Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein, Epic Mickey, Open TTD

I started this week with my run through Wolfenstein 3D. In my previous blog post I may have given the impression that I wasn’t fond of the game. While I stand by the remarks that none of the environments are particularly memorable, it is a competently-designed game and I am enjoying it. The levels are designed in such a way that you almost always must clear most of the level to get to the end. There are no skipping tough sections; if one part is too hard, you need to figure out a way to deal with it. Bottle-necking enemies in doorways usually works, but you also need to remember where in the level the health pick-ups and ammo packs are. Your character doesn’t pick them up straight away if he doesn’t need them but you’re likely to run in to a difficult section later that will tank both your health and ammo, and you’ll be glad that there are some pick-ups to run back to! The fact that there is no map (that I’ve been able to see!) doesn’t help but it adds to the challenge of memorising the levels.

They'll drop you in a couple of hits...

I also enjoy using the Chain Gun. This is the most powerful weapon in the game, but it has a problem with ammo conservation; it never uses less than two bullets and any amount of sustained fire will drain your ammo quickly. You’re therefore forced to fire in short bursts to take out the regular guards and save your ammo for taking down the harder opponents like the SS or Mutants. It’s a simple strategic element but is far more effective in making a challenging game than simply giving you the chain gun and letting you run wild!

We worked this bit out eventually.

Elsewhere, me and Kirsty played Epic Mickey 2 on the Xbox 360. This was a free download a few months ago, and we like Disney so we gave it a go to see what it was like. We wanted to like it, we really did, but it’s been a long time since I played a game in split-screen mode and it was very tough for all the wrong reasons. The solutions to the puzzles aren’t particularly intuitive, and the split screen restricts your field of view. We got stuck at a point where you must use one character to throw the other over a gap in the environment, and we weren’t very clear on what we had to do; it sucked all the fun out of the game, and we called it a night.

I’ve carried on with Horus Heresy: Legions; there’s a new event running now that requires you to fight a Titan. Most of the Imperial decks are Space Wolves, and I find them a lot easier to use than Custodes, and the Titan battles are easy enough, but the Player Versus Player modes are always a challenge.

Wha...? I can't even... no. No.

Finally, I came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: Open TTD. If you don’t know, this is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, one of the most memorable management games I think I’ve ever played, if only for its Jazz soundtrack! It’s a free download and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. The aim of the game is to build a transport network to supply passengers and various commodities to towns around the environment. There is also a competitive element to the game where you have other transport networks attempting the same. Now, I can build the routes, but I’m not great at micro-managing the train lines in order to get them to run efficiently, and no matter how well the signal system should work, I always end up getting one train or the other stuck. I doubt I’ll make enough money to win the game, but apparently the game ends after 100 years of game time so if I get that far, that will be an achievement!

Incidentally, it was my intention to record some footage of this to put on YouTube. Unfortunately, I can’t get my capture software to work with it, presumably because it doesn’t launch from either Steam or GOG. Still, we can always follow the blog to keep up!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Castlevania IV, Torchlight, Horus Heresy: Legions

I’ve been playing quite a few games this week, many of which I’ve never played before; let’s hope I’ve got the space to write about them all:

As with the later Doom, the chaingun eats up
a lot of ammo...

The first one was Wolfenstein 3D on my laptop. This one is often regarded as the Grandfather of first-person shooters, and while it might have been the first game that kicked off a huge part of what mainstream video games eventually became, it hasn’t aged particularly well. You run through the halls and rooms of a grey castle, shooting Nazis and collecting treasure. It works, and it is fun. The level design has a certain “Dungeons and Dragons” sensibility to it, and it’s challenging enough on the right level. But when all the levels look the same with very little variety in what you’re doing, it’s hard to think of a part of the game I’ve played that I would classify as “memorable.”

Robert Foster and Joey.

I’ve also been playing Beneath a Steel Sky. This was a game that I got for free on my GOG account, for some reason, and had never touched it in that time. From the occasional coverage from Jim Sterling, I knew that it was a Point and Click adventure, but unsure as to whether I had the patience, I didn’t bother with it for the longest time. But I’m playing it now, and it’s a pretty good adventure; it was developed by Revolution who also did Broken Sword, so it was interesting to see the contextual mouse system being developed, even if it was in its infancy back then. It’s pretty good, amusing in the right places, but it has the same problem that most games of its time had – if you can’t work out the puzzle, the whole game grinds to a halt. This has happened to me at least once, where I had to use a guide to figure out what to do next, only to find I had to talk to a character I had no practical reason to talk to at that point. Nonetheless, I hope I get to the end of it!

Hands up who remembers THAT music...

On the WiiU, I’ve been playing Super Castlevania IV. This is a game I played a while ago, as my mate Matt had it on the Super Nintendo; it’s arguably as good as the Castlevania series ever achieved and certainly an entertaining game after all this time. A nice variety of enemies, tricky platforming sections, and bosses that you should never be able to beat makes for a fun time, marred only slightly by some cheap deaths and odd checkpoint placement. It works especially well with the WiiU’s internal saving system, and I’m enjoying playing through it again, if only to give myself some ideas on what I might develop in my own DnD campaigns in future!

Spiders. It had to be spiders, didn't it?

I also played Torchlight on the Xbox 360. This was a free download with Games with Gold, and while I’d already bought it on the PC I thought the Xbox would be a more convenient platform to give it a go. It’s a dungeon-basher, with a lot of things to loot, an interesting “Pet” mechanic and a linear and standard storyline. It’s been fun so far, but it hasn’t got the depth of many of the RPGs I play, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much more than getting through to the end of the game. I’ll stick at it for a bit, but I don’t know, I might have wanted a bit more than this. Still, I didn’t pay for this version of it, so I guess it’s OK!

Custodes. A pain in the bum to run or fight.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Horus Heresy: Legions on my phone. It took me a while to get back in to it, but I got there in the end! I’ve joined a new lodge as well – emperors Finest. The reason for this was that my previous lodge, the Emperor’s Daggers, was full of dead accounts. I’d love to be able to win some points for the team in the events, but the Adeptus Custodes cards are very fiddly and I’m not sure yet how I can use them effectively.

Let’s see what next week brings, and whether I can finish some of these games!

Backlog Beatdown: Crashing in to Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot was an unusual acquisition for me. When I moved in with my girlfriend last year, she had a PlayStation 4 and Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy was one of the games she had for it. I’d played Crash before, of course; when you’ve grown up in the 90s when everyone and their cat had a PlayStation, it was almost impossible not to. But I’d never really enjoyed it enough to make it a worthwhile purchase, even when I had a PlayStation. But having come to the end of two quite heavy games, I decided to give it a go. Please note, therefore, that these notes refer to the HD remake for the PlayStation 4 – not the original game.

More or less what I looked like after clearing the game.

You play as the titular Crash Bandicoot, who has been mutated into a sentient being by Doctor Neo Cortex, and having escaped, now must make his way across the Wumpa islands to rescue his girlfriend Tawna. Along the way, you jump platforms, dodge traps, spin-attack enemies and defeat bosses. It was a video game typical of its time, with the exception that this was still in an age where mascot platformers sold systems, and there’s an argument to be made for the idea that Crash would do this for their PlayStation. It was also one of the first times that a platform game had been made in 3D – though in practice, the levels were rather linear, and most of the time you were moving up into the environment rather than across it, which was more typical of 2D platformers.

Crash was made at a very special time of video game design where – for the first time – consoles could run 3D software, and a lot of games were made to accommodate that. Some were better than others, and often the technology would run away the design which would fall flat on its face. Crash Bandicoot is not without its issues, but it manages to strike a balance between the creative necessity of the time and being well-designed enough to prevent these teething problems from alienating its fan base. 3D platforming is always a tricky business, because you require a certain amount of depth perception in order to correctly make the jumps. I died a lot in Crash Bandicoot, but that was mostly because I’d misjudged a jump, got caught in a trap or fallen down a pit – the enemies were the least of my problems!

Achieving invulnerability is always fun...

With that being said, it was a lot of fun. The levels are short and snappy, and reasonably well-designed. The controls are tight enough, although the design of the environment lends itself better to the directional pad rather than the thumb stick as your principle method of movement. The lives system is left over from previous-generation games, but since the only penalty for losing all of them is that you have to start from the beginning of a level rather than the last checkpoint, it doesn’t get in the way of the enjoyment of the game. The graphics have received an overhaul for the HD remake, and they look fine; they’re as good as they need to be. There was no need to aim for hyper-realism in a game about a mutant bandicoot! The sounds are wonderful; 5^th-generation consoles were able to play CD-quality audio for the first time and developers lost no time in taking advantage of that fact. It’s frustrating in places, but the frustration never gets so bad as to stop you from playing if you’re determined to clear the game. The save menu could have done with an overhaul – under no circumstances is it acceptable to be able to save and load your game on the same screen in this day and age – but that’s the only thing that ought to have been changed for the remake.

Having got to the end of the game I’m now faced with the task of unlocking all the paths, gems, ankhs and boxes, and while this is fine for post-game content, it’s not something I’m particularly interested in doing. All in all, Crash Bandicoot is a good game that anyone could enjoy – but the old-school design means that some people will enjoy it more than others.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Wordscape, Rayman, Spelunky and Persona 5.

This week’s been an interesting one. Probably the most notable thing that’s happened is that I had to have my laptop reset to factory settings. It was time for its yearly tune-up and there had been some things going wrong with it; I was told that the best thing to do would be to go for a factory reset. I backed up all the important information; anything that couldn’t be re-downloaded at some stage in the future. I had some faff when I got it back because some of the C++ redistributable files were missing and that got in the way of installing and running, among other things, GOG Galaxy, but I got that sorted and now I’m back up and running. Sort of.

Can you work out the third word?

I now have a blank slate, so to speak. I’ve bought more games for the PC then I’m ever going to fit on one hard disc, and I’ve recently been roughly 30% away from capacity and didn’t feel like pushing my luck by adding to the number of games I’d had installed. At this point, none of them are installed and I can start again from scratch. But like a child with too many toys on Christmas Morning, I don’t know which to play first! Maybe I’ll use this opportunity to play some games I bought but never installed, maybe I won’t. But it’s an interesting experience!

I have found time to play some other bits and pieces as I’ve been going along, though. I’ve made a discovery on my mobile, Wordscapes. If you haven’t played this then you’ve seen an advert for it; it’s the word game where you make several words out of six letters. I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun with this, as the answers are always there in front of you – you just need to know where to look. It’s also nice being able to ask my girlfriend for help, which she’s always happy to provide if she knows the answer too.

I’ve also been playing Rayman Legends on my Switch, when I’ve had the time. As I spent the first part of the week in London, I was thankful for the Switch’s portability! Apart from that there’s not much else to say; it’s one of those games where you can easily do a few levels at a time and leave it at that.

All the characters handle the same, but this one's got
a particularly impressive set of whiskers.

On a similar pick-up-and-play theme, I had a go at Spelunky on the Xbox 360. I’ve had this game for a while, but I haven’t played it much because I enjoyed Rogue Legacy more. But having played neither game for a while I found myself strangely engaged. I’m no better at it now, and only got as far as the Jungle (for the first time!) before something killed me straight away. But I’m glad I’m enjoying it!

Couldn't tell you what's going on here...

Finally, on the PS4, I played a game that I’ve owned for nearly a year and (mainly because I knew it was a long-form RPG that would need some time investment,) hadn’t got around to playing yet: Persona 5. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn’t, in fact, going to have to wait ages for the game to install before I could play it, and was able to get started straight away. I played the first couple of hours of it and spent most of that time wondering what it was all about! It’s very Japanese in style, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it can be a little alienating if you’re not familiar with the culture. You play as a high-school student who, on going to his new school, finds himself between two worlds and must find a way to escape while dealing with the problems the alternative worlds present. That’s all I can say at this point as I didn’t get very far. The actual gameplay consists mainly of exploration and combat so far, and the combat is turn-based with certain enemies weak to certain kinds of attacks. But with the game free from the constraints of western RPGs, some of the combinations aren’t so obvious, and I have a feeling that this will be a lot of trial and error for me!