training” videos, are funny in their uselessness. The whole thing is capped off by having many of the voice-overs done by the sadly-missed Rik Mayall, whose performance brings the cheesy lines and camp over-acting to life.

The game challenges me at the right level; it’s tough enough in places but the campaign took me around 15 hours to get all the way through and that’s quite enough for me. The AI sometimes makes some very strange decisions indeed, and the controls feel clunky – I suspect this was a quite deliberate design decision that adds to the feel of the game. After all, guns are hard enough to use at the best of times, never mind trying to do it with trotters!

I love this game; I regretted selling it years ago and I’ll certainly be hanging on to it for a good long while this time. Maybe I’m getting old, but I found myself thinking around half-way through my play-through that we just don’t get this kind of game in the mainstream these days. Turn-based strategy games are still something of a niche, and in a Triple-A release, the edgy dialogue would be focus-tested out of the game before you’d even got on to Rik Mayall’s booking agent. Plus, it’s fighting pigs; not relatable in any obvious way (though the game has a surprising amount to say about the futility of war!) and a ridiculous concept. You won’t see this on any Youtube advertisement, and if people still make games like this, then they are consigned to the depths of what is now called Indie Gaming. A bit sad, really.

*EDIT*

Chances are some of you may now be thinking: "Well, this seems pretty good, I'll give it a go." If you do, be advised the PC version of this has slightly better graphics and is inferior in all other respects. The main problem with it is that the enemy pigs don't move, they just stand and fire. This is not a bug but was deliberately coded into the game, and I'd like to find out why, because it should be coded out again with extreme force. It removes any challenge from the game and you're basically just playing a shooting gallery. Get it for the PlayStation, or the handhelds if you can.

Backlog Beatdown: Collecting EVERYTHING with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might be forgiven for thinking “But Matt, haven’t you already beaten Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga?” And you would be correct, well done, especially if you’re not one of the (currently) 33 people who read that blog in the first place. And you’re right, I wouldn’t normally count a game as ‘beaten’ if I’d already done so. However, I allowed myself a free pass with Lego Star Wars. And here’s why:

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is the first full game on the Xbox 360 I have completed 100%. That is to say, I have completed all the campaigns, collected all the collectables (and this is a Lego game so there are a LOT,) and got all the achievement points.

Playing as Obi Wan in his full 'Cool
Old Guy' glory. What's not to love?

In fairness, this is probably the only game in my collection where I have a hope of achieving all the achievement points. It’s not because I’m bad at games, not just because of that anyway. It’s just that for the vast majority of games I’ve got on the 360, a lot of the achievement points are tied up in the online Multiplayer mode. And since I’m always going to struggle even to get a game in now that most people have moved onto the Xbox One, the chances that I’m going to get many achievements that depend on multiplayer games are slim indeed. There was one achievement, in this case, that required me to complete a level with another player online, but I managed that one a couple of years ago.

I got a long way to doing this when I was participating in No Game New Year back in 2014, but after collecting all the mini-kits and other various achievements, I realised I was essentially going to have to play through the game at least another two times in order to complete the game and it got filed under “can’t be arsed.” Nearly a year and a half later, I came back to it and found that I needed to get all the Blue Mini-kits in challenge mode. I used an online guide for this because I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down, and even then some of those kits were very tough to find in the 10-minute time limit. It took a while, but I got them all.

Then I needed to complete the bounty hunter missions for the final few gold bricks. These turned out to be quite easy and very enjoyable; the bounty hunters are always fun characters to play and it’s nice to play the familiar levels with different characters. Yes, I know Free Play allows you to do this, but the Bounty Hunter missions lock you with those 6 (I think) characters so you have to utilise what abilities you have – some have more than others – to get through the level.

The final thing I needed to do was to complete Super Story Mode – in this, you apparently have to get through each story in less than an hour and collect 100,000 studs along the way. Now, I’m not complaining, but I found in my play-through that I only actually had to do the latter, as some of the stories took me well over an hour and were marked off as complete anyway. Collecting 100,000 studs is really not that hard to do, so it was just a matter of getting through the story again, but I managed it for the final achievement of completing the game 100%.

Fitting that this was the scene at the end of the
Lego Star Wars - TCS journey...

And that should be it for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I’ve done everything there is to do and there’s no reason for me to own the game anymore, so I should probably just get rid of it. Except… for some reason, I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know whether I’ve got an ill-proportioned amount of investment in this game now, or whether I’m thinking of playing it through again in the future, but I don’t want to delete it from my hard drive just yet.

Maybe it’s because whatever else it might be, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is actually a really good game.

Backlog Beatdown: Biologically Shocking with Bioshock 2

One of the things I want to do when playing video games this year is to get through some of the series of games I’ve been hoarding. I’ve got quite a few; the entire Gears of War series, Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, XCOM to name but some of them. The trouble is that by the time I get to the end of one game in a series, I’m usually itching for a change of pace and playing the second or third instalment of it straight away is the last thing I feel like doing. The result is I’ve got games I haven’t even touched because I haven’t finished their prequels. That’s something I’m hoping to address in the coming months.

Take Bioshock 2 for example. My main incentive for getting this particular game was that I’d downloaded Bioshock Infinite onto my Xbox 360 when it was released for free on Games with Gold. I’d already played the first Bioshock game – a very good game, in my opinion – and I’d heard that the second instalment was arguably the weakest in the trilogy, but as it had been a good couple of years since I’d beaten the original Bioshock, I thought the time was right to give its sequel a go.

This time, instead of playing a pure human, you play as one of the Big Daddies; huge hulking lummoxes in diving suits that are genetically engineered to protect the Little Sisters – strange, waif-like girls who walk around harvesting corpses for ADAM (genetic materials that can be used to enhance capabilities.) The story goes that ten years ago, you were forced to shoot yourself by the game’s primary antagonist: Sophia Lamb. You awaken, and have to re-connect to your little sister, now a young adult, in order to survive and escape the huge underwater city of Rapture. Sophia, however, has her own plans for Eleanor – her daughter, and your little sister – and will not let her go without a fight. She has engineered a fanatical cult-like collection of splices and bitter enemies, and will stop at nothing to impede your progress.

Have a guess where I'm going
to stick this...

I didn’t find the change in character affected the gameplay to any major extent; you can take as much punishment as Jack from Bioshock, and apart from some changes in the weapons (rivet gun instead of a pistol, Big Daddy Drill instead of a wrench etc) the game plays much the same as it ever did. This is a good thing, since Bioshock played so well in the first place. It is reasonably well-balanced; I died a lot but it was always because I was rubbish rather than cheap deaths often put upon you in lesser games, and since your only punishment for this is to go back to a Vita chamber – the game’s save points – with half your health and EVE (mana,) the game is not harsh enough to derail the whole thing if you make a mistake. The enemies are surprisingly well-varied, and are all potentially a threat if you don’t take care as you go through the levels. The game also rewards you for taking your time, exploring and finding all the loot hidden around the city; ammo is not exactly scarce but it’s very easy to burn through and you can make things a lot easier for yourself by looking for all the ammo-dumps and med-kits.

One thing I did find a bit redundant was the Plasmids. While they can potentially create a whole host of fun effects, I found myself sticking with the Lightning Bolt – which has the additional effect of stopping the enemy for a few moments – more often than not. It suited my play style but it meant I missed out on a lot of the potential fun from the game. It is in many ways a step backwards from the previous game, which required you to use a certain plasmid in a certain area in order to progress. But that’s not a complaint so much as an observation on my own particular taste.

Bioshock 2 does a very good job of blending gameplay with storytelling, and the closer you get to your goal of rescuing Eleanor, the more invested you get in the plot. It takes a few hours to get going, as you’re introduced to various characters and mechanics, but once you’re in, you’re hooked. The game lasts around 12-14 hours, which for a game like this is plenty of time. The last couple of levels in particular have a feeling of frantic desperation about them that keeps you going right until the end. There are a few different variations of the ending depending on what moral decisions you made during the game; always a nice touch but I can rarely bring myself to play through a game to get the bad ending so I finished the game with the best ending and looked up the rest on Youtube.

Bioshock 2 does enough things differently to Bioshock to justify its title of ‘sequel.’ I think if it had come out the year after the first Bioshock game it would have been a disappointment, but it looks like a very well-paced series and if Infinite is the last instalment, I understand it went out with a bang. I’ll probably play it at some point, but right now I can feel accomplished at beating a well-designed enjoyable game that tells its story brilliantly.

Backlog Beatdown: Old School Platforming with Mega Man X

Mega Man X is a game that I first played when I was about 10 or 11, my friend Matt had a Super Nintendo and borrowed it off someone. I remember enjoying it at the time; it made enough of an impression for me to download it onto my Wii U 20 years later.

While I wouldn’t have consciously thought this when I first played it, I guess Mega Man X is a “gamer’s game,” and as standard as they come. A side-scrolling platform game with colourful characters, bosses and upgrades, easy enough for me to get more or less all the way through the game without me discovering many of its secrets, but challenging enough on the right level for it to be fun. Also there were plenty of optional upgrades to discover for those people who wanted to look for them.

Watch for the attack patters, or just
shoot it until it dies - game's fine either way.

I haven’t played many Mega Man games, but as far as I know the pattern scarcely varies between each game – you go through a number of levels, fight a boss at the end and take his weapon if you beat him, and then go on to the final level where you get a boss rush (fight all the bosses again) and defeat the game’s final boss for the win. It’s a simple enough concept, and is solid enough for it to still be popular even to this very day, with new games in the series being released as little as a few years ago.

The gimmicks of the ‘X’ series – and what sets it apart from the other games – is that you can upgrade Mega Man himself. In the main series, your upgrades were limited to the weapons you received from the bosses you defeated. In Mega Man X you get that too, but you also get upgrades to his legs, chest, helmet and gun, allowing him to dash, take more damage, break certain ceilings with his helmet and charge more powerful shots, respectively. You can also pick up items to increase your maximum health, and even ‘sub-tanks’ that allowed you to store health pick-ups to re-fill your health bar when you were ready. Finding and using all of these upgrades is the real challenge and reward of the game.

The levels are well-designed and challenging. Very few of your enemies put up much of a fight and will die if you hit them a few times, but some of them exist to get in your way and force you to come up with strategies to either avoid or kill them quickly. You die far more often to traps and pitfalls than you do from taking damage! You can access the levels after you’ve beaten them to search for the secrets, and brilliantly, areas hidden areas of some levels are only accessible once you’ve beaten others. This is a classic example of good design – you’re not forced to discover these secrets in order to beat the levels, but it is a rewarding challenge for those who do.

Most of the bosses can be beaten by analysing their attack patterns and reacting accordingly, but you can make things a lot easier for yourself by finding out which boss is vulnerable to which weapon. The classic example is Spark Mandrill – once you have the Shotgun Ice weapon, he freezes as soon as you hit him with it. Boomer Kuwanger is almost impossible to hit, but is particularly vulnerable to the homing missiles you get from Launch Octopus. The final bosses of the game are also weak to certain weapons.

I’ll admit that I used a wiki to help me to discover some of the game’s more obscure secrets – the last few health tanks, and the final bosses’ vulnerabilities. Some may call it cheating, but these were tricky enough moves to make and did not detract from the challenge of the game. I’ve had a lot of fun with Mega Man X; it’s a splendid platformer from a strong development team at the very top of their game. I’ll keep it on my Wii U in case I fancy another go, but I can’t see that happening any time soon as I’ve seen most of what there is to see.

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!