Last Week's Games: Early August

Hi, it’s been a while since my last regular blog, so I thought I’d do an update for you with the games I’ve been playing over the last few weeks. This isn’t me ‘resuming normal service’ in the usual way; things are still very up in the air at the moment and I can’t give a timetable to a weekly blog for another couple of weeks at least, but I can give you an idea of what’s been happening. 

Mack the Knife. Also known as Stabby McGee.
Thanks Kirsty!

I’ve cheated a bit with playing new games over the last few weeks, as most of them were on the Capcom Arcade Classics Collection Volume 2. This was a disc I bought for the Playstation 2, I think I was still at University at the time so it would have been anything up to twelve years ago. I bought it mainly on the strength of the original Street Fighter which was featured on the disc, and didn’t touch any of the other games on there. That was a shame, as Street Fighter is arguably one of the weakest games on there,[1] and I missed out on some gems! A lot of them were old late 80s/early 90s arcade games, where the arcades where at their peak of featuring scrolling beat-em-ups you were never going to be able to beat without spending at least £10 on continues, but I’ve had a lot of fun with them. Kirsty and I got through Captain Commando, and there’ll be a Backlog Beatdown on that one soon!

Well that's a bit presumptuous. I don't remember being friends
with Susan and Brian. I'm sure they're very nice people.

Elsewhere I’ve been playing 8 Ball Pool on my Kindle Fire. This is a top-down pool game that is played against various people around the world, including at least two people I know! I’m doing reasonably well with it, I win about two thirds of my games, although I’d suggest that at least half of those are to do with the connection going on the other side of the match! Once you get past the novelty of playing pool on your tablet, it’s an unlock-fest really, and one that is not shy about advertising its micro transactions, but as long as you keep your wallet under control it’s possible to have a good time with games like this!

Also I’ve been trying to get through the original Castlevania on the WiiU. As anybody who has played this game will tell you, after a deceptively easy first level, the game becomes brutally difficult, and the only way I’m making any progress is to scum-save each part of the levels and hope for the best when I get to the boss. Thankfully, the structure of the WiiU allows you to do this, or I wouldn’t have a chance. I’ve always really enjoyed the Castlevania games, but apart from beating Super Castlevania IV in 1997, I’ve never beaten another one. Might be time to play through some more!

I haven’t had much time for hobby gaming over the summer holidays for various different reasons, but I’ve continued to run Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords for Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve also started to run Dungeons and Dragons again at the Black Country Role Playing Society, where I’m running the Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts path from the D&D Adventurer’s League. I had a starting line-up of players worryingly similar to the Falcon’s Hollow saga I ran years ago, but I should have some new players join up next week.

I should go to the Nashkel Mines next...

Perhaps as added inspiration I started a new campaign on Baldur’s Gate as a Sorcerer. I’ve played through probably the first third of the game many times, and have never been able to see it through quite until the end, however this time is different because I allowed Khalid and Jaheira, and certain other party members to be killed off and will recruit new party members as I’m going along. I almost never do this as canonically they both survive until the end of the game, but I thought I’d see how I get along with the core line-up!

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[1] Yes, I know it paved the way for the massive gaming entity that the Street Fighter Franchise eventually became, but the first game in the series just wasn’t there yet.

Last Two Week's Games: Wet, Streets of Rage 3, Roll the Ball, Chaos Cultists

Normally I keep these blogs to 700 words; that’s roughly a side of A4 and about as much time as anyone’s got for anything I have to say about video games! However, as this blog has to cover two weeks rather than one, this will be a little longer.

Mordheim Mercenaries.

My time last week was somewhat limited but I did manage to get a few games in! I had my usual go through Mordheim: City of the Damned, and I’m not sure what’s going on with my warband but I seem a lot more susceptible to injuries than I ever did before. There have been a few characters I’ve had to prematurely retire before I’ve got as far as the campaign missions, which is slowing my progress down somewhat and I hope that the game doesn’t bug out on me when I get there!

My new game for this week was supposed to be N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, a game I’d bought for £1 from CEX a few months before. Having tried it, I’m not sure they checked the game when it was traded in. My Xbox 360 wouldn’t read the disc, and when I took it out of the machine to find out why, I noticed a white ring burned into the silver side. Knowing it would never work in a million years, and not having had the foresight to keep the receipt, I put it in the bin. CEX, you done messed up.

A typical action scene...

So the new game that was actually my new game was a game I’d bought in the same purchase, funnily enough: Wet on the Xbox 360. I know that it hasn’t got great reviews, but I bought this one on the strength of it appearing in one of Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos. He admitted it wasn’t great but there was some fun to be found in it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find he was right! It is a third-person action adventure, with an emphasis on combo kills and style. For example, you get more points for taking out an enemy while sliding on your knees, which is brilliant. Not the standard for games these days, but it’s always nice to see games doing things just a little bit different. I had a decent time with the arena battles particularly, where the enemies constantly respawn until you shut down the respawn points. I also really enjoyed the section where there’s a big car chase and you’re combining precision-shooting with quick-time events; the latter are rarely welcome but I’d have enjoyed actually having to jump between cars a lot less.

Unfortunately the game is let down by slightly wobbly controls; in certain situations the buttons take the lead character, Ruby, in unexpected directions. This is rarely a problem in the main section of the game, because I don’t mind having to figure out which jumps you can make and which you can’t. It takes me back to the old Tomb Raider games! But I don’t like it on the Assault Course stages in-between the levels, because you’re on a timer and can ill-afford to make mistakes because the controls are letting you down. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the game, and saw it through to the end. A Backlog Beatdown review is on its way!

New enemies, new character models,
new gameplay mechanics...

I had a go through Streets of Rage 3; the only game from the main series I never beat. I’d played it before and never seemed to like it quite as much as Streets of Rage 2. Nonetheless, I’ve been having some fun with the game, although it’s an interesting new take on the mechanics. Some of the moves were re-balanced, throws do a lot more damage, Max has been replaced completely by Zan, and there are environmental hazards to contend with as well. Also Blaze had a re-vamp; her character is better than ever! I’m finding her a lot easier to control than I did in SOR 2. My quest for all the achievement points is going to be a tough one, since the game contains a system where you have to max out your Blitz attack, and the only way to do it is to score 120,000 without dying even once. This is ferociously difficult and I’m going to run in to a lot of problems doing it but apparently there is a cheap trick you can employ on level 6 to make it happen. I haven’t got there yet though!

Puzzling...

My new game for the second week is Roll the Ball, something I downloaded on to my phone. It’s a puzzle game where you have to arrange tiles to roll a ball into a target square. There’s usually some parameters; a certain set of squares you have to go through, a target number of moves, and even a mode where the ball is moving as you complete the puzzle and you have to move the squares – often with the ball in it. It’s a nice distraction when I have a few moments to kill, and there’s a lot of levels so it will keep me going for ages.

The tile they're standing on is what I
use as a pallet, by the way,

Finally, I completed a hobby project: I finished painting my Chaos Cultists. I had the flesh and the base left to do, and once I’d done that and tidied it up a little bit they actually ended up looking quite good. I haven’t done a massive amount of justice to them with my camera phone but they are looking OK at the moment. I started my next project, a Dark Apostle, and I’d forgotten how much I dislike building resin models, as they barely hold together and fall apart if you so much as breathe on them too hard. I only managed to get the undercoat on before I dropped it and the leg fell off! But I’ll fix it and try again in the week.

A reminder – no Last Week’s Games blog next week; I’m on holiday. But I’ll try and do a blog covering both weeks for the week after.

Last Week's Games: Shadowrun Returns, Cooking Fever, Mordheim, Co-Optional Podcast

A rather interesting mish-mash of games for me this week:

Beautiful game, but not running too well...

I started this week with my new game for the week, which is Shadowrun Returns. This is an RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate or one of its sequels, and has you create a character to perform ‘runs,’ a series of missions in a cyberpunk world that go outside of the mega-corporations controlling it. The combat works very similar to XCOM, and the couple of hours I played of it were more enjoyable than the awful multiplayer-only shooter on the Xbox 360 by some considerable distance.

Unfortunately my laptop really doesn’t like running Shadowrun. It crashed a few times during the time I was playing it and I had to restart the computer. I don’t know whether the game is poorly optimised or whether this is one of those games my laptop would rather not be running, but I’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how that’s working out before I put many hours into the game.

So many sausages...

I’ve become rather engrossed in a game on my Kindle Fire called Cooking Fever. It’s a game where you create various dishes to serve to customers in a set amount of time. For a game that’s supposed to be a time-waster, it does a fine job of hooking you in and convincing you to play just one more level, and I’m having a good amount of fun with it so far. You serve customers to earn money, and serve them quickly to earn tips. You then spend that money to upgrade your equipment and eatery so that the customers will wait longer, tip higher, and your cooking efficiency improves. It has micro-transactions in the form of diamonds that have to be used to unlock some upper tiers of food production, customer satisfaction and more restaurants. These can be earned in-game via an experience point system, but I can see this becoming a grind in the later stages of the game!

I finally finished painting Angron. This was a Forge World model that my mate Dave asked me to paint ages ago in exchange for some dwarves. I got so far in to the project and then left it for literally years; by the time I give it back I will have had that model for nearly five years. I definitely won’t be accepting any more painting commissions, as I have little enough time and patience to paint my own models, and it looks pretty poor to accept a job and then not do it for nearly five years. I was far from pleased with the final result; I know I can do better. But Dave told me he needed the model back, so I did the best job I could in an evening and I’ll hand it back next time I see him.

Ogres are amusing, but will need levelling up
before they're much use!

Finally, I started another campaign on Mordheim: City of the Damned with Mercenaries again. This time I’m doing them all as Nordland Pirates, who have their skills in ambush attacks. It will work or it won’t! It’s a special game that I run in to so many bugs with, yet enjoy enough to keep coming back to it!

I also watched the Co-Optional Podcast #222 featuring Sky Williams. I’m mentioning this because he gave an interesting piece of gaming discipline that I thought I might try: He said that he’d got bogged down playing the same two MMOs and not really doing anything with his other games, so now he’s trying to beat one game a month. I’ve got a long list of games I’ve yet to even played, never mind beaten, so I think I might try that over the next few months to see how it goes. I’ve certainly not done a Backlog Beatdown blog for a long time!

On that subject, the blog posts may be a little erratic over the next few weeks due to holidays and a very busy week on the horizon! I try to get these posts out on Monday but that isn’t always possible. In particular, I will almost certainly miss Monday 6^th August, though I will probably try and publish something later on that week.

See you all soon!

Last Week's Games: Mordheim, Regicide and the Witness

I started this week with a game that might by now be considered an old favourite: Mordheim, City of the Damned. I think what inspired me to do that was that at some point I had a look at the achievement list on Steam, and found that there’s a lot of achievements that only a very small number of folks have achieved. Wanting to be one of them, I’m aiming high this time, wanting to get some heroes to level 10! It’s not an excellent game – the bugs can get in the way sometimes, and it tanks the power on my laptop, and that’s even before we get into the somewhat limited map design and ferociously tough objectives. But as you’ve probably gathered from the tone of some of my more recent posts, I love the Games Workshop licensed games, and Mordheim has been my favourite of them so far.

Witch Hunters. They hunt Witches, I've heard.

By “ferociously tough objectives,” I’m talking specifically about the Crush their Will missions, which is Mordheim’s version of Capture the Flag – you have to steal the enemy’s idol at their cart and return it to your own. The problem that it runs in to is that the battle system works on Morale – the war bands need to take a morale check once their morale falls below a certain point, and if they fail, which they almost always do, the battle is over. The trouble is that there’s rarely enough time to get from one side of the map to the other to get the idol and bring it back to your own, except for certain maps that are generated randomly so there’s no way of strategizing this. And even if there were, you would have to use one of your heroes to do this, as your henchmen don’t have the same kind of mobility. Then again, I tend to play either Mercenaries or Possessed, I don’t very often play Skaven so the position might be different there, we shall see! I played for a long time until I ran into a game-breaking bug that stops you from beating one of the campaign missions, and while I did get some advice on beating it, I ended up starting again as the Witch Hunters.

I also had another go at Regicide, 40K’s version of Chess, where I’ve got stuck on a mission where you have to stop three Ork Stormboyz (knights) from getting into two squares on your side of the board with four Tactical Marines (pawns) and two Devastators (bishops.) The problem I’m running in to is that the secondary objective is to capture the three Stormboyz, (i.e. the conventional way you’d do it in Chess,) not kill them. It’s a tricky thing to do because of course it doesn’t stop the Stormboyz trying to kill you, so even though you make the right moves, your pieces could very well be killed by the enemy shooting at them before they have a chance to capture! So ultimately I’m relying on a mistake by the AI, which isn’t a particularly rewarding way of dealing with things.

I tried Eternal Crusade again after being away from it for about a week, during which the competition seemed to have ramped up in difficulty! I found myself not enjoying it quite as much as I used to, it might just be getting a little old now.

This bit's a beauty...

My new game for this week was The Witness, a puzzle game in which you travel round an island solving maze-like puzzles. This sounds like the most boring thing in the world but I actually quite like things like that and I’m enjoying my time with it, even if I had to look at IGN to find out what to do with one of the Tetris puzzles. It’s a beautifully-presented game, and the ambience does a lot to keep my mind focussed on a couple of different things at the same time. My only complaint so far is about the puzzles that you only appear to have one chance to complete; if you don’t, that puzzle is shut down. It seems a little harsh not to get a second go at it, especially if the puzzle rules have changed!

Last Week's Games: Sonic Transformed, Streets of Rage, Midnight Wanderes

What's it like to drive with no tyres?

As I resolved to play one new game every week, I tend to do that at the start of the week to make sure I’ve done it and give the game a chance to engage me. I didn’t do that this week, starting with a game I’d been playing a few weeks before: Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. I had a fine time with this a couple of weeks ago but had left it alone for most of the previous week; it took a few goes to get back into the rhythm of the game. I had a go at the final section of the World Tour, and chose Vyse for this part of the play through as one of the achievements are tied up in his lap times and I wanted to level him up. However, after a few races, it became apparent that I’d got as far as I was going to get by playing through on Normal difficulty. I tried switching to Expert and got utterly destroyed, so I settled for Hard difficulty and played through the first few races again to earn some stars. This is going to take a while but it’s the sign of a good game that I’m willing to come back to it!

The three original heroes. Shame Adam
didn't appear in any more games!

On Wednesday night Kirsty and I had a go with the original Streets of Rage on the Xbox 360; I downloaded the compilation trilogy when it became free on Gold. I chose Adam for the play through and Kirsty played as Axel. It was good fun going through the game and hearing Kirsty come up with names for the enemies: Stabby McGee, Streetwise Prince Harry, Purple Zombie Dude, Yellow Turtle Guy and He-Man were some of my favourites! We actually did quite well; we got as far as the last stage but we fell down to the Big Ben bosses. The game is re-balanced to accommodate two players, and when Kirsty ran out of lives and continues, I couldn’t handle two of the Big Bens on my own with Adam as he moves quite slowly. It didn’t help that I kept forgetting not to throw them in this edition of the game!

Metal Slug with a crossbow...

So what was my new game for this week? Well, a while ago, I watched one of Metal Jesus’ videos, Discover HIDDEN GEMS in Game Collections and Compilations, which he did with his friend John Riggs. In that video they talk about some excellent games that were part of compilations, and Jason (Metal Jesus) was often surprised to hear John talk about a game he didn’t realise that he owned on a compilation! The same applied to me when John talked about a game that appeared on Capcom Classics Collection vol. 2: Midnight Wanderers: Quest for the Chariot. This was actually hidden in a multi-game, called Three Wonders, so wouldn’t necessarily happen across it. So I gave it a try. It is a platform/shooting game similar to Metal Slug in gameplay, where you control a hobbit called Lou on a quest apparently taken on a whim to find a chariot. I gave it a go and it’s a pretty decent game; I like the way it plays, the jumping feels a little off but it very often did back in the early 90s when jumping mechanics weren’t standardised. The enemy design is really good as well. I didn’t get too far with it since I didn’t have long, but I had a decent amount of fun and I’ll probably come back to it at some point – although, it has to be said, that compilation has a lot of other good games on there that I should probably check out too!

I managed to find time to go to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards and continue to paint my Chaos Cultists. I’ve done the vast majority of them now; I just need to do the flesh and the base and we’re away. I’ve got another ten to paint after this, and I’m hoping to get a Dark Apostle done after that. That will be 500 points of Word Bearers painted, so I might move on to something different after that; I was inspired to paint Blood Angels by Regicide after all!

Last Week's Games: Regicide, The Savage World of Solomon Kane and Lost Cities.

After playing Eternal Crusade for a while, I had a go with another Warhammer 40000 game: Regicide. This is a 40K game based on Chess, with the different Space Marines representing the different pieces. Tactical Marines are pawns, Terminators are rooks and so on. Where it differs from Chess is that your pieces can shoot at each other with weapons and throw grenades for area-of-effect attacks, putting an interesting spin on the classic game.

Those obstacles block movement, funnily enough...

I’d previously tried this a month ago, but didn’t count it as my “new game” because I only managed to play through the tutorial. I had a go with a Skirmish match – as near as it gets to a standard Chess game – and I had some fun with it. The tactics need to account for having ways to attack the pieces other than capturing them like Chess. I was prepared for it to be an occasional curiosity rather than a game I’d put any substantial amount of time into, but there is a campaign I found strangely engaging due to the short length of the missions.

Some aspects of the game work, and some don’t. In the campaign, your pieces are deployed in a set, and you use them and their abilities to take out certain enemy pieces. It’s like a puzzle, as you manoeuvre your units in to the best position to capture a piece – an instant kill – while trying to avoid such a situation yourself. It also gives me some ideas for how I could run some short games of 40K; pitched battles are all well and good but the game is open to so much more! Where the game is let down, is with its Random Number Generation (RNG.) It uses a percentile ‘chance to hit’ system, which adds complexity to the mechanics but severely alters the strategy. It might seem strange for me to say this given that two of my favourite games of the decade are XCOM and Mordheim, both of which use RNG systems. But in those games you could affect the numbers it came up with – get closer, flank your opponents, develop your abilities etc. Regicide doesn’t have that, and the consequence is that meticulous strategy and puzzle-solving can be invalidated by the pieces being able to attack without having to capture. I’ve lost a few campaign games from making the right moves, but the key pieces falling before I can take the win, in a manner removed from the process of playing Chess. But then, I was never much of a Chess player!

Looks like a Witch Hunter...

I also returned to the Black Country Roleplaying Society after some time off, and joined The Savage World of Solomon Kane. From what I understand, this is a tale of swashbuckling and derring-do in a gothic horror setting, with Solomon Kane himself being a harbinger of righteousness. While he is the hero of the piece, he’s not above committing acts of outright villainy to achieve his aims! I’m playing an elderly sorcerer; able to perform magic but forced to maintain secrecy due to the world’s negative view of magic and witchcraft. And, we have the usual disparate party in the other players!

I approached this game with some caution as I know almost nothing about Solomon Kane, and I’m not fond of Savage Worlds as a system. But with roleplaying games, the enjoyment comes from the interaction with the other players, so I’ll give it a chance. It was a slow start this week due to character creation, but we’ll see how it picks up next week!

Apparently this is quite a common 'couples' game...

Finally, on Sunday night I played Lost Cities with Kirsty. This is a card game in which you compete to make the most money from exploring lost cities by creating long runs of cards, with additional twists: There are five possible explorations you can start, but starting those costs you 20 points potentially ends in negative figures. Also, you can bet to double your score at the start of a run – but this is applied after you’ve taken off the 20 to fund the expedition. It was a fun game while we were playing it, but the maths homework at the end was a bit of a chore!

Last Week's Games: Sonic Transformed, Catan, Exploding Kittens, Eternal Crusade and 911 Operator...

This week was busier than I expected!

Let's not worry too much about why a Hedgehog who is
the fastest thing alive needs a car...

My new game for this week was Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, recently downloaded for the Xbox360. This is a kart racing game with the usual line-up of Sonic characters, plus another several characters from Sega’s other properties such as Alex Kidd, Super Monkey Ball, Shinobi and, bizarrely, Wreck-it Ralph. I was expecting to play a few rounds of this and then put it to bed, but I was astonished and delighted by how much fun this game is! I’m working through the World Tour at the moment, which is great for introducing the game’s modes – racing, battles, time trials, drift challenges, that sort of thing. The races are pretty easy – you don’t need to win the race to beat the level; you only need to come third – but some of the other challenges are pretty tough. The drifts, in particular, require a lot of precision. I initially chose Sonic for my play through, because you don’t buy a Sonic the Hedgehog game not wanting to play as Sonic, but when I’d levelled him up as high as he’ll go and couldn’t progress him any further, I tried playing as Danica Patrick, who handles very well. I wondered what Sega game she was from and was surprised to discover that she is, in fact, a real person! I’ve got to the end of the World Tour – just the Bonus levels to do now – but the game still has a lot to offer and I’m nowhere near fed up with it yet, so I’ll keep going for a bit longer!

It’s a little strange how that works out as I tend to prefer games with storylines. Or, at least, I think I do. But a competently-designed racing game has a very addictive “just one more go” mentality that is proving every bit as fun as an engaging plot. I enjoy having a nice balance between the two.

A mixture of non-sequitur and smarmy self-reference
often mistaken for comedy by the same sort of people
who describe themselves as "random..."

Later in the week I had a Wednesday afternoon in Warlords and Wizards, and played an enjoyable game of Catan with a couple of the lads in there which I was very pleased to win! I also had a go with Exploding Kittens; it’s a card game where you have to avoid picking up certain cards from a blind draw. The art is amusing, though very much “of its time,” and the game mechanics work even though it is based on luck. But to be honest I didn’t think much of it. It’s far too reliant on luck for me, and the theme doesn’t lend itself to a compelling plot or reason to be doing what you’re doing. The kids in the shop enjoyed it, and if someone got it out at a party I’d join in, but I won’t be spending any money on Exploding Kittens. A change of schedule means that my regular visits to Warlords and Wizards on Wednesdays have now come to an end, but I will still pop in when I can. It’s a great little shop!

I had a few rounds of Eternal Crusade; what I’ve started doing with that is trying to progress with one character until I’ve reached a Requisition Points Bonus; there are usually three available bonuses worth 1500 points each, and once I’ve achieved one I’ll move on to the next character. The reason for this is that the one you’ve won takes a while to be replaced, and could be replaced with something you could have been working on while you were playing. It also lets me have a go with some of the other factions, which is always nice.

The level I'm stuck on, funnily enough.

Finally, I continued playing 911 Operator, which I originally tried way back in February (I had to go back through my blog to find that out.) It’s odd to play games about going to work, but I really enjoy the core gameplay loop! I think the campaign could have done with fewer cities and a bit more time to develop in each city, as the improvements you make usually only occur once before you have to move on. The map doesn’t make much difference to what’s going on.

Let’s see what I’ve got time for next week…