Last Week's Games: Mount and Blade, and musing on videos...

I thought I’d talk about something a bit different this week…

Over the weekend I played a game that I’d had for a while but hadn’t gotten around to playing, called Mount and Blade. It was on my radar largely because TotalBiscuit had talked it up at one point, and it was a Role Playing Game so I was willing to give it a bit of time, but I hadn’t played it up until now because I was aware that it was a game that had no real end-game to speak of. Some games work very well like this – the Sims games thrive on it – but I like there to be a goal, something I can aim for. If a game doesn’t have that, I find it hard to justify the time I put in to it at the expense of games that do!

Because he doesn't look like Aragorn at all...

Nonetheless, I had a go with it and was pleasantly surprised to find an open-world RPG where the idea is to build your… prestige, I suppose, and become a part of a saga of warring nations, eventually becoming a key player in it yourself. It reminds me of somewhere between Romance of the Three Kingdoms and A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed my time with it but again, with there being no apparent endgame, I did wonder how long it would keep me engaged for.

I put that thought out on Twitter, including the remark about A Game of Thrones, and it wasn’t long before my Dad came back with “8 seasons?” by way of a reply.

That gave me an idea…

What if I recorded gameplay videos in episodes and uploaded them to Youtube, creating a “series” of videos that would document my progress through the open-ended game? I have a few games I could do this with, Mount and Blade being one of them but also Cities: Skylines, and it would be an interesting take on showcasing those games. I could aim for a series of 12 videos, and put it to bed after that, knowing that I could draw a line under the time I’d spent in the game and the progress I’d made up to then.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’d had the idea of recording gameplay footage, and I tried it a while ago with DXTory. Paid £60 for the licence, and everything. Unfortunately it didn’t go very well, for a couple of reasons that come down to one fact: I play most of my PC games on a laptop.

The problem that this runs into is framerates. My graphics card was one of the top end models at the time I bought it and should be able to run most games at 60fps (frames per second) without even trying. But you still need a pretty fast hard drive to write that data to, and the hard drive on a laptop isn’t that fast. It’s understandable; unless it’s specifically been built for gaming, laptops aren’t really designed for speed. They’re designed for long battery life and high storage, neither of which needs the hard drive to run very fast. The most I can get out of the framerate for most games I have is 30fps, or just under. Since most of the games I play on my laptop are turn-based strategy games, this isn’t usually a problem for me but I wouldn’t expect a warm welcome on Youtube if I can’t run high framerates!

The other issue is the file size. They’re huge. When a video is made in DXTory, the file is made up of what’s on the screen and everything the graphics card is processing. What this means is that even a 15 minute video takes roughly 100 gigabytes. I don’t have that kind of storage space!

However, last week I tried streaming Horus Heresy: Legions off my laptop for a while. It seemed to work; I only had two veiwers and I’m pretty sure they were both me, but I did it using XSplit Gamecaster. It’s just possible I might be able to do it off that, so this week I’ll give it a go, and see what happens. I might just end up on Youtube!

Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!