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!