Last Week's Games: Painting Backlog, Necromunda, Spyro 2

The biggest thing that happened to me this week gaming-wise was completing the painting of my Space Hulk boxed set. I tend to keep anything I want to say about painting separate these days, so I’ve written a blog for them that you can read here. I’m mentioning it in this post because it inspired me to think about painting my models, how many of them I still have to do, and whether ever actually doing it is a realistic option for me.

Painted, and ready to play...

I’ve run into the same problem that every wargamer / hobby gamer runs in to at some point: The backlog. I’ve bought a lot of models from hobby shops in the past, most of them Games Workshop, some of them not, and for one reason or another never got around to painting them. The reason for this is mainly because I give priority to whatever army I’m currently working on, as there is a certain expectation that they will be painted should I ever wish to use them in a shop game. At least, that’s the case with Games Workshop, or Warhammer as the shops are called now. Other, independent stores may be a little more lenient about it but having all my models painted is a standard I set for myself during my time as staff. The box games that I’ve been buying have therefore taken a back seat. This changed during lockdown, where I had more than the usual amount of free time (though not much!) and once I’d painted all the models from the Black Legion force I was working on, I made a start on the Space Hulk set. You’d think, with not even 40 models in the set, it would have taken me a little less than eight months, but somehow that’s where we are. I paint intermittently; always have, always will. But that means that my backlog of models is taking a long time to get through.

So, what does that mean? Is clearing my backlog a realistic goal for lockdown? Possibly; it’s been going on for longer than I originally anticipated, and with the UK Conservative Government changing its strategy about as often as most people change their clothes, it could go on for a great deal longer before we’re finally clear of Covid-19. It’s not likely, though. I’ve got quite a few sets to get through! However, it may be possible to make a large dent in it. And that will be fine too.

Close Combat doesn't happen often,
but when it does, it's brutal!

With video games, there’s not much new happening this week. I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars, reaching the part in the story campaign where the three factions make an uneasy alliance to reach their goal. I’ve got a fairly shrewd idea on how that’s going to work out for them, given that their alliance is about as stable as, well, the UK Conservative Government. It will be interesting to see how the story ends, I’m not too far away from it now – but as the missions take anything up to an hour and a half to beat, and that’s if you manage it first time, I need to make sure I’m giving myself enough time when I sit down to play. Even after all that, I’ve still got to go through the warband mode, which is the next step!

Struggled to find a screenshot of the
underwater levels from the PS4 version...

Time management is an easier task with Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. I’m about halfway through the game now, having 100%ed at least half the levels on the Autumn Plains. It’s an absolutely beautiful game and is always a joy to play, and I’m enjoying the gimmicks and minigames that occur on almost every level which break up the gameplay quite nicely. I’m aiming for 100% completion for this one – none of the achievement trophies are tied up in multiplayer modes, so I could potentially manage it – so I feel absolutely no shame whatsoever in looking up how to do certain of the puzzles, which isn’t always obvious. Plus, it’s a great game to play when Kirsty and Jessie are around. Jessie likes the fact that Spyro can swim in this iteration of the game and loves playing around in the water on the Summer Forest level!

Last Month's Painting: Completed the Space Hulk set

Finally... the set is complete

This week I finally came to the end of my journey to completely paint my Space Hulk set. For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know the story already: I obtained Space Hulk when I worked for Games Workshop in 2009, and even though I opened it and played it a few times with my mate Dave, I never got around to painting it. The reason for this is that I played the vast majority of war games in what was then Games Workshop, and what is now the Warhammer stores (though I’ve yet to play a game in one of those!) where there is a certain expectation for your models to be painted, or at least have some sign of progression, if you use them in the shop. The problem is that Games Workshop stopped supporting Space Hulk after the month it was released, so as I wasn’t going to play any games in the shop, it wasn’t a priority to paint them – not at the point where I perpetually had a tonne of Chaos Space Marines, Empire and Haradrim (one army from the three core game systems that it was expected I would have as a member of staff) that I needed to be painting! Dave, of course, didn’t mind the models not being painted, so even though we’ve really enjoyed playing the game in the past, the models remained unpainted for eleven years.

All the Terminators were very highly detailed...

That all changed when Lockdown began, and I found myself with a little (though surprisingly not much) more than the usual amount of spare time on my hands. I’d painted all the Chaos Space Marine Raptors I had for the Black Legion army I was working on, and while I did get some more eventually, I didn’t see any sense in going to any of the hobby shops to buy them while we were in lockdown. I had some of the old boxed sets in the loft of the flat I used to live in and decided to get the Space Hulk set down and paint them. I started with one squad of Terminators, then painted the twelve Genestealers that looked the most straightforward to paint. Both appeared in previous editions of the blog. I then painted the remaining squad of Terminators – including the dead one – and the leftover Genestealers, these didn’t make it on to the blog because I didn’t know what to say about them without repeating myself.

...and the Broodlord was a lot of fun!

Moving on, I painted the Librarian and the Broodlord. Both presented an additional challenge for me: As most folks who play 40K know, a Librarian’s armour is always blue no matter what chapter they’re attached to so that was a break from the red I’d been painting hitherto. I also went into a lot more detail with the weapons, face and armour than I did with the other models, as this was the “centrepiece” of the Terminator force in Space Hulk. With the Broodlord, this was much the same as the Genestealers I’d been painting up to that point but with an extra layer of colour on the flesh and carapace. There was also a lot more than the usual number of skulls and Terminator helmets that needed painting, and it took me a while, but I’m pleased with the result.

The finishing touches.

Finally, I painted the last little bits – the Artefact and the C.A.T. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on these, but it was a lot of fun doing the jewels on the Artefact.

I’ve bought quite a few “build and paint” games in the last 10-12 years and this is the first time I’ve managed to do both with a complete set, so I’m pleased with that. Both factions presented a fresh challenge: The colour I painted the Blood Angels Terminators was the same as the colours I’d been painting my Word Bearers, but with more of an emphasis on the gold than the silver. The Genestealers were an altogether different experience, as I haven’t painted Tyranids many times before, and when I have, it’s never been in any significant numbers. Space Hulk is a great set, and I’m glad to have completed it.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Backlog Beatdown: Ascending to the God of Word with God of Word

About a year ago I decided I wanted to increase the speed of my typing and bought some typing games off Steam. The week before last, I decided to play one of them: God of Word, mainly because I wanted to be able to play something on my laptop without having to plug in my mouse!

What's the longest word you can make here?

God of Word is a word game where the main objective is to make a 3-7 letter word out of the given letters. This central mechanic is nothing that we haven’t been playing in our internet browsers for the last twenty years or so, but what sets this one apart is that it’s set in Ancient Greece, as a kind of paper puppet theatre set-up. The idea is that you’re a messenger – not Hermes, but probably a disciple of his – and you’re telling the story of how you journeyed from one side of the country to the other, delivering messages and battling monsters.

Each stage has a few different enemies and monsters for you to fight, and you have a set amount of time to beat them. To beat them, you must type your words in to build up your attack; you need to build a certain number of points and your letters score points based on their counterparts in Scrabble. Larger words are worth more points and do more damage. You can press tab to re-arrange the letters, and space to draw a new set of letters – but at the cost of around 10 seconds of time. It’s simple enough, and if that was all there was to it, God of Word probably wouldn’t be interesting. But the game deploys bonus tiles from time to time to offer you more incentives for using those letters: Red ones do more damage, yellow ones give you more time, blue ones give you more renown (experience, I think,) and gold ones give you, well, gold.

You won't be using that E for a minute or two...

Ah yes, gold and experience. God of Word also provides the lightest of role-playing game elements, by assigning experience points to increase your character’s attributes (that give you more time, increase your damage, etc) and at certain milestones in the game you can also buy more equipment. Better weapons do more damage and can have additional effects, and better armour gives you more time. It is necessary to do this to keep up with the way the game increases in difficulty as you progress, but it gives you some agency over which attributes to increase which builds your engagement.

I wonder what the remaining letter
could possibly be...

God of Word also manages to provide some variety in the levels. Every so often there is a “hangman” style minigame, where you have a certain number of guesses to spell a word and rescue a follower – but take too many guesses and they will die. The game has boss battles as well, which tend to work in one of two ways: In one way the game works as normal but with extra stipulations on the tiles. In the Medusa battle, for example, a letter will turn to stone if you don’t use it quickly enough, and it will take a while before you can use that letter again. The other way is a word blast, which has a couple of modes as well – either monsters or hazards come flying at you and will kill you if they reach you, or you have a certain unspecified amount of time to type a certain number of words before you die. These require some quick typing and some of them are hard – the Sirens took me a while!

This is an indie game built in the Unity engine, and while it lacks a certain amount of polish, it’s competently made. The graphics boast a distinctive art style; you either like it or you don’t, but it does what it needs to do. The sound is good as well, nothing to write home about but the effects are all in the right places and the music sounds epic enough (if a little anachronistic for the time period it depicts, but hey, most things are!)

God of Word won’t change the world, but it’s a fun game to pick up and play – and get lost in.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a Look

Last Week's Games: Gears of War 2, Warhammer Quest, Spyro 2, Juju

I’ve got a few new games to talk about this week. I discovered a better way of counting my games on the spreadsheet I have for them, and found that I had more than I thought I had bringing me up to over 1000 games now, and the number of games I have yet to play is astonishingly high so I thought I’d better play some of them.

Dom's sad story brings a tear to the eye...

I played Gears of War 2 on the Xbox 360 a lot last week. I beat it as well, so most of what I’m going to say about the game will be in the review I’m going to post up about it next week. However, I will say this: It’s among the first games I ever bought for the 360, and I didn’t play it for the longest time mainly because I wanted to get everything I could possibly get out of the original Gears of War before I moved on to its sequel. Of course, that didn’t happen, and probably never will, but I found myself thinking about the almost obsessive attitude I’ve taken towards completing games over the last eight years, and how I’m making the necessary adjustment to accommodate it.

First, I needed to break out of the need to play through games sequentially. I usually do this if I can, but it means a few things that are detrimental to clearing my backlog. For one thing, many of the games I’ve bought over the years are series; I’ve bought many sequels to a base game before I’ve even played it. I bought the first three Gears games at the same time, for example, but I’d never have dreamed of playing any but the first game first. Also, there are many game series out there whose first iterations are on consoles I no longer own, or computers I don’t have access to and never will. Finally, the quality of games tends to improve with sequels, so I’m potentially missing out on the best the series has to offer by playing them all in order first!

Secondly, I need to not worry so much about the achievement points and trophies. They’re nice to have, but difficult to justify why it’s so important to me when, say, I’m playing a game where many of the achievements are tied up in online multiplayer modes with dead servers. Gears of War is one such game, and I won’t be throwing away the opportunity to play a well-designed game with a fun story because I haven’t completed its previous iteration any longer!

Danger threatens in the dungeon...

I’ve also been playing Warhammer Quest on my laptop. I first saw this covered by TotalBiscuit, and while he didn’t think much of it, I can usually find some fun in Warhammer-related games. It’s a turn-based dungeon basher, with some basic role-playing game elements to it. There’s not a lot to it, and the skill involved with the game is almost nullified by the random number generation that permeates the game, but sometimes a simple dungeon crawler is all I want to be playing, and Warhammer Quest appears to be a game I can dip in and out of if I happen to have an hour to spare in the afternoon.

This is Ripto, in case you were wondering.

Finally, I’ve been playing a couple of games that are very much aimed at children: Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage on the PS4, and Juju on the Xbox 360. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: my daughter Jessie is around a lot of the time now, and while she’s maturing at a rapid rate, it would be very irresponsible of me to play graphically violent or intense games when she’s around. So, when she’s with me, I stick to either racing, sports or child-friendly action games. Regular readers may remember I was talking about Spyro the Dragon a lot last year, and what I’ve seen so far is everything a sequel should be: more of the same, but with extra moves, more things to do, and an overall better experience. Juju is a charming little platformer where you make your way through an exotic forest jumping on things; I’m sure I’ll be playing more of this in weeks to come!

Last Week's Games: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, Necromunda: Underhive Wars

 I’ve got quite a bit to say about the games I’ve been playing this week. I don’t know how much of it is going to make sense; I’m not very well today. But we’ll see how I get on:

The first thing I should say is last Friday I reached the end of the main campaign of Not Tonight; you can read my review here. I’ve enjoyed it, and it hasn’t outstayed its welcome so I might give the extra part of the game called One Love a go as well, but I haven’t got much more to say at this point.

I also reached the end of God of Word. As a game that I installed onto my laptop so that I’d have a game on there I could play without necessarily having to plug in my mouse, it certainly served its purpose, and I managed to spend quite a long time playing it over the last few weeks! I’m hopefully going to get a review out on Friday so I’m not going to say too much about it now, but it was a good time.

Back in the day when pickups increased your
score and didn't have to make any sense...

It was my birthday last Wednesday and my daughter Jessie bought me a game for the Nintendo Switch: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. The James Pond series never really broke out of the fourth console generation (Megadrive / Super Nintendo) and hasn’t had the longevity of some of its contemporaries, but they’re still fun to play. A couple of my friends at school had Codename: Robocod, so I’ve played it a few times before, but never beaten it. It’s a side-scrolling platform game where you traverse colourful locations in Santa’s workshop, fighting your way through traps, hostile creatures and rescuing hostages. Interestingly, of all the James Pond games, it was Codename: Robocod that was ported and re-made onto several consoles after its generation, with some differences including level layout, music, and hostages. I have a vague memory of the hostages in the old versions of the game being penguins; these days they are Santa’s Elves – I suspect mainly because the penguins in the original game were a product placement for the McVities Penguin Bars, and the sponsorship deals have long since expired. The game was altered several times over the generations it was released on, so I don’t really know which version I’m playing – it could be that there was a new version entirely for the Switch!

I bet she's a sight for sore eyes...

Finally, on the PlayStation 4 I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars. I’d been looking forward to this game for a long time and is one of the very few games in years I have bought close to release. I’d rather have got it on PC to tell you the truth, but for some reason it’s not designed to work on Windows 8.1 (My PC specs are fine in most other respects, but I wasn’t going to waste my money risking a purchase when it says on the Steam webpage it will only work on Windows 10.) So, I bought it on the PS4. Now, some of you will know that Mordheim: City of the Damned is one of my favourite games, and Necromunda looked like it was going to work much the same way but with guns. And it does – but there are other things going on as well. The campaign – the small amount of it I’ve played, anyway – is far more narrative than Mordheim, with each mission I’ve played so far supporting a plot point. I haven’t tried making my own gang yet, as the story mode drops you in with the Escher gang and presumably allows you to explore the other gangs (Goliaths and Orlocks) as you proceed. I’m not sure whether I like this or not – part of the fun of Mordheim for me was taking your warband through its own story and progression and having the occasional mission to do in between to move the plot along. I appear to have less agency over how the Necromunda gangs develop, but we’ll see how it goes. It may take some getting used to but I’m sure I’ll find the fun in it; it’s a GW game and I usually like those by default!

Backlog Beatdown: Not Letting People In Tonight with Not Tonight

Not Tonight is a game that I’d seen some coverage on during the time it was released for PC in 2018. I’d heard it described as somewhere between Brexit: The Game and Papers Please, and for that reason didn’t buy it for PC – even to this day I’m hearing about Brexit on an almost daily basis, and I already have Papers Please, so I didn’t feel any massive need to buy this game. Then Kieran, with whom I play in a band called Raphaella Kornarskis,[1] told me it was for sale on the Nintendo Switch and I should give it a go. So that’s what I did. Here’s what I found:

"Take Back Control." Hmm.

In Not Tonight, you play as a person of European Heritage in a post-Brexit Britain, who lives in a flat/habitation block and must work as a bouncer to earn enough money to prevent deportation. The game works on three levels: Your working patterns as a bouncer, managing your money and living conditions to prevent game loss through deportation or untimely death due to ill health, and working to support the resistance against the far-right Albion First government.

Your gig as a bouncer is where the bulk of the gameplay lies. You must check people’s identification and other documents to allow them into pubs, night clubs, parties or wherever it happens to be. Initially, you’re just checking that they’re old enough, the photos match the person and the ID card is still in date, but as the game progresses, you have to deal with things like Guest Lists where you have to manage two queues, VIPs who need no ID but you only have a short amount of time to get them in with the correct password, hidden objects, dress codes and nationalities. The game allows you to make a few mistakes, but not many, and if you let too many people in who shouldn’t be in, you get fined or lose the level all together.

Guest Lists: all the faff of checking ID -
AND checking if their name is on the list.

Managing your status is crucial as well. Initially you only have to worry about paying bills and can just about make enough money to do it, but as the game progresses, you’ll find that you start getting billed for things like rent and tax, plus you necessarily have to make improvements to your flat otherwise your health suffers. The only easy way to make enough money to do this is to do some work on the side – Some punters, for example, will offer you bribes if you initially refuse to let them in. Many of them will buy drugs off you if you can buy and supply them. And any money you make off this will stay with you whether you finish the level or not – but do it too much, and your Social Credit will fall to the point of losing the game entirely.

Finally, there’s an ongoing plot about the resistance: You must complete several tasks within the game to build your position in the resistance to activate the final plot device and get the best possible ending.

Later on, you start pulling duties on
government checkpoints. Sounds familiar...

The game runs reasonably well on the Switch; only once did I ever experience a bug in the game. The controls work well enough, though the arrow buttons are sometimes a little fiddly. The graphics are pixel art which have the delightful combination of looking dated but at the same time consistent and enduring, meaning the game will still look as good in 10 years. The sound is limited to some basic effects and mumbled dialogue, but the music is great. Not Tonight does have a rather British tongue-in-cheek sense of humour about it, and while I struggled with it initially (I’m afraid I don’t find the idea of Brexit the slightest bit funny,) eventually I was laughing along with the jokes it made. It’s more linear and binary than Papers Please; you don’t need to balance out your government’s obvious disdain for you with the desire to be a decent human being, but this makes it its own game and it tells the story it wants to tell.

Not Tonight is not for everyone, but if you’re interested, give it a go.

Final Score: 4/5: Great Game.

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[1] It’s my blog, I’ll promote my band if I want to.