Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

For the second time in as many weeks I find myself apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.

Well you're about to die, sonflower...

If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!

Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly 60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights, I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the week!

I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly engaged!

Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle
since that's who you play as.

However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an “energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!

I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!

Last Week's Games: Regicide, Kingdom Hearts, Chaos Cultists

First of all, sorry I’m a bit late with this one. I didn’t get much sleep on Sunday night and had a very long day on Monday, when I would normally write these. By the time I got home I was exhausted and I knew I’d find it very difficult to focus, so I decided to put it off for a day, get some sleep and come back to it in the morning. I guess, if I was writing for a magazine with a deadline, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that, but this is somewhat different. I have a fair amount of people reading these blogs, but the majority of them come in long after I’ve published them – they sort of trickle in off search engines. I doubt anybody reading this in a month, six months, a year, or several years (it happens!) is going to care that I didn’t put this one out on a Monday, but they will probably notice if my writing is below my usual standard. So here we are. 


Orks, mate. They'll blow you up.

I carried on with Warhammer 40K: Regicide, I was hoping to beat it last week! It wasn’t to be, sadly; I got to within the last couple of levels of the Space Marine campaign to find that the secondary objective for the penultimate mission is, once again, to kill – not capture – all the Ork pieces. Regular readers will remember that this gave me some problems a few weeks ago with the final mission of the second act, but at least the playing field was somewhat level for that one! Here, you are outnumbered by quite a lot, and you will lose if either your Librarian (Queen) or Captain (King) are eliminated. Not being allowed to capture the pieces makes the game very difficult in that regard; I haven’t quite managed it yet but I’m sure I’ll get there if I tackle it hard enough!

Not to judge Square characters by
their fashion sense, but...

Elsewhere I played Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting through the Agrabah level. Here, I noticed something a little odd about the platforming sections of the game – you don’t die from falling off the platforms. Instead, you fall to the bottom of the screen, or when appropriate, a different screen altogether. I’m not suggesting that it requires a suspension of disbelief, as quite frankly playing as a 14 year-old boy running around with a giant key, a one-piece swimsuit (I think) over a short jacket, shoes that are far too big for him and accompanied by Goofy and Donald Duck allows you suspend it enough to ignore the potentially harmful effect of gravity. But consider – when you lose all your health in the game, you click Continue and go back to the start of the screen you’re on. When you fall off a platform, you have to climb all the way up again, and if you’ve fallen into a different screen, this is actually quite a bit more faff than simply restarting the section. I don’t know, it may seem meaningless, but I think it’s a clever little bit of game design – they didn’t make it too easy to keep repeating the same parts over and over again in order to practice the platforming sections, so it gives a better incentive to concentrate.

Then on Monday, when I was having some work done on my car, I spent some time in Phoenix Games in Stourbridge painting my remaining Chaos Cultists. I used to go in to the shop quite a lot, and even ran a Dungeons and Dragons game for them for a couple of years. I don’t go in so much anymore, mainly due to family and work commitments, but Brett and Steve are always happy to let me sit down and paint while my car is being fixed. And it was nice to see Emile and Matt, who were previously in the DnD game, having a game of Konflikt 47.  I didn’t get my models finished; I wasn’t expecting to as I take my time with my painting. But I got a good way in to it and I might even pick them up again in the week while I’m off work!

I’ll see what I can get done next week!

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide, XCOM, 8-Ball Pool, Crossword, Sniper 3D Assassin

An interesting week this week. Six games to talk about!

I progressed with Kingdom Hearts, beating the Deep Jungle and making it as far as Agrabah before I stopped. At this point you have to do some back-tracking to allow the Gummi Ship to fly to other worlds, but I’ll take this opportunity to talk about an element of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 that wasn’t in the original – The Gummi Missions. This takes the form of certain objectives when flying the ship between worlds; like scoring a certain number of points, or taking out a certain number of enemies with a particular kind of gun equipped. I consider this an improvement, as previously there was no real reason to do the Gummi flights other than to get to the next world. It gives something extra for the completionists, and I would love to unlock them all.

This took me a few goes!

I also continued with Regicide, finally beating the end of Act 2 that I had been stuck on for ages! I progressed several missions in to Act 3 as well, the game being good at promoting the “just one more go” mentality, and it was quite late into the night before I realised I should stop! The screenshot was one I did myself (normally I pull them off Google Image Search,) because of something going on with Facebook over the weekend. I’m in a group called Gaming Dads, which given the levels of nastiness that can plague the internet is a really nice group to be in. Sadly, one of the members recently lost his partner after an illness, and her funeral was on Saturday. To show our support, we were supposed to upload a screenshot of what we were all playing over the weekend, with the tags: #tucker #wegotyoubrother. I chose this game because it was most convenient to do it on my laptop; I’m glad I finally found a use for Dxtory in the end!

I was ill on Thursday and had some time off work, and I played a bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I continued a game I’d started in November, and it didn’t go very well. In the space of a few missions I’d lost some of my best soldiers. It might warrant yet another restart but I’d been doing pretty well up until then, and I’d had to deal with a massive setback during the one time I beat the game so you never know.

An old picture but does the job!

But I was very interested in the games I’d been playing on mobile devices! I’ve been playing 8-Ball Pool a lot this week, and I think of all the games I downloaded onto my Kindle Fire 7, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most, simply because there’s a measure of skill involved rather than just clicking on things until you can’t click on things any more.

I downloaded onto my phone a couple of other games: Crossword, which is as it sounds – crossword puzzles. I’ve never been much good at this but I’m sticking to the easy puzzles for now, and the game does help you: The clues you solve correctly lock and have a beige colour on them so you know, and you can ask for a hint. You have a limited number of these but you get three every time you beat a puzzle so that’s not a major issue. Sometimes I use a website to solve the clues, which might be considered cheating, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to find different ways of saying things. It might help next time I play Scrabble!

Also I’ve been playing Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Shooter. This is a game where you’re given a target to shoot at, and you have to kill them with a sniper rifle or suitable weapon. I’ve been having fun with it but I’ve reached the point in the game where I have to start paying for things in order to carry on, as I need to buy a new weapon which I can only do with diamonds. I’m not sure how long I’m going to put up with being forced to watch ad after ad in order to keep enjoying it!

So, a busy week!

 

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide and Ticket to Ride

A difficult boss to beat. Some might say...
He was tricky.

I was quite busy with games this week! I carried on with Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting as far as the Coliseum. It was a pleasure to go through Wonderland again, and the harder difficulty setting means that the fights are challenging – I had to use a continue for the first time. I also noticed that, as I’d chosen the Guardian class at the start of the game, Sora’s abilities were developing differently; I was getting different powers to assign to my action points than I was used to for the warrior class I usually pick. I did this because the characters that you meet along the way are usually fighters, so I could conceivably swap Goofy out for, say, Tarzan and still have a balanced party.

Unusually for me, the highlights were the boss battles, the Trickmaster and Cerberus. I had to analyse their attack patterns and find out what attacks work best and where in order to defeat them. The Trickmaster took a few goes! Maybe I’m enjoying boss battles more as I progress through games in general, possibly because I’m taking them as a welcome change of pace that I actually have to think about.

Not quite the mission I was on but
it looked a lot like this.

I also carried on with Regicide, the 40K chess game. I cleared the level I was stuck on last week! On the other flank of the board were three Ork Shoota Boyz. These weren’t part of the mission objective, but the objective targets were deployed in a defensive formation that was tough to crack. Out of a need to try something else, I attacked the Shoota Boyz, and found something that I’d forgotten about – In chess, you have to move; you can’t forgo your turn. So once I’d eliminated Shoota Boyz, I forced the Storm Boyz and the Meganob to move and break formation. At this point, the battle became a lot easier. It still took a few goes – a lot of it is still reliant on the random number generation – but the different approach helped!

I breezed through the next couple of missions, before getting stuck on the last one. The last mission in Act 2 of the Blood Angels campaign involves having to take down almost an entire chess set of Orks. You have all your pieces except your king and its pawn, they have all theirs except their queen and its pawn. Your objective is to take down the Warboss (King.) I once again fell down on the secondary objective, which in this case was killing – not capturing, the conventional method – all enemy units. I’d worn the Ork forces down to just the Warboss and a Meganob. Unfortunately I’d misunderstood the objective and killed the Warboss first, ending the mission but as the Meganob was still alive, I failed the secondary objective. What a way to mess it up!

Finally, on Friday night I sat down for a game of Ticket to Ride with Kirsty, Fran and Phil. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: one of the main indicators of good game design is how small the gap between picking it up for the first time and understanding how it all works; the other three had never played the game before and were playing very well by the end! My three tickets at the start of the game had stacked, and I took over much of the West Coast of America quite quickly. Not wanting to deliberately throw the game for the benefit of the people who’d never played, but also not wanting to dominate the game without them even realising, I then took another two tickets which stretched out to the East side – not quite to New York, but near enough. I reasoned that if I could achieve those tickets as well, I would definitely have earned a win! I nearly managed it as well, but then Kirsty, who felt she was well out of the runnings by then, blocked the last route I needed to take! So I lost the points for the two tickets I’d been brazen enough, which cost me the game. Fran won in the end, and we will have her quote of “Eat My Steam, Bitches!” running through our heads forever more.