Last Week's Games: Eternal Crusade

I started this week knowing I wasn’t going to have much time, so I was only going to be able to play a few games. By the time we got to the end of it, it was only one…

My new game for this week was Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. I bought this last week as part of a War bundle from Steam; a lot of the Games Workshop licenced games had come up on there and as I hope to do a complete retrospective on them at some point, I thought I might as well buy it. I didn’t intend to try any of them straight away as I have things to be getting on with, but then it came to my attention that Eternal Crusade was a multiplayer-only online shooter. Now, I’m not very good at these games, and my laptop hasn’t got a particularly fast hard drive so games like this don’t run especially well, but I thought I’d better give it a go before the servers die out.

Funnily enough I'm not sure it looks this good
on my laptop...

The game allows you to choose from one of four Warhammer 40K factions: Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Orks and Eldar. Being the sort of player I am I initially started off with Chaos, but then I had a look at the structure of the game; if you want to get in to a battle you have to choose from a number of areas on the campaign map that only two of the factions will be involved with. Far from remaining loyal to one side, I created a character for all four factions and decided to play as whatever the battle needed at that point. I spend the most time playing as Orks, funnily enough…

As for the game itself, it plays like the multiplayer mode to Space Marine than anything else. You have a mixture of classes taken almost straight out of the 5^th Edition rules: A standard Troops class that can capture objectives, a Heavy Support class with big weapons, a Fast Attack class with a jump pack or similar, and a healer or support class. Some other heroes are available for a price. You start with standard equipment; more can be unlocked as you’re going along and gain experience in battle. You have a certain amount of time to capture a few areas, and if you can hang on to your captured areas before the time runs out, you win. There is also a mode where one side has a limited time to capture all the areas, and the other side has to defend it with limited reinforcements.

I have really enjoyed Eternal Crusade so far and I hope I continue to do so. I have heard some questions raised about the game’s quality; I don’t play a lot of games like this so I don’t know which ones do it any better or worse, but it seems alright so far. I’ll probably try to get what play time I can out of it before the servers go dead, and since I’m enjoying levelling up my characters and playing online matches, this could be a while!

Anyone want to help campaign against the tyranids?

But there is something I do need to be careful of – addiction. I’m not very good at controlling this at the best of times, and I’m noticing the familiar patterns. Eternal Crusade has a quick but very entertaining core gameplay loop, and more than once this week I’ve found myself still playing at some ridiculous hour in the morning after telling myself “just one more game.” It’s certainly not going to help me get through my backlog, since this isn’t a game you beat in the usual sense; even the Player Versus Environment is a bit of a non-starter since no one seems interested in playing it. It does have the potential to get in the way of my work/life balance if I’m not careful, and while it is my intention to keep playing, I’m glad I’ve resolved to play a new game every week – I’ll need something to distract me from this.

So, a new game for next week then. Also, I might get a war game in at some point; I’ve not done that for a while!

Last Week's Games: Dungeon Master and Cluckles' Adventure

This week has been extremely busy for me for all sorts of different reasons and I haven’t had anywhere near as much time as I usually have to play games. But I found time to have a quick go on one or two games; a new game for me that’s actually an old classic, and a relatively new game that looks like an old classic…

My new game for this week is Dungeon Master. This is an early roleplaying game in which you play a Wizard’s apprentice trying to guide four heroes around a dungeon in order to win the Firestaff (I think) and save your master. This style of game is quite common for such franchises as Might and Magic, and the nearest I’ve ever played to this before is Legend of Grimrock. I quite like the style of it, but my word, it is hard…

Strewth, I'm going to have to fight this at some point...

This game was originally released in 1987 (presumably I’m playing the 1989 DOS release but from what I understand, they’re virtually identical) and harks back to a time where you were expected to make your own maps, write down the combinations of buttons that successfully cast spells, and know the strengths and weaknesses of all of the 24 available heroes. I’m not saying it can’t and shouldn’t be done, but don’t forget that back in the day, games could have their difficulty increased by arbitrarily forcing you to take responsibility for your progress outside of the main mechanics. Most games managed with a password, but if you come back to a save file after three or four months and you can’t remember how to do the spells, you’re pretty stuffed. Thankfully I can run the game in a window and have an online-available map in front of me, as well as the part of the instruction book that at least purports to tell me what all the spell syllables supposedly mean. As games went on, we developed ways of storing that information in the structure of the game itself, and it makes for a far more streamlined experience – but it’s interesting to see where the structure for these ideas came from.

Dungeon Master is a difficult game to get my head around but I’d be willing to give it a few more goes. The combat is fiddly and unintuitive, but it’s meant to be and I think it creates one of the core facets of the experience. I need to remember to save it every now and then, as this game was released well before autosave was a thing, and I’ve lost nearly an hour of play by blundering into a room full of Mummies and not having the wit or resources to deal with them. We’ll see what happens with it.

Just in case we need reminding:
It's a chicken with a sword. A sword.

My other game for this week is Cluckles’ Adventure. This was a gem I discovered last year where you play as a chicken with a sword. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, but I will re-iterate a point I think this game makes very well: You can have all the graphics, presentation, celebrity endorsements, well-written plots and budget you want, but nothing’s going to quite replace a consistent art style, good level design and a solid core gameplay loop. If you want a platforming game that will remind you why you got in to video games in the first place, please give this one a go.

After I’d finished whatever nonsense I was up to on any given day last week, I found myself with very little motivation to get my paints out. I built the remaining Chaos Space Marines in the box I started a few weeks ago and sprayed them black, but that’s as far as I got with any hobby games this week.

As it happens, I’m not expecting to have much more time this week, as I’m expecting to be out all day for the next several days. I’ll carry on with some of the long-form campaigns if I possibly can, but more likely I’ll be filling a few spare minutes with games that can be beaten quite quickly. Nothing wrong with that – it’s just a case of time management.

Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate, OlliOlli, Pokemon Leaf Green, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Cultists

It’s been quite an eventful week for me in terms of playing games! I had a couple of highlights, not the least of them finally getting to the end of Hand of Fate after owning the game for nearly two years. You can read my full review here, but I’d like to re-iterate how much it adds to the game that there’s no real plot to speak of, no Jacobean tragedy of characters to keep track of and no need to restart the game in order to remember what in the world was going on. It’s just you and The Dealer, and even though none of it gets explained by the end of the game, I feel it would have ruined it the game if it had tried to resolve it. It is a hugely fun experience, worth more than the sum of its parts, and one that I would more than recommend giving a go.

My new game for this week was OlliOlli; a 2D skating game. I’m finding this one very difficult to get to grips with because the system for tricks and landings is completely different from what I’ve come to expect from the 5/6^th generation Tony Hawk-style games. With those games, the face buttons combined with the directions handled the vast majority of the tricks, and landing was as simple as pointing the skateboard the right way when you hit the floor. With OlliOlli, the tricks are done almost entirely off the left thumb stick, and the A button (on the Steam controller) handles the landing. It’s taking some getting used to, but then, so did Tony Hawk, so I might come back and give it another go if I’ve got a few minutes.

I carried on with Pokémon Leaf Green for a while, getting to the other side of Moon Mountain and into Cerulean City. I haven’t done anything there yet because I didn’t play the game for very long this week, but I’ll keep going at it whenever it’s convenient.

I also carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2, arriving at the point where you have the option to spend some money to rebuild the town. It does require a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that roughly two years have passed between arriving at the villa and the game’s plot progressing, and I’m not sure to what end you are re-building the town. Some of the buildings have obvious benefits, but for the rest of them, I’m not sure what the purpose is unless there comes a point later in the game where you have to spend a lot of money! I’m having a pretty decent time with it, but while it does seem to take control of its own plot more than the previous game, it appears to be less open than Assassin’s Creed as well for that reason.

Finally I spend some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton painting Chaos Cultists. I enjoyed painting them a lot more once I’d got the block colours done on the clothes, because at that point they started to look quite good. I probably put a little more effort in to them than was necessary for rank-and-file models that will die if my opponent so much as breathes on them too hard, but hey, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to complete the army!

I had a look at some of the options for building my Word Bearers army, and found that with the addition of 20 cultists and a Dark Apostle, I could build a Battalion formation in a 500 point army. This would give me six command points to spend on Stratagems, and I found a couple of interesting ones that relate to the army I’m trying to build. I could, potentially, remove a unit of cultists from the board and bring it back at full strength on any of the board edges I like; this is a bit of a gamble but it might pay off in objective-based games. Also the Stratagem that relates to the Word Bearers take some of the risk away from summoning Daemons, I will see how this effects the composition of the army as it grows.

Backlog Beatdown: Handling my Fate with Hand of Fate

I bought Hand of Fate in the summer of 2016. I remembered watching TotalBiscuit’s impression of it the previous year wishing I had a computer powerful enough to play it, then jumped at the opportunity to play it when I bought one. This was probably the reason I bought a Steam Controller as well; I knew a lot of it was an Arkham-like brawler and I didn’t fancy doing that on a laptop keyboard!

This is the best you see of either character.

Hand of Fate is a procedurally-generated Deck Builder/Brawler/Role Playing Game. You are an unnamed adventurer, across the table from The Dealer; a mysterious being of considerable power. The Dealer has a deck of cards that take you through various encounters; these purport to be memories from your adventures. These cards are laid out in a simple shape, some large and some small, some linear and some more open. You move your character onto the cards one at a time and resolve the encounters on there. Sometimes this is a decision, sometimes it’s a game of chance, and a lot of times they’re combat encounters with a variety of monsters. You have to make your way through these encounters, through various ‘levels’ of the dungeon created by the deck, manage your resources along the way and beat the boss at the end of the adventure. You’re supported along the way by equipment cards, and you can manipulate what occurs by building up the equipment and encounter deck at the start of the game. Each run takes between ten minutes and half an hour, promoting a “Just one more go!” mentality.

The combat - simple, but short and functional.

Hand of Fate appears to be a jumbled mess of ideas that shouldn’t work in a game, but it really does. The game is beautifully presented; the graphics are nothing special for the time but the theme and the atmosphere create a fantastic and slightly unnerving experience. The Dealer, in particular, is wonderful character: Primarily an antagonist with a distinct aura of menace about him, but almost friendly in nature; not above congratulating you for a victory, apologising for a harsh card, or laughing at you for a mistake. That you can only see his eyes means his countenance never gives too much away, and Anthony Skordi’s brilliant voice acting brings as much to the character as it needs to – clearly invested in what he’s doing, but no overblown dramatics. The deckbuilding is well-implemented; you can either build the decks yourself or allow the computer to do it for you. This allows for micro-managing and optimisation for those who want to, and rewards you with more cards and items if you do, but doesn’t distract from the game for those who just want to play it. Some questions have been raised about the combat system but the only major flaw for me was that I wasn’t able to control the camera, meaning that I didn’t know what was going on in some situations. Everything else is fine; it’s basic, but you’re rarely in combat for more than a few minutes at a time so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. If anything, it adds to the general effect of not quite being in control of the situation!

If you play pen-and-paper RPGs and have ever wondered
what "True Neutral" looks like, I think The Dealer is it!

Finally, one of the game’s greatest strengths is in its plot. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be one. You don’t know who the adventurer is, or who the Dealer’s true identity, or the purpose of the game. Without wishing to spoil, the ending, while spectacular, doesn’t address any of this. But this is fine; it allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself, and you can never be so invested in a plot that isn’t there that you feel the need to restart every time you come back to the game after a time, which is usually the reason I rarely see RPGs through to the end. And I’ll happily come back for more later; some additional difficulty levels were patched in post-launch, there’s downloadable content which implies different classes, and a sequel was released not long ago.

Hand of Fate is a game that delivers exactly what I needed when I needed it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time, and I’m looking forward to returning to it soon!

Last Week's Games: Pokemon Leaf Grean, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Space Marines

What might lurk in the grass? Rattata probably.

So I had a request to play a game! I’d never got one before and I was quite excited to do it. Katie, someone I know from the open mic circuit, asked me to cover a Pokémon game, and I remembered I had Leaf Green on my Game Boy Advance so I was happy to oblige! I hadn’t played it or any Pokémon game for a long time, though I remembered it being basically being the same game as the original Pokémon games released in 1999. (I don’t remember anybody talking about it before then – and people talked about it a lot at school!) I enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far; I named my player character Katie after the girl who asked me to cover it, and the rival Boris because he keeps appearing to mess everything up, rather like our current Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson. I didn’t get very far because I started with Charmander, which is all but useless for the first two Pokémon gyms so I had to do some grinding with my other Pokémon to beat Brock. I’m currently at Moon Mountain, and I intend to keep playing! But I’m not going to go for 100% completion. Even if I could be bothered, the chances that I’ll find someone with a GBA and a copy of Fire Red to trade the necessary Pokémon with are slim indeed. 
 

Ezio before he becomes an assassin...

My new game for this week was Assassin’s Creed 2. You’ll remember from my previous blogs I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed when I played it last year, and I found I was missing large open worlds with things to discover and do so I gave the next one a go. It’s a good game; I haven’t noticed much difference between it and the first game yet in terms of how it plays but the Assassin’s Creed 2 seems a lot more invested in its own plot than the previous game was, which is making for a far more compelling experience. I’m a couple of hours in to the game and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next!

And my new game for last week – I did play one, but I forgot to put it on the blog – was Dynamite Heddy from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. This is an oddball platformer typical of the time, where you controlled a little puppet that could attack by throwing its head in different directions. It’s competently-designed, and fun enough, but I don’t have much interest in coming back to it simply because I’m not all that invested. If it had been a game I’d been playing since I was nine, it would be another matter, but having just picked up the game at thirty-two, I couldn’t honestly say it held my interest.

They grow ever more numerous...

Finally, in the space of about a week, I built and painted five Chaos Space Marines in Word Bearers colours. I was tidying around in my room in preparation for having new windows installed, and found a box of Chaos Space Marines I’d had for years but hadn’t built (it was my original intention to build them as Thousand Sons.) I enjoyed painting them, and the vast majority of that was done in Warlords and Wizards in Netherton where I had some great company as well! I’ll never be allowed to use them in a tournament because the bases are the wrong size (the rank and file of the current edition of 40K uses slightly bigger bases than previously, and unlike Age of Sigmar, 40K measures from the base rather than the model,) but I’m not bothered by that. I’m no tournament player, and I’d rather they were built and used than never touched again because someone was being funny about their base sizes!

I’ve built and sprayed some more models that I’m hoping to paint next week. I’ve also re-found the fun in micro-managing army lists, and I’ve found that I can fit two squads of Chaos Cultists into a 500pt army, so that’s where I’m going next. I’ve got an old box of cultists that I never touched, so I’ve built them now and I’ll try paint scheme that fits in with the Word Bearers!

Pickups and Trades #3

This month, I’ve had to slow down with buying games, since I don’t have much money at the moment, and the small amount of money I do have was perfectly capable of spending itself without any help from me.

It's OK but my lack of know-how is slowing
me down at the moment!

I downloaded Heroquest, Space Crusade, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk from myabandonware.com, meaning to check out some of the earlier Games Workshop licensed games. As this is abandonware I didn’t buy the game the usual sense; just downloaded it and made it work in DOSbox. I’ve already tried Heroquest and will try the other three when there’s time.

I deleted Ascend: Hand of Kul from my Xbox 360 hard drive. This was a game I’d downloaded from Games with Gold nearly five years ago now; it is a game in which you played a huge creature called a Caos warrior fighting across a grim fantasy land to defeat the Titans. Or at least it was. I had a look on the Wikipedia page and it turns out its servers were shut down in late 2014. I was more upset that it took me this long to notice, to be honest! I enjoyed it at the time but it’s been taking up space on my hard drive I could ill-afford for three years.

On Steam, I bought a few games when I got paid. They were:

88 Heroes, an interesting-looking pixel-art platformer where you have the titular 88 Heroes to get through the game,

Guacamelee Gold/Super Turbo Championship Edition, A Metroid-Vania style platformer where you play as a Lucha-Libre wrestler, I’ve seen this talked up several times over the last few years, even though it’s been years since release. I look forward to seeing how it all works!

OlliOlli: So Olli they named it twice, this is an odd 2D skating game that I’ve seen TotalBiscuit talk up so I thought I’d give it a go.

This looks exactly like my thing...

Renowned Explorers – International Society: It’s been a while since I’ve seen any coverage on this game, but if I found it interesting enough to put on my wish list it’s worth a go!

Torchlight: A fantasy RPG that again I saw TotalBiscuit cover a while ago. I do like my RPGs, so this one’s worth a look!

I meant to get The Banner Saga as well but I had some confusion over the sale dates and missed it. Not to worry, it will go on again!

Last Week's Games: Heroquest, GTA: Vice City, Chaos Space Marines

Hmm, naming the Wizard Gandalf...

It’s been something of a quiet week for me on the games front. Early on in the week I had another go with Heroquest, and played the first two missions again with the Barbarian before dying on the third. This was, in part, due to not knowing about certain of the game’s mid-long term facets: Your health (body points) carries over between missions, but any healing potions you pick up do not. So I didn’t heal my character before the second mission ended, meaning he was going into the next level under-powered and with no means of healing himself. By the time I realised this I had a run of bad luck with some of the encounters and died in a battle I hadn’t got a hope of winning. Disheartened, I moved on.

On Friday I went in to Get Gaming in Lower Gornal to see if they had any Xbox 360 games I wanted. As it happens they did, but not enough to make up an offer so I left it alone. I also had a look at the PSP, as they have a system and some games in, including the two Grand Theft Auto games: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. I thought about buying the system and the games, but then I remembered that I already own three games in the GTA3 canon, and so far have only beaten the first. I’d like to own a PSP and even a PSVita, but when my chief motivation for buying one is currently open-world games in a series of which I haven’t even played through the previous games, it didn’t seem such a good idea.

A big part of this game was the Florida Haze...

So I checked out the 360 back-compatible list, found the GTA3 games on there, dug my old games out and had a go at Vice City. I had somehow forgotten how rough the handling was in those early GTA games! But it was a fun experience nonetheless, and now that I’m more familiar with slang terms for certain demographics (Guido’s, for example,) I can enjoy some of the cut scenes more now I know what in the world they’re talking about! As we’re still in the point where there were secrets in the form of hidden packages, rampages and insane stunts, I’m trying to alternate between doing the missions and at least one of the extras. I’ll never 100% it – but I’ll get what I can out of it!

I also visited Warlords 'n' Wizards for the first time in a while and bought a Necromunda gang, the Orlocks. I added it to my ever-growing pile of models I have yet to build, and decided to make a start on some of them. I’ve had a box of Chaos Space Marines lying around for a while that I think I originally intended to convert to Thousand Sons, but now that Word Bearers are my flagship Chaos army, I fully intend to paint them in those colours. As I’ve had the box for a long time, they’re still on small bases, but I’m not going to worry about that or they’ll never get built!

I built five of them including the heavy bolter and sprayed them black. One of the things I find when I’m painting armies is that as the bulk of it is made up of rank-and-file models, it’s easier for me to stay engaged if I paint five at a time, before moving on to a different model. Ten at a time would get them done more quickly but I get fed up painting the same model over and over again; with five it’s easier to see the progress I’m making. I paint very slowly anyway, and I’d rather make small and regular progress rather than get fed up and paint nothing for weeks, which very often happens! I didn’t get any further than the undercoat due to time constraints, but with a couple of weeks off work I’m hoping to make some progress with them.

And so we move on into the next week, where, for the first time since I’ve been doing this blog regularly, I’ve had a request to cover a game. We’ll see what happens with that!