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| 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.
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| 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.
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