Last Week's Games: Fire Warrior, Hotline Miami, Shinobi 3, Golden Axe, Takenoko

I’ve missed the last few weeks of this! Sorry about that…

In the last few weeks, I’ve played and beaten a couple of games. One of them was Fire Warrior on the PC, and I’ve posted the review for it here. I have a few additional remarks to make here: Many of you will have noticed by now that I really enjoy games based in the Warhammer / Warhammer 40K universe. However, I rarely make the argument that they’re good games, and Fire Warrior is no exception. A lot of what eventually became first person shooters were being standardised during the period where Fire Warrior was released, and in many respects, the game fell short of the mark.

Wouldn't it be great to order one of
your squad-mates to cover you?

It is also worth remembering that the Tau were in their infancy in the 40K universe when this game was released, and with almost two decades under their belt, they have become quite a distinctive force in their own right, rather than the “new kids on the block,” so to speak. I don’t know how well they work in the most recent edition of Warhammer 40K, but certainly as far as 7^th edition, they relied on their squads working together more than almost any other army in the game. That got me thinking: What if a 40K game was made with Tau as the player characters, but instead of a standard FPS game, it became more of a squad-based game like SOCOM and Star Wars: Republic Commando? A rather odd comparison for me to make, since I’ve played neither, but I understand the general premise of those games and having an FPS game with a team of Fire Warriors with different abilities could be something very special indeed. Could it happen? Let’s hope so…

Get used to the game telling you you're dead
'cause you'll be seeing it a lot!

I also played Hotline Miami on the PC, getting to the end of it. I’ve got a review for that coming out on Friday, but I might as well tell you now, I really enjoyed the game. It takes a certain rhythm to get into it but once you have, you can have a lot of fun with the trial-and-error gameplay – as long as you don’t take it too seriously. There’s a lot to be said for being good at what you do. By the time I reached the end of the game, I was still having fun and wasn’t quite ready to get off my crazy horse quite yet, so I downloaded Hotline Miami 2 and I’m playing my way through that now.

These will go down in one hit if you
know what you're doing...

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been once again getting some enjoyment out of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I’ve often spoken about my fondness for Streets of Rage 2, but funnily enough I didn’t even touch that this time. I came back to my old sparring partner Shinobi 3, running, chopping and, er, shuriken-ing my way though the seven stages, and even though some of the platforming is frustratingly difficult, it is always a fun game to play. The furthest I managed was the final level on the flying airship, because as with many platforming games I died to falling off it more than anything else!

The platform sections of Golden Axe
were never great...

I also played Golden Axe with my daughter. This is one of the first games I ever played on the Megadrive, and some of you may remember I beat it several years ago. I had no intention to return to it, but I thought it was a simple-enough game to explain to Jessie, so we gave it a go! It went reasonably well until Jess forgot what button she had to press to continue the game when she died and locked herself out of the game. I managed to reach the end of the game but lost to the final boss.

Everyone loves cute pandas.

Finally, me and Kirsty played Takenoko – a board game where you must grow a garden and feed a hungry panda. Kirsty will play just about anything with cute animals in it, and she managed to win it this time by taking a lot of the panda-feeding cards and scoring points that way. It’s a great little game, about the right balance of luck and skill for us, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Doom and Dark Void

 This week I’ve mainly been playing Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. I mentioned last week that I’m enjoying this game a lot more now that I’m in the frame of mind to go around the different areas grinding for Experience Points, but first impressions of the game are a little misleading in this respect, as there is really only one way you can go at the start of the game – the Nashkel Mines is the first major dungeon – and if you don’t go there reasonably quickly, certain party members leave you behind. I wouldn’t want to have to handle the first part of the game without Jaheira’s healing powers! Now that I’m well into the game, having cleared the Cloakwood mines – the second major dungeon – I’m touring round the Southern part of the world map, trying to tie up all my loose ends before I head to Baldur’s Gate itself.

Apparently he gets much
better later on...

The other thing to keep in mind was that while I was initially willing to allow some of my party members to die, I’m building a party around the six I have now that I’m happy with: The main character is a Paladin called Roisin, who I’ve given a two-weapon fighting style. Imoen, of course, is essential for her trap-finding skills and as her main weapon is her bow, she also serves as most of the party’s artillery. I picked up Branwen in Nashkel, and I held on to Jaheira as well – multiple healers in the party give it a little more longevity, especially in the later areas of the game where you need to cast several healing spells to heal a party member completely. Dynaheir is my wizard, and she is at her most useful when her area-of-effect spells flatten a combat encounter before it even starts. Finally, I have Rasaad, a monk who is new to the Enhanced edition of the game I have. He can do a decent amount of damage up close, but doesn’t seem to be able to take much himself – I had to use magic items[1] to bring his Armour Class down[2] to a reasonable level, and even then, he appears to get hit a lot and doesn’t have a particularly high hit dice.[3] Nonetheless, I’m happy with the party I’ve got now and I’ll hopefully see it through to the end!

I mean, I'm assuming this is an updated
version of the Revenant...

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Doom on the PS4. I’ve had this a while and I’ve just gotten around to playing it; I’m liking it so far! While the graphics and gameplay have obviously been enhanced by increasingly good technology since the 1993 originals I still play from time to time, the fast and frantic game play is still there and makes for some intense, thrilling battles. Hit-scan weapons are thankfully a thing of the past, but it’s a lot harder to dodge projectiles unless you’re really on it with your strafing! I’m not very far into the game yet, but it’s one I will come back to when I need a cathartic shooting spree. I don’t have a PlayStation Plus account though, so you’re unlikely ever to see me on Multiplayer.

Has the same 7th gen problem of having
unnerving eyes...

Finally, I downloaded and played Dark Void on Xbox Games with Gold on the Xbox 360. This is an interesting game that looks like it’s going to be a jetpack-based shoot-em-up, but then the main plot kicks in and it’s a 7^th-gen cover-based shooter with some jetpack elements added later. It’s based just before the World War II, where your plane crashes somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle and you find yourself under attack from strange metal beings called The Watchers. It’s alright; it’s tried to implement verticality into cover-based shooting which was a brave move, and I probably would have liked it a lot more were it not for the fact that I’ve just played through Uncharted 2. I’ve heard that Dark Void was something of a let-down in its potential, but I’ll try to beat it and see for myself!

---

[1] Monks can’t usually wear armour.

[2] Baldur’s Gate is based on the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons’ weird THACO – To Hit Armour Class Zero – system, and any enhancement to your armour class goes down rather than up.

[3] D8, I think.

Backlog Beatdown: Being Among Thieves with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

I played through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as part of the Nathan Drake Collection on the PS4, so please note that my notes refer to that version of the game and completely ignore the multiplayer functionality on the PS3 release. I felt it had been long enough since my playthrough of the first game to give this one a go, and here’s what I, er, charted…

My hands were sweating in this bit...

Uncharted 2 is one of those rare games that surpasses its predecessor in one way: The story. Mechanically, there’s not much in Among Thieves that wasn’t in Drake’s Fortune; there are a few new weapons here and there, but other than that it’s functionally identical. And on the surface, it appears to carry a similar story – a search for treasure, exploring forgotten tombs, betrayal, car chases, train rides, the discovery of an ancient power best left forgotten, and even a couple of things that weren’t taken from the Indiana Jones franchise![1]

*MAJOR SPOILERS COMING UP IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH*

In case it wasn't blatantly obvious
where this was going...

But it’s the characters that make the story this time, as they are well written and performed, and really bring the tale to life by developing along the way. Nathan Drake’s dialogue is performed by the always-excellent Nolan North, who improvised a lot of the lines for a more organic performance. The primary antagonist, Lazarevic, is as “tropey” as they come, but builds up a maniacal desperation that makes all the difference. Harry, the double-crosser, betrays Drake early in the plot, and while he won’t admit he was wrong to do this, it becomes increasingly obvious in every encounter you have with him that Harry is in way over his head without his old friend. Chloe, the sultry femme fatale sidekick, is a better Catwoman than most interpretations of Catwoman I’ve seen – ostensibly friendly, but you’re never quite sure of her motivations or whose side she’s on until right at the end. And it would have been far too easy to create a jealous love triangle between Chloe and Elena from the previous game, but this never really happens – the two girls bond over Drake’s insufferable narcissism and lack of forward planning. Elena, for her part, keeps the heroes on the moral high ground when they’re at their lowest point and ready to give up. This does a fine job of keeping the stakes high, which is particularly relevant in those set-pieces where Drake is running from a rapidly-crumbling bridge or train, getting himself into situations which no one should be able to survive – but he does, because the story is presented in a way that gives him something to live for.

*SPOILERS OVER*

A beautiful mess.

Uncharted 2 is absolutely gorgeous for a 7^th-generation game, with particular care gone into the scenery. Considering that you experience comparatively little of the scenery presented to you in the game, a lot of attention to detail went into making the places you visit look alive. The sound design is bang on point, with high praise for the voice / mocap actors in particular, and the gameplay is on par with the first Uncharted game. This brings with it a few niggles – I still don’t know why the grenades are mapped to L1 by default. Gun battles are telegraphed by going into areas littered with strategically placed chest-high walls, and the game has a habit of providing the situational weapons at precisely the point you need them: sniper rifles for long-range battles, rocket launchers for heavily armoured enemies etc. This isn’t really a bad thing, as not having access to these weapons at the point you need them would mean backtracking at best and de-railing[2] the game at worst, but it breaks immersion somewhat!

Ultimately, though, Uncharted 2 is a very competently designed game that is well worth at least one play through. It’s a curious situation for me: I liked it better than the first game purely for the story, but is that an appropriate benchmark for a successful game? Given that, unlike the first game, I’d love to come back and play Uncharted 2 again at some point in the future, I reckon it is.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

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[1] Yes, if you’re wondering, I borrowed that joke from Yahtzee Croshaw.

[2] No pun intended!

Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Backlog Beatdown: Rimming the Sky with Skyrim

 I bought The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the Xbox 360 way back in 2013. It’s been released on just about every major platform going since then, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade; I’ve owned the game for roughly eight years and I’ve only just gotten around to beating it so I don’t know what I was going to do with extra content and multiple copies of the game!

Hagravens are vile creatures...

Skyrim is a game that needs little introduction. After waking up as a prisoner on a cart and narrowly escaping execution, your character discovers an almost unique ability to absorb the souls of dragons. They find out they are the so-called Dragonborn, and that they alone can harness the power of the shout to stop the evil dragon Alduin from raising the dragons from the dead and conquering Tamriel. Along the way, they must learn to control their powers, contend with warring factions, and explore caves, dungeons, and constructs to build up their power, all building up to the final confrontation…

Ugh. Spiders.

I chose an Argonian for my playthrough and was going to go for a lightly armoured double-handed weapon fighter build, but as is very often the case when people play Skyrim, you end up as a sneaky archer. I managed to get somewhere between the two and was very glad of my ability to breathe underwater and heal quickly! I’ve played Skyrim several times already but as all my previous save files were on a different hard drive, I started a fresh character to see where a new adventure would take me.

The thing with Skyrim is that you really need to pace yourself. There’s no point going straight for the main quest; I’m sure a skilled enough player could speed run the game in about five hours but there’s a whole world out there to explore, and there’s little reason to miss out on the content on offer here. I levelled my character up to 50 and there were still outstanding quests to resolve by the time I’d finished the game – I’d refrained, for example, for taking a side between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. This was a choice I’d made in the game, as I couldn’t honestly say I supported either side. The Imperials were the invaders of the land, but such strongholds they had were being maintained reasonably well. The Stormcloaks had the home advantage but had a ruthless streak in them that made them very difficult to support. That I managed to beat the game without resolving this conflict goes to show how huge this game is! Do a quest here, clear a dungeon there, take a bounty somewhere else, sell your gear wherever you can. Set yourself some goals and play for however long you want to play.

Clavicus Vile is the exception
to the otherwise static voice acting...

The graphics work well enough for a ten-year-old game, and some of the scenery is beautiful; Skyrim feels like a living breathing world to get lost in. The music is great, and the sound effects are good, the voice acting is alright for the most part, if not particularly inspired. The game does suffer from a few bugs that can get in the way of beating certain quests, and I had to weather a few hard crashes, but nothing that stopped me from beating the game – not that I’d have realised I had, if I hadn’t known that this was the end of the main quest. It was only once I’d got to this point that I realised – there are very few cut-scenes in the game, and the ones that are there are interactive to a certain extent. All the exposition is done within the game. There’s no ending sequence, no credit roll, you just… win. I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down by that, but after sinking nearly 120 hours into the game, the journey made it more than worthwhile.

Skyrim is better than average and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’m not sure it’s the pinnacle of RPG experiences, but it does what it does well. I found a way of pacing myself so that it worked well for me – but don’t forget it took me eight years to get there!

Final Score: 4/5: Great game

Backlog Beatdown: Crashing into more Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot 2

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a game Kirsty bought as part of the N-Sane Trilogy when she first had the PS4. I play Crash every now and again, usually as some sort of intermission between long-form RPGs and open world games! Regular readers may remember I beat the first Crash Bandicoot nearly two years ago, and after coming back to Crash Bandicoot 2 I reached the end of that a few weeks ago. Here’s what I found:

Watch out for that plant...

Crash Bandicoot is abducted by Dr Neo Cortex and instructed to retrieve 25 crystals for him so that Cortex can harness their power to stop a cataclysm caused by an up-coming alignment of planets. Crash must traverse 25 levels in search of these crystals, and hand them over to Dr Cortex. However, all is not as it seems, as Crash’s sister Coco warns him against Cortex and his former assistant, Dr Nitrus Brio, contacts Crash with an alternate plan… which path will Crash choose?

The Mascot Platformer was declining in popularity during the mid-late 90s but given that Crash was flying that flag for Sony’s PlayStation, it shared a remarkable number of the same tropes as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. The groundwork was set in the first Crash game – the characters, the villains, the basic gameplay loop – and Crash 2 was more of the same but expanded upon in ways that made the game better. In addition to everything he could do in the previous game, Crash also acquired a power slide and crawl move, which came in useful for certain puzzling sections of the game. Late in the game, Crash acquires a jetpack, which is a little fiddly to use but shakes the gameplay up a bit. And the post-game content contributes to the end as well – the “alternate plan” I referenced earlier involves getting all the gems – much harder than the crystals – which affects how the game ends when you defeat the final level.

As a tribute to my Dad's recollection of a 
Monty Python sketch, I called these hedgehogs:
"Spiny Norman."

Most of the levels in Crash 2 are designed with the 2.5D sensibility that worked well for the Crash Bandicoot series at the time. You run from one side of the level to the other, smashing all the crates, spinning, or dodging the enemies, picking up the crystals – they’re always in the path of the level and are impossible to miss – and defeating the bosses once every five levels or so, which are quite a bit easier than the first game. The levels require some quite precise platforming, and while there’s nothing as irritating as the bridge levels from the first game, there are certain sections where jumping on platforms that are ahead of you require some trial and error! The levels where you ride an animal for extra speed make a welcome return, as do the levels where you’re running away from a much larger obstacle – a giant polar bear or rock! The latter are hard because you are running into the screen in this case, and it’s very difficult to see where you’re going. It wobbles on the line between satisfyingly challenging and frustratingly hard, so while getting to the end of the game is far from impossible, I find that Crash is better enjoyed in small bursts. Having reached the end of the game, I have no desire to go back and find all the gems – I haven’t got anywhere near as much investment in this as Spyro!

Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin...

The game is presented well; the graphics are fine, and the sound is good. The voice acting is in line with the larger-than-life cartoon characters of the 90s and works as well as it needs to. The plot is a little thin – it is obvious that a “betrayal” twist is on its way – but that’s hardly the point of a Crash Bandicoot game!

I enjoy Crash Bandicoot as a distraction from longer and more serious games, as I described above. But the frustrating difficulty makes it hard to enjoy as much as some other games I’ve been playing. Crash 2 is definitely better than its predecessor, and remains a good game, but for me, never quite reaches the levels of being a great game. I’ve enjoyed it – but that’s all I did.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.