A cautious return to blogging...

It’s been a while since my last blog post where I told you all not to expect too much more from me in the future due to having to accommodate a number of significant changes in my life. Right now, we’re coming up on New Year, and with New Year comes New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve got a number of them, but for now, I’m going to try and get my gaming blog going again.

A few things have changed since I last posted. I’ve still been playing the Xbox 360 and various games on my laptop, but also I’ve been playing Kirsty’s Playstation 4, and she was kind enough to buy me a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. We’ve been having a laugh with that! I’ve not been playing as many hobby games as I used to due to time allowances, but I always enjoy it on those occasions where I do, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have acquired some new games over the last few weeks!

So I’m looking forward to writing about it all again. I’ll try and get most of my regular series going, so Last Week’s Games should come out on Mondays. One thing I’m not going to be doing next year though is playing a new game every week, as I tried to do this year. It was a well-intentioned attempt to play at least some of the games I’ve been buying, but ultimately it meant that I wasn’t getting very far on the games I was playing and I enjoyed them a lot less than I could have done.

I therefore face a new challenge this year: Trying to write about more or less the same games each week and make it sound interesting. For example, while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the PS4, Yakuza Zero is the only game into which I’ve put any significant amount of time. I currently own two games for the Switch, (Street Fighter and Rayman,) and as I tend to buy games on the cheap, I probably won’t own too many more for a while. And on those occasions where I’m alone with my laptop long enough to play a game on it, it tends to be the same one each time now (currently Regicide.) The same is true for my Kindle Fire; the only game I’ve played on that for months is 8-Ball Pool and I really enjoy that but there’s a certain amount of skill involved with it, rather than clicking things to make things happen until it starts demanding money. My 360 is always there but the only game I’ve played on that for a while is XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Some semblance of progression on at least one game a week should be enough for me to find something to write about, we’ll see how that pans out.

As for the Hobby games, it’s as and when I can find the time. I’ve had to drop the Black Country Role Playing Society indefinitely; we’ll see how things pan out but it will be a long time, if ever, before I will be able to return. I’ve still got the monthly RPG group; that tends to be pretty constant. I’m hopefully going to be having some games nights around my flat so I might get some board games in. The Wargames, have had a massive slowdown, as it’s a faff to make it happen; I’ve missed painting my models but requires a certain amount of planning and deliberation to find time to do it, which if I’m honest sucks a lot of the fun out of it. Doing it with two or more people in order to actually play a game is something I haven’t attempted in years (I just go down to the relevant shops and played a game with whoever is there.) You can be rest assured that on those occasions where I do manage to get a game in, I’ll be writing about it!

2019 will going to be an interesting year, whatever happens. I hopefully won’t buy too many more games in the future but I might at least get a better “Bought : Beaten” ratio than I’ve manged for the last few years!

Why My Gaming Blog Has Stopped - For Now...

It’s been quite a while since my last post, and I find myself making a new one to tell you all not to expect any more for the foreseeable future…

I’ve had some significant changes to my life occur over the last few years, and while most of them are positive, they’ve also affected the amount of time I can put on writing blogs like this. Most saliently, I finally moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time in nearly 33 years. That’s brought with it a lot of flexibility to do things I wasn’t able to do before – I won’t go into details – but also a lot of responsibility to look after my new home and be a lot more efficient in managing my time and my money.

What this means is that I don’t have time to write regular blogs any more. It’s a shame, as I had a number of things I wanted to write about. Access to Kirsty’s PS4 means that I can play a whole lot of games I couldn’t before. I was planning a retrospective look at some of the games I’d played in my past which was going to become a weekly post once I’d written enough of them. And after my experience at the UK Games Expo, it was my intention to enter some hobby gaming tournaments and write about my experiences with that. I was going to call it Tournaments and Tribulations. But I barely have time to play these games anymore, let alone write about them! I’m sure, to most of you reading this, taking the 45 minutes it generally takes me to write a 700 word summary of what I’ve been playing this week isn’t a huge imposition on me, but as I spend the vast majority of my time these days either working, supposed to be working or asleep, there just isn’t the time. Welcome to the real world, eh?

Also, blogging doesn’t make me any money. I know how that makes me sound, so let me clarify here that I never expected any substantial amount of money from this. I only ever did it for my own enjoyment, and it was great to see some other people enjoying my posts as well, a few of whom I know in person (mainly from the gigging circuit, and for similar reasons I don’t do anywhere near as many gigs anymore!) But with my schedule as packed as it is, a lot of other things to do (sometimes work, sometimes not,) and my own personal enjoyment my only real incentive to write the blog, it’s fallen by the wayside.

Will I ever do it again? Perhaps. There are things going on that are still quite “up in the air,” so to speak; a lot of situations are developing and I haven’t quite got settled into a routine yet. If such a time comes when I do, and I can find a regular amount of time in the week to put into playing games, I might be able to write about them in a regular blog again. But it’s not going to happen without a re-assessment of exactly when I can get everything out. In the past, I would put Last Week’s Games out on Mondays, Pick-ups and Trades out on the first Wednesday of every month (at least, that was the plan; it rarely worked out that way!) and on those occasions when I managed to beat a game, I’d write a Backlog Beatdown post about it for the next Friday if I could. If I manage to post anything out in a regular schedule again, it won’t be anywhere near as busy. There may be some changes to the content as well; I might find myself playing more handheld games as I’m out rather a lot these days! We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I thank you all for reading my blog. There were roughly 60-100 of you a week at its peak, and more would come along later to look at archived posts. I hope you know I appreciated each and every one of you, and I hope to be back some day!

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!