Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Last Week's Games: The Horus Heresy: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Lemmings

I spent the vast majority of last week enthralled with the Horus Heresy: Legions. I mentioned this last week so if you want to know what kind of game this is have a look at that, but for now I’m going to mention my progression. I’m getting quite good at the game now, and I can often hold my own against all but the toughest of decks. I built a few decks around Garviel Loken and whatever the daily mission objective was, but then it occurred to me to build a deck out of Loken and a larger percentage of Chaos Cards – the latter can be applied to any faction, as no legion involved with the Horus Heresy escaped corruption! This works reasonably well, if not particularly consistently. The Chaos Cards have some powerful effects but the higher level cards are also quite unpredictable, and some are as likely to do some damage to you as well as your opponent. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying the deck!

Garro has a cool healing ability, but the rest of his
force will need to hit pretty hard to win...

I also built a deck out of Saul Tarvitz and the Mechanicum. The Emperor’s Children has been an interesting faction to run since their benefits are usually tied to perfection – while powerful in their own right, the Emperor’s Children cards often have a special bonus applied when they use all of your remaining energy to play them. Tarvitz’s effect of lowering the energy you need to play a card by one makes this more flexible, and combined with the Mechanicum, who have some very powerful machines at their disposal, they are a force to be reckoned with. It doesn’t make much difference to my win:loss ratio, but it’s a refreshing change of pace that I need sometimes.

I rarely give a free-to-play game much attention, but I’ve put more time in to Legions than a significant number of games I’ve actually paid for, so it must be doing something for me!

One of the best In Medias Res beginnings I've ever seen in
a video game. You don't even know the hero's name at this point.

On the Switch, I continued with Final Fantasy VII, getting to the point where you leave Midgar after rescuing Aeris from the Shinra building. I’ve really enjoyed playing it again, and even more so now that I’ve been playing pen-and-paper role-playing games for a while and have a much better idea of a class-based system. This isn’t used obviously in Final Fantasy VII, but it’s helpful to remember what everyone is supposed to be doing and, apart from a couple of times when I’ve made a mistake with regard to what materia everyone has when I have the option to change it, I’ve been doing quite well.

Who's done Lemmings before?

Finally I’ve been playing a game that was among the first video games I ever played and has now been updated to a mobile port: Lemmings. I had a great time with this game when I was very young – to this day, I still remember my Dad laughing at the first level without really knowing what to do – and I’ve missed playing it ever since the Acorn Computer we played it on stopped working. This mobile port is not a re-make of the original game. Instead, it is an updated version of the game to bring it in line with mobile gaming. It is, for example, no longer possible to give instructions to individual lemmings. Instead, the game works on a grid-based system, where you click the square you want to affect with an instruction, and the first lemming to get there will do it. For example, if you want a lemming to dig through a square, you touch the square and press the button when it comes up. The lemming will either dig across it, or down it, depending on where it happens to be in relation to the square you’ve clicked.

It works quite well, though it lacks some accuracy that would be useful. There are certain situations where you have to work to avoid traps, and it would be really helpful to just get one lemming to where you need to be. The only way to really do this is to block the other lemmings, and you have to time it exactly right or you’ll let more through than you meant to.

So, a fun-filled week this week! Let’s see what next week brings…

 

Last Week's Games: Horus Heresy: Legions, Ultra Street Figher 2, Final Fantasy VII

In my quest to play all the Games Workshop licensed games, I downloaded and played The Horus Heresy: Legions. This is a collectable card came based around the Horus Heresy era of the Warhammer Universe, and was free to play so I thought I’d give it a go.

Who can play the better hand?

I’d never played a collectable card game on the computer before. I know Hearthstone is the standard but I’d never been tempted to play it. I’ve played the real thing – I used to play Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. I don’t anymore, because I don’t have the financial structure to keep up with the ‘meta[1]’ of the games, and even if I did, I don’t play often enough for it to be a worthwhile financial investment; I intended to do another blog in this later. So I had some expectations, which I had to shift to accommodate Legions. Your first card on the table is always your Warlord, and they come with their own abilities you can use in the game. Legions kicks you off by giving you Garviel Loken; the hero of the first Horus Heresy books. After that, the game works on an energy-based system: Each card is worth a certain amount of energy (1-10) that you need to play it, and you can only play as many cards as you have energy for. Your energy for the turn increases each turn you play, up to a maximum of 10. The idea of the game is to reduce the health of the opposing Warlord to 0, at which point the game ends and you win.

Apart from that, the main difference between video games and their table-top counterparts is the health system. Each card that represents a fighting unit has two numbers: Left is how much damage each unit does, and right is how much damage it can withstand. The number on the right goes down cumulatively to the attacks it takes, and when it reaches 0, the unit dies. This is different to the table-top games, where it is usually necessary to hit a unit hard enough to eliminate it entirely or it loses no defensive power at all – and rightly so, or the game would get bogged down while the players try to keep track of it. But I expect the whole point of playing games like this on a computer is to have the CPU make those calculations for you!

I’ve been having fun with Legions so far; I win about as many games as I lose. I don’t intend to spend any money on it, and I’m not sure how much more time I’ll want to put in to it, but for now it’s doing what I need!

I had another go at Ultra Street Figher 2, getting through most of the game with various different people and beating it with Dhalsim, of all people! He’s not the easiest character to use, however it becomes a lot easier once you remember that you have other options than to use his most powerful attacks – the lighter ones are often easier to aim. I also played Street Fighter with my daughter, which was lovely. She’s only 2 at this point, but she found it engaging! I think the thing with fighting games is that it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to be doing – beating the other guy up. There’s no tricky platforming, no levelling up or looting; you just press a button to make a thing happen which she enjoyed. I let her win a few times – I wanted her to enjoy it – and called time after 10 minutes. I guess for her, it’s about winning, but it’s also about doing something with her Dad, and with video games being a large part of my life, it’s great to be able to do that!

Beautiful...

Finally, I’ve been enjoying Final Fantasy VII again on the Nintendo Switch. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, except that it really does look good on the Switch! Let’s see if I can beat it this time!

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[1] The system by which you’ve only really got a chance if you keep on top of the latest releases

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Cluckles and Cannon Fodder

Had a whale of a time on this bit...

I started this week playing a game I hadn’t played for a while: Kingdom Hearts. Regular readers will know I was playing this a lot about a month ago, but it fell by the wayside as I became increasingly keener to beat Regicide. I figured it was time to come back to it before I forgot about playing it entirely, though, so I put it on, did some faffing about in Traverse Town and the Hundred Acre Wood, and eventually played and beat the Monstro level. I’d forgotten about this maze-like platforming section, and had a decent time getting through it and beating the boss. There’s a certain sense of achievement in analysing their attack patterns! 

I'll say it again because it never gets old:
It's a chicken. With a sword.

After playing that, I felt like playing something quick, so I returned to Cluckle’s Adventure. I’ve covered it before in previous blogs but just to remind you, it’s a 2D platform game starring a chicken with a sword. It’s a great pick-up-and-play game, with the one slight caveat that I prefer to use a controller when playing games like this, since I don’t want to exhaust my keys with rapid presses that you very often need for games like this! I’m trying to collect all the stars in the game, which you do by rescuing all the chicks in the level. This bogged me down for a while but when I was playing last Monday I discovered which part of the scenery telegraphs a secret area. Once I’d discovered that, getting through the levels was a lot more straightforward, and I stand a reasonable chance of beating the whole game in the not too distant future!

Then later on in the week I had a go with a game I hadn’t played in a while: Cannon Fodder. I bought this game back in 2015 off GOG and haven’t played it often since then but I thought I’d give it another go. It’s a mouse-driven top-down shooter with some light strategy elements, originally released in 1993. The graphics are showing their age now, and I normally need a couple of goes to get it to run on my laptop, but it’s still good fun after all these years. You take a small squad (1-6 soldiers) out on a mission to kill all their enemies, or blow up all their buildings. All of your soldiers have machine guns, and you can pick up grenades and rockets along the way. It sounds simple, but the game is very challenging and the gung-ho tactic of sending your lads in guns a-blazing doesn’t really work. You have the option to split your squad up, which you need to do because if the enemy hits your squad with an explosive, most if not all of your squad will die. You then have to make decisions about how many grenades and rockets you’re handing to the squads you’re splitting, because if all the members of the team die, their weapons go with them. This leads to some very interesting pieces of decision-making, and is the core of the challenge of the game.

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
Literally. That's how the buildings count as destroyed.

Cannon Fodder was also available on the Sega Mega Drive and I borrowed it off a friend at one point when I was still at school. I’d never owned it prior to when I bought it in 2015 though; if I remember rightly, the game was not easy to come by. The use of some of the imagery in the game (the poppy in particular) was considered offensive by some, and it wasn’t available for very long. It’s odd to think of that now, where the last console generation was flooded with modern military shooters, but back in the 90s it hadn’t really been done before. There had been military games, of course, but in nearly all of them your player character was some kind of 80s action hero and there was usually a lives system; Cannon Fodder was the first game that I remember to use characters that were basic, common soldiers who died permanently when they got shot. Maybe at the time that was just a little too much for some people – especially those who would argue about the detrimental effect that video games have on kids!