Last Week's Games: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Lock's Quest, Shinobi III, Streets of Rage II, Vectorman 2 and The Story of Thor

With a well-received week off one of my two jobs, I found myself with a bit more time to play games this week, including some important finishers. Let’s see what they were:

I recently downloaded Hydro Thunder Hurricane for free from Xbox Live Gold, and inspired by Youtube’s MetalJesusRocks, who likes games like this, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a speedboat racing game, and is good fun; it has a good selection of modes and there’s plenty to unlock. I probably won’t ever complete it, as some of the achievements rely on local multiplayer of all things; I currently only have one controller. But I’ll dip in to it now and then to see what it’s got to offer.

Also I had another look at a game I’d been meaning to finish for roughly five years and have now got round to coming back to: Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. I started the campaign again as I’d forgotten most of the plot and the mechanics, but I found it coming back to me quickly enough, even if I had forgotten how hard the game is! I’ll try and get to the end of it this time, when it’s convenient for me to be playing a handheld system.

But the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection is still in my Xbox360 and is not leaving any time soon. I can’t think of any other Xbox360 game other than XCOM: Enemy Unknown that I’ve got more mileage from during the time I’ve had the console. I gave Shinobi III another go, and very nearly got to the end. I lost on the last stage; the fighting is easy enough but at one point you come into a section of the final level where most of the floors and walls are electrified, and you need some precision platforming in order to survive; I just don’t have the right set of skills! Also, during a quiet night at work, I transcribed the tune “Whirlwind” from the game’s soundtrack into Guitar Pro. One of my hobbies is listening to old video game music and transcribing them; it’s a great way to train my musical ear!

I attacked Streets of Rage II as well, because why wouldn’t I. Once again I fell down on the last boss rush, however I’ve been varying my runs by playing as Axel every so often. Normally I would play Max, but Axel has his own charm. His Grand Upper attack does a huge amount of damage, and spamming it is a great approach to most of the bosses, but I find other aspects of his style a little hard to deal with – he’s nowhere near as good with the heavy weapons as Max.

I played, and to my surprise beat, Vectorman 2. After being stuck on the fifth level for goodness knows how long, I took a more methodical approach to playing the game, and got to the eleventh level with a good amount of lives in reserve. Feeling that I had a good chance of beating the game, I ploughed ahead to the end and did just that. You can read my full review here.

Finally, I played the oddly-titled The Story of Thor. Oddly-titled because in North America and Europe it’s actually called Beyond Oasis, which makes more sense in the context of the game, and also the story has nothing to do with any iteration of the character Thor that I am aware of. It was called The Story of Thor in Japan. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good Zelda-like RPG, designed for the Mega Drive’s 6-button controller and with surprisingly good graphics and sound. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I’ve only got as far as I needed to unlock the Water shrine, which is what I needed to do to get the achievement points.

This brings my quest to get all the achievement points for the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection to an end, and it’s been quite a journey! There’s still mileage out of some of the games and I don’t think I’ll ever say goodbye to Streets of Rage 2 again, but it’s still a milestone for me.

Backlog Beatdown: Taking Out the Trash with Vectorman 2

I’ve been stuck on the fifth level of Vectorman 2 for a year now, and I occasionally play it when the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection is in my Xbox 360 to try to get to the eleventh stage, which was what I needed to get the available achievement points. Imagine my surprise when, not only did I manage to win the achievement, but I beat the game as well…

Vectorman 2 is a 16bit platforming game that was released on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis back in 1996. You control Vectorman, an “Orbot” – a robot made entirely out of orbs – as you run and gun your way through a nasty collection of insect-like enemies over twenty-two levels, aiming to find out who shot your ship out of the sky.

This is only the second level, and it's brutally hard.
Mainly because you can't see.

In the 90s, platforming games were one of the main styles of game available on consoles, and the better ones had their own gimmicks and mechanics that set them apart. Vectorman’s most obvious shtick was to morph into different things like tanks, space-ships, and some shapes based on his tougher enemies like scorpions and stag beetles. But the quality of the game comes from doing a lot with a very solid base of game mechanics. The controls were great and responsive, for most of the game there were two buttons (jump and fire,) the power-ups were meaningful, the graphics were of the highest quality the Megadrive could manage, and it was a lot of fun.

It was also very hard. Where I was going wrong was that I wasn’t exploring the levels enough. The game’s power-ups come in Power Sacs, bulbous green eggs hanging from various points that you have to shoot several times to break open and grab what’s inside. They’re dotted in various locations around the levels. Their contents range from health, to photons (the game’s equivalent of coins, which contribute to your score,) to temporary weapon upgrades, to access to the bonus levels and multipliers. It is on the latter power-up that the genius of the game’s design comes through. In most games, most multipliers multiply your score; decent, but it doesn’t really help you progress. In Vectorman 2, it also multiplies your power-ups. For example, a health orb would normally restore one hit point. If you have a 3* multiplier and you grab one, it restores three hit points. The same applies to extra lives, and while the game is competently-enough designed that it doesn’t put extra lives in easy reach of a 10* multiplier, it’s possible to create a good amount of extra lives beyond your starting three.

I did a bit better this time because I explored the levels and bonus stages enough to find the power-ups that increased your hit points beyond your starting four. This was crucial, as I could take enough damage in the later levels to not lose sight of what I was supposed to be doing. When I reached the eleventh level, and found I was half way through with nine hit points and thirteen lives, I found myself thinking ‘Wow, I could actually beat this today!’ and saw the game through to the end.

A lot of the levels had little puns like this.
I like it!

The four boss battles work well. Vectorman can morph into different things and upgrade his weapons – but not on the boss battles. Apart from increasing your hit points, you can’t stack the odds in your favour and rely on upgrades to beat the bosses. You have to do the same thing you always have to do in older games: Analyse their attack patterns, learn their weaknesses and exploit them to your advantage. I admit I had to check a Youtube video to find out how to beat the last boss; after having come so far I didn’t want to lose due to ignorance, but I still had to beat it!

Vectorman 2 is not perfect; the difficulty curve is harsh, and the tank section has fiddly controls. And it’s not a game I grew up with, nor has it engaged me on such a level that I could see myself returning to it. But it is a competently-designed and very fun platformer. If you have it on a collection, or own a Sega Megadrive/Genesis, it’s worth playing.

Last Weeks Games: Painting Word Bears, Building Project Pandora and Beating ZombiU.

This week’s was interesting. I beat ZombiU, and while I will talk about that later, much of what I want to say about it was covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. So for this week, I’ll be talking a bit more about my hobby projects:

Had a fine old time
painting this one!

The first and most important thing to examine is the Warhammer 40K Start Collecting! Chaos Space Marine boxed set that I finally finished on Sunday. I bought it back in April/May, and having finished painting the Chaos Space Marine Terminator Lord, I’ve now painted everything in the box. I’m not a very fast painter; it can be months between painting sessions, however over the last few weeks I’ve managed to find some time to go in to Warlords 'n' Wizards in Netherton and spend an hour or so painting. Doing little bits and pieces at a time when it’s convenient yields many more results than painting on those few hours I have to very deliberately set aside when I’m at home! Who knew?

This is my fifth Chaos Space Marine army – I love Chaos in 40K – and for this one I used the Word Bearers colour scheme. My mate Dave started a collection of Ultramarines at about the same time, so I painted them up as their sworn enemies, hence the Terminator Lord having an Ultramarine helmet on display and – from the advice from Steve from Warlords – the head of a Tyranid of Hive Fleet Behemoth. Dave’s taken a break from war games for a while, so I won’t be playing against him any time soon, but I’ve now got some Word Bearers to show for it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of doing a force full of religious nut-jobs, so I ran with the Word Bearers legion and I hope to add to them in the future.

The whole boxed set was a joy to paint.

I’d like to give a shout out to the videos I used as a guide to painting the miniatures; I’m not a strong intuitive painter, and having a guide is pretty much the only way I learn. So thanks to The War Gamer for the vast majority of the help I received with the painting, and to Warhammer TV for the fiddly but crucial parts.

Elsewhere, I opened my Project Pandora: Grim Cargo boxed set and built all the Corporation models. I bought this game a couple of months ago. If you don’t know, it’s a dungeon crawler set in futuristic space, published by Mantic Games. It’s concerned with the battle between the Veer-min, rat-like creatures stealing secret cargo, and the Corporation soldiers defending it. I haven’t played the game yet since the models require some assembly, and unfortunately there’s no assembly guide included in the game. The Corporation models weren’t exactly challenging to build, but it was fiddly when it came to attaching the arms. The fit of some of my models suggests a certain set of guns are supposed to fit a certain set of left arms, however the game gives no indication of what arm goes with what guns, and the parts look identical. So some of my corporation guys look very odd indeed! Also, the models are plastic resin rather than full plastic, and required the use of super glue rather than the usual poly-cement.

Yeah. It got me.

Now, ZombiU… Some of my previous blogs may have given the impression that I wasn’t enjoying the game, but I actually had a decent time with it once the story got going. There were several parts where I got careless and rushed into an area full of zombies, woefully under-prepared, and one or two well-paced jump scares that managed to startle me. Very few times when I’m playing games these days do I find myself thinking: “Yeah, you got me. Well played.” ZombiU managed it, so well done! As I mentioned in my review, I beat the game but got the bad ending, as I didn’t manage to reach the helicopter before dying, but I checked the good ending on Youtube and it’s not much better, so I doubt I’ll be rushing through the game again in order to get it. I might play the Survivor mode at some point though.

Backlog Beatdown: Killing Zombies with ZombiU

ZombiU is a game I’ve had for a while, played for a bit and never got past the first few parts. I came back to it a couple of weeks ago and after having some difficulty getting started, I managed to beat it last Thursday with an unexpected day off work. Let’s see how it worked out:

ZombiU was one of the WiiU’s launch titles. First person Survival Horror games are nothing new, and ZombiU doesn’t do anything different with the theme. The notable differences are: It’s set in London, it makes use of the WiiU controller, and there are Rogue-like elements.

They'll drive you batty...

The London setting works; it is familiar to me as I am from the UK, but only in an aesthetic sense as I don’t live anywhere near London and even if I did, I don’t know enough about the interiors of Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London (two of the game’s key locations) to make a comparison. Neither, I suspect, do the developers, who appear to recognise London and its people as overblown caricatures, and presumably have never been inside Buckingham Palace either, as from what I understand about the place you don’t just ‘go in.’

The WiiU touch pad contributes to certain aspects of the game, like aiming some of the heavier guns, adding and removing barricades, and inventory management. The latter is where it helps the most; you can add and remove items from your inventory with tablet-like functionality, and it can be used as extra buttons to select your weapons and equipment in real-time, rather than having to pause the game.

The Rogue-like elements come in to play when your character dies. You respawn as a different character, with limited weapons and equipped with whatever you stored at your safe house. The game itself doesn’t change; nothing you killed during your previous run will respawn, except that your previous character is now a Zombie. You need to kill them to reach the equipment that they had; if your new character dies before you manage this, that equipment is gone forever and late in the game, that’s a nasty business indeed.

The game took a while to get going but I enjoyed it once it did. You’re guided by a disembodied northern voice called “The Prepper,” through the speaker on the WiiU controller. He initially teaches you the skills you need to survive. Later in the game you find yourself at odds with him as other people turn up and give you things to do, as Prepper seems to think there is no point in trying to escape the city; he tells you that your only chance is to survive. But, as is often the case, things are never as they seem...

So this turned out to be a thing.
Not a nice moment of the game!

The game is challenging, thrilling and scary in the right places. There’s just the right amount of “panic” moments where you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded by zombies, and some well-paced jump-scares. There’s some optional world-building documents to collect, but you’re not obliged to read them to progress. The campaign rewards a careful, methodical approach to progression, and punishes over-confident hubris. The controls can be fiddly, but I believe it better represents the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re playing. However some of the dialogue requires some suspension of disbelief to accommodate the different survivors. For example, there is a section where you fetch an item for a doctor. You’ll probably have died several times by the time you return– but he talks as though he recognises you and makes no mention you being a different person!

I beat the game, but there’s a post-credits sequence that determines the ending. To get the better ending you need to escape the city via helicopter, but as you make your way there, you’re surrounded by zombies that respawn for the only time in the game. I didn’t beat this; I didn’t have enough firepower left to deal with the zombies effectively, and I’d forgotten which way I was supposed to go and ran in to fire. There is a Survivor mode – where you have to beat the entire game with one survivor – and some multiplayer modes. I haven’t looked at these yet, but they’re there if I need them!

Last Week's Games: ZombiU and Greyhawk

Because of my usual problems with time allowance, this blog will be more of a review of ZombiU. I started it last week and, continuing on this week, I’m finding it tough to play – sadly not for the right reasons.

I’ve been spoiled over the last ten years or so by Autosave, where I expect a game to save itself every so often so that I don’t have to do the last half an hour again if I lose during the game. ZombiU works differently to this. When your survivor dies, you carry on from the same point in the progress of the game with a different survivor; functionally identical but a different person. The problem is that the game doesn’t save when this happens. To save the game you have to sleep in the safe house. I didn’t know this, and lost all the progress I’d made on Monday through forgetting to save the game.

A cricket bat. Could it be more British? Good for conserving
 ammo but it takes a lot of hits to drop a Zombie...

“No problem,” thought I, “I wasn’t doing very well, let’s start again.” I got to the point early on in the game where you have to go to the supermarket and hack the security camera junction boxes. I died a number of times – usually as I’d managed to traverse to a different area. When I’d finally finished what I was supposed to be doing, I headed back to the safe house, to find that the game had glitched and hadn’t registered that I’d made it to the supermarket. This was a requirement to end the mission, and because it hadn’t registered, the game would never progress beyond that point. I could have started again, but I was tired and went to bed instead.

The game itself plays OK. The handling’s a bit off but I’m choosing to believe that it better represents the relative skill of the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re controlling. The best – and simultaneously the worst – bits are where there were more zombies in the area than you were expecting, or you trigger a trap, and you have to make a quick blind decision as to where to go next. You can barely see, you’re panicking and the chances that you’ll get it right are slim indeed. You’ll probably die at these points, and it can feel quite cheap. On the other hand if I was caught up in a Zombie Apocalypse that’s probably what would happen to me!

The WiiU game pad works better in some situations than others. It’s good for inventory management; touch screens are ideal for those situations. I also liked it’s utilisation for things like opening sewer drains, or setting and removing barricades; that’s representative of at least some of the physical effort required by your character to do those things. It reminded me of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS, essentially the first Resident Evil game that included some added bits of touch screen functionality.

Less welcome are those times where you have to use it to aim the heavy machine gun near the safe house; you have to aim in first person using the gyro and the screen on the pad. Those guns should be a challenge to use. But you hold the pad flat to play the game, and hold it up to your face in order to aim on the screen with the full range of movement. The trouble is if the aiming begins while your pad’s still flat, you’ll hold it up and will be looking straight at the floor. Even though I later found that you could use the right analogue stick to correct this, it disrupts the flow of the game!

ZombiU’s OK, but that’s all. I might not through to the end before moving on!

I expect Simeon looks a bit like this...

At the Roleplaying group we’ve changed games for this rotation; we’re continuing a Dungeons and Dragons: Greyhawk campaign started a while back. It’s not a deliberately funny setting, but I’m playing a half-elf fighter called Simeon D’sai who has a Wisdom score of 6 with a -2 modifier. This has created very fun situations where my character is easily fooled, both in the adventure and my colleagues who take advantage of it! It’s been fun so far, and it should continue to be.

Last Week's Games: X-Wing, Ticket to Ride, Castlevania, ZombiU

This week I played a surprising number of games…

The first one was Star Wars: X-Wing. I’m playing through the main campaign mode and I’m about two thirds of the way through the first episode; I’m enjoying it so far. I like how there’s always a specific objective you need to work within the game parameters to achieve; there are escort missions, combat missions, missions with specific targets to destroy, rescue missions and everything in between. You might be forgiven for thinking that’s standard, but the game doesn’t hold your hand. You get a briefing, and then you get dropped into the mission – after that, you’re on your own. You get some support in the form of wingmen and updates from your computer, but you need to work out how you’re going to tackle the mission; the game doesn’t tell you and your wingmen won’t win it for you. Quite often, you’ll work it out through trial and error – but that’s a positive thing; it puts some necessary thought into the process of beating a level.

Also, there’s a risk of you getting captured or killed in the game. Again, you might think this an obvious point, but let me explain: If your ship gets destroyed when you’re on a campaign mission, one of three things will happen. If you auto-eject, you’ll either be rescued by the Rebels or captured by the Empire. If you can’t eject because of bad luck or a systems malfunction, you die. If either of the latter two happen, your character can be revived, but he loses his rank and experience and is demoted to Flight Officer, the second lowest rank.

In this edition of the game this doesn’t make much difference, but in previous editions, this could potentially have an effect on your wingmen. You could have several pilots on file, and before you launched a mission you’d have the opportunity to deploy these pilots into the ships that would be flying with you – the higher their rank, the more competently they would fly. You’d run the risk of them dying but you’d also have a wing of pilots you’d created and nurtured yourself. They even had pictures! This was removed from the Windows version of the game I’m playing, presumably to streamline the experience, but it also removed the potential for some X-COM-like storytelling in there in addition to the main campaign.

Great game.

I also spent some time in Warlords 'n' Wizards, a new hobby shop in Netherton, and managed to have a game of Ticket to Ride with one of the lads there. Most people who play this know what a great game it is. I won the game, but with Ticket to Ride, the time between playing the game for the first time and understanding what you have to do is quite short, and the guy I was playing picked it up very quickly, so he had a lot of fun as well. That’s the mark of good game design, in my opinion! I might talk about it more in depth on a slow week, but it’s a very well-designed game that everybody should play at least once.

Hard game!

I dug out the WiiU and played a couple of games on that as well. The first was the original Castlevania, and I’d forgotten how brutally hard that game was. I’m going to have to exploit the WiiU’s infrastructure to scum-save the game, because there’s no way I’m going to finish it any other way. Some might say I’m not getting the true experience if I play it with an option to save, but these old games were designed in a time where the length of the game was extended by its difficulty. I’m having fun with Castlevania – but I’m not looking to get bogged down.

The other one was ZombiU. This was an interesting take on the Zombie game genre, because it functions like a Rogue-lite: you take a survivor up until the point where you die, and then when you take over as another survivor, you have the opportunity to fight your previous character – now a Zombie – and pick up your old equipment. I’ll talk a bit more about it next week! 

Last Week's Games: X-Wing and Final Fantasy II

This week I’ve found myself short of spare time, so I didn’t play many games. But I get to talk more at length about the games I did play, so here they are: 

The main game I played was Star Wars: X Wing. I talked about this last week, but I’ve been getting really in to it again because of how the game plays. It is a space flight simulator; there’s all sorts of different controls and buttons and you have to use most of them at some point in order to succeed. It’s challenging for a number of reasons, the main one being the power distribution system, but it’s not insurmountable and is still a lot of fun.

I'm pretty sure this is the edition
of X-Wing I am playing...

I beat the A-Wing proving ground: a track where you have to fly through gates and shoot targets, some of which shoot back. The track is the same layout no matter what ship you’re in. There are eight levels you have to beat in order to gain the reward for it; a flight badge. You have a limited amount of time to beat it, which gets progressively smaller as you beat the levels. If you miss a gate, you incur a penalty of 15 seconds; for some of the middle levels, that’s disastrous. Also, the targets shoot more aggressively in the later levels, and in the last one, they even shoot you from behind – but if you shoot them, you gain 2 extra seconds to complete the level. There are certain stages that are all but impossible to beat without this.

The challenges in the proving ground are more or less substantial depending on what ship you are flying. The middle tier levels have the tightest time and usually present a significant challenge, but less so with the A-Wing as it moves fast enough for time to be less of a consideration. It doesn’t do such a good job at boosting its shields though, and for that reason, the later levels with the more aggressive targets were more challenging. If your systems start to shut down then you’re in trouble; if your guns are taken out then you can’t fire back, if your shields are knocked out you’ll be destroyed in seconds, and if your flight control or engine goes then you lose a lot of time getting them repaired. Despite all this it was a surprising amount of fun addressing the different challenges each level presents, knowing that there is way to beat it if you can only get it right.

I also enjoyed the A-Wing historical missions; they’re less challenging and a relaxing change of pace. Here’s where a lot of the genius of the game design comes in to play: The missions rarely take more than a few minutes to beat, and you can play through them quite quickly, but there is a reward for each one. It’s a graphic of a badge on a display uniform; not much in itself, but because the game shows you a tangible reward for doing these training missions, you have the incentive to beat them all.

I started the main campaign mode as well. More on that next week!

These hornets are a threat at the beginning.
Not for long...

I also progressed with Final Fantasy II. I love the Final Fantasy games but rarely see one through to the end; the first game is the only one where I’ve managed it so far. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’ve arrived at the point where I’m heading for Mysidia Tower. I’m playing it on my Gameboy Advance, although I find that the game is best enjoyed when I have my phone to hand. I don’t know whether it’s a design error in this edition of the game, but whatever command is supposed to display the world map isn’t working! I’ve had to call up an image of the world map come up on more than one occasion so I can see where I’m supposed to go. The game itself isn’t all that challenging, although I am aware that the difficulty level was re-balanced for the GBA editions.

So, what’s next? More of the same, or will I try a different game? Will I even have time? We’ll see…