Last Week's Games: Spelunky, Streets of Rage 2, Mortal Kombat, Battle Isle, Painting Chaos Raptors...

Spiders. It's always spiders.

This week, I’ve had to balance out my time for playing games with the fact that my daughter is around all the time now, so for that reason I’ve been spending a lot more than the usual amount of time playing Spelunky. This is a brutally hard game to play but as nothing worse than landing on a spike trap happens in it, it’s safe for me to play in front of a three-year old! She’s had a go with it as well, she’s not necessarily very good at it as she hasn’t got the dexterity to handle the controls of precision platforming, but she tries, bless her! I’m hoping to get a little further into the game than the mines, but so far, I’ve managed it twice and died almost straight away both times, so I need to be in it for the long haul. 

These were the characters when
me and Jessie played...

Another game that’s fun to come back to every now and then is Streets of Rage 2. Regular readers will remember that this is my favourite game of all time, and nothing has changed in the 26 years since I had it given to me. I hope, one day, to beat the game on Hardest difficulty without cheating; I’m not quite there yet but I’m not necessarily far from it either. Just a few more pushes… Also, it’s a good game to play with Kirsty and Jessie, since on the easier difficulties it doesn’t require much more thought than find someone and beat them up. I played it through with Kirsty one night in the week and got to the end of it, though Kirsty had run out of lives before the final boss rush.

I'll get there eventually. Maybe.

When I wrote about Mortal Kombat last week it probably sounded like I wasn’t enjoying it all that much, but I’m currently working from home and I keep putting it on every now and then. As a run only takes me about 20 minutes before I lose my final credit, it doesn’t take too long and I’m quite enjoying it now! It is a very difficult game though; I can get most of the way through the ladder, but as soon as I come to the endurance matches I get stuck, especially as they always seem to involve Kano – a very hard character to fight if you’re not on it with your blocking! I’ll keep trying though; it’s become a good pick-up-and-play game for me.

Reminds me of Advance Wars...

I downloaded and played Battle Isle, a very old strategy game on the PC. It’s a turn-based strategy game on a Hex grid; my kind of thing, but it’s got some old-style and very finnicky controls! To give an order you must click your unit, then hold the mouse button and move it in the direction of the order you want to give. Also, your shooting phase happens after the opponent’s movement phase – so you’re attacking where they were at the start of their turn; not where they are going to be at the end of it. That takes some getting used to, and I’ve only just discovered you can repair units in the buildings, but it’s early days with this one, so we’ll see how it goes.

It's been fun painting them but that's it for a while.

Finally, I finished painting my last squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. At least, it was supposed to be the last squad – I was always going to get another box of them but the intention was to build and paint three of them so I could have three squads of six. Having bought the new Chaos Space Marines codex and seen how the new points values affect what I’d planned for the army, it works much better to have another squad of five – making four squads of five – and have them lead by Haarken Worldclaimer. I’ll let you decide how to pronounce that name; my preferred method is to put a glottal attack between the two “A”s. I won’t be painting either of them for a while, as we’re in lockdown and it would be incredibly churlish of me to run around town looking for Warhammer models, but I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, including the Terminators from the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set…

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII and Spelunky

I found the original Mortal Kombat trilogy on sale on GOG and remembering how much fun I’d had with those games in the past, I bought them and downloaded the first game. The first thing I noticed was that it handles quite a bit differently to the Sega Megadrive version of the game I was used to…

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

There’s no point in being polite about this; the controls are incredibly clunky, even for a Mortal Kombat game. The game was released for DOS and runs on DOSbox, which doesn’t support the game controller I have. This being a fighting game, I’d rather be using a controller, but from what I understand, that wouldn’t be much better: As PC controllers at the time weren’t expected to have more than four buttons anyway, whichever configuration of the controller settings you used would have meant missing out on at least one of the necessary buttons. I ended up rebinding and using some of the keyboard for the game. It works… but it’s very fiddly to remember what key does what button, and often I find myself pressing buttons that do nothing at all.

Elsewhere, the game is closer to the Arcade game than the console ports that came later. The music is different to how I remember it from the Mega Drive, but some of the tracks were used in the Gameboy port of the game! The fights work well enough, if you can get past the controls, and it would be churlish of me to suggest I’m not enjoying it at all, but there are better fighting games than this now.

A very sad moment of the game...

With the corona virus gripping the country and a lot of my work put on hold, I have spent quite a bit of time playing Final Fantasy VII on my Nintendo Switch. This is another game that, objectively speaking, hasn’t aged particularly well, but is always a joy to play, nonetheless. At the time of writing I’m in the Corel Prison, (I got game over-ed in the fight against Dyne; I’d forgotten how quick he reacts!) which means I’m past the point I reached the last time I attempted a complete playthrough. I’d be surprised if any of you remember this as it was over five years ago, but I tried playing through the PlayStation version of the game which sadly stopped working en route to Corel. Whether I’ll see this through to the end I don’t know, and with the remake due out in a few weeks, I may not have to – but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

I carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2 when I could spare the time, and I’m working my way through the missions in Venice. Funnily enough there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much side activity to do in Venice as there is in the other cities in the game; maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the game wants to move the story on a little more quickly now.

Intense...

Then, when my daughter turned up, I had a go with Spelunky on the Xbox 360. This is a bit of an odd game for me as I played it after playing Rogue Legacy, and I didn’t think Spelunky was as good. But it is one of the better pick up and play games I own on the 360, and the controls are simple enough for my daughter to at least give it a go! It’s a very difficult game, but we have fun in the mines. In my case that means getting through as much of the game as I possibly can, in her case it means trying to get to the end of the level before the ghost gets her!

I also managed to finish painting my second squad of Chaos Raptors for my Black Legion army and bought another box of them. My intention is to get three six-man squads plus a Chaos Lord to make up a 500pt army and see how I feel after that. But I’m painting these models more quickly than I’ve managed in a long time, so while this would normally take me close to a year, this year may prove a different matter entirely.

Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Pathfinder, Doom and Mordheim

I managed to make quite a bit of time for playing games this week! Unusually, I’m going to talk about the Hobby games first…

Let the madness begin...

A little on the nose, given what’s happening in the world right now (If you’re reading this after the fact, the world is currently in a state of confusion and panic over the Covid-19 virus) but Kirsty and I had a go with Pandemic over the weekend. Some people like this game more than others but when I’ve played it, I’ve enjoyed it. We certainly had a good time stamping out the diseases across the map – Kirsty was fortunate enough to choose the Medic, who could take out all the disease cubes on one section and is very good to have early in the game. We certainly made more use out of that than my ability – I’d drawn the Contingency Planner, who can pull an event card from the discard pile and use it again later. We beat the game, though on reflection we got some of the rules wrong. I’d forgotten that we were supposed to infect the cities after drawing an Epidemic card, and that we were only supposed to swap cards if we were in the city of the cards we were swapping. The latter, at least, would definitely have made a difference to the outcome of the game! We enjoyed it, nonetheless, and we’ll have another go soon.

Also, over the weekend, I continued with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. Currently they are trekking through the Vaults of Greed, and it was very satisfying to give them a dragon hoard to distribute, and to flatten one of my players with a trap – especially as he plays the kind of impulsive character that would be susceptible to triggering them! He was a little more cautious from then on. I then had a laugh with the Mephits, who seemed more at home playing in the bath than causing a threat, but I have a feeling the group enjoyed it a lot more than trying to fight them. We’re all still enjoying it but there is talk of pausing the campaign for a while and letting someone else have a go at running another game; we’ll see how that goes. I like running games, but I’ve not been able to play for a while!

I finally beat the Deimos Lab on Doom and I’m now at the Control centre. This is an interesting map, and I’m enjoying it, but the difficulty is bogging me down and I’m finding it hard to make any significant amount of progress. But Doom is the kind of game I can come back to whenever I like; the plot is very straightforward, and I don’t need to worry too much about remembering important points!

From humble beginnings...

Also, I made some progress with Mordheim: City of the Damned. With enough confidence in my Mercenary warband to tackle the fourth campaign mission on the bridge, I gave it a go and beat it quite easily (to be fair, my warband is vastly over-levelled now!) None of my men were put out of action, which is quite rare as even on my best day at least one of them usually drops. This is now the most progress I’ve ever made in the game; I came close with the Sisters of Sigmar but gave up after the fourth mission bugged out. It appears that I’m now in the second half of the game, so we’ll see how that goes. I had a go with another of the regular missions, but hubris got the better of me and some of my men ended up dropping to a rival Mercenary warband – usually the easiest faction to deal with.

Finally, I was pleased to be able to have some time in both Phoenix Games in Stourbridge and Warlords and Wizards in Netherton at different points in the week to paint a fresh squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I haven’t quite finished them yet – got some finishing touches to put on their champion – but they’re looking alright, if somewhat different to the box art! I’m also carrying a small number of World Bearers around in hope of a game…

Last Week's Games: Aracania, Doom, Legions and Misty

Most of my gaming time last week was spent on Arcania; the not-very-good RPG I’ve been playing on the PS4. I’m not sure where I am in relation to my progress through the game but I’m in the area of the game that features a lot of swamplands, which has been curiously named Tooshoo. It’s not so much an open world RPG as several open questing areas chained together in a sequence, which is fine by me; I don’t necessarily like the whole world hitting me in the face at once! And I’m enjoying the game at least enough to overlook a couple of its major flaws:

That Stamina bar is a bit redundant...

First, the stamina bar. You have three bars on the bottom of the HUD, (Heads Up Display, if you don’t know!) one for health, one for mana, and one for stamina. You can increase these attributes as you level up. The problem I’ve run in to is that I’ve not been able to do anything that decreases the stamina bar. Nothing you do in open play seems to affect it, and even the moves that should affect it either doesn’t, or the move doesn’t work at all. I’d have thought dodge-rolling, at the very least, would be a way to exhaust it, but I’d be wrong apparently. Now, you’d think that this was a positive thing rather than negative, since what essentially amounts to unlimited stamina would make the game easier to play. And it does… but it also removes a lot of the challenge and makes some of the skill upgrades redundant.

The other glaring issue is feedback. Apart from your health dropping – and you’re not always looking at the HUD – the player character doesn’t react at all to being hit. There’s no hit animation, no cry of pain, nothing. Hit detection is a little off from the enemies as well, so there’s no telling whether the moves they have done have hit or missed. Often, you don’t know you’ve been hit at all until you’ve looked at your health bar or died. Again, it’s not impeding my progress in any major way, but it could have been handled a lot better than this. A shame, really, as there’s about 60% of a good game in there somewhere, but I’m finding it hard to recommend a game as mired in flaws as this.

He's invisible at the moment...

I’ve tried to play Doom as well, but I’ve found myself stuck on Deimos Lab. I’m having to be careful with my ammo as there are a lot of enemies in this section of the game and I am woefully unequipped to deal with the huge rush of them at the end of the level. I find myself running out of ammo before I can hit the relevant switches to open the end of the level, and even if I manage it, I won’t necessarily be in a good place to tackle the next one! I find myself wondering if I should be more careful in looking for the game’s secrets, as the increased difficulty setting that I’m playing on may require some extra work!

I also went back to the Horus Heresy: Legions. I have been booted from my lodge, because there was a gap of a couple of months where I wasn’t playing at all, but I’ve joined another one mainly for the card rewards. They won’t be as good – there aren’t as many members, and the ones that are there aren’t as busy – but I’ll keep playing with them until I get a 12-win run. I keep playing single matches with my Space Wolves as well; they’re always fun!

I tried to find a different picture,
but all that comes up on Google
Image Search is the character
from Pokémon.

Finally, I played Misty again with Kirsty. She had a better handle of the game this time and put up much more of a fight as we tried to arrange our window drawings strategically. I won again, but not before we’d forced a fourth round out of a draw! The main benefit of this game, we discussed afterwards, is its simplicity. If you’ve never played a card drafting game before, this one is pretty easy as the cards only do a limited number of things; we’d be happy to play this with younger or older family members!

 

Last Week's Games: Age of Empires, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2, SSX World Tour and Painting Chaos Raptors

I’ve had all sorts on this week…

Powerful, yes, but vulnerable in... wait,
what? What's happening in this picture?

I had another go with Age of Empires, playing the mission where you attack Troy with Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus and whatever army you can muster. I gave up in the end since all the heroes had died, and I couldn’t crack the enemy’s impenetrable wall of Hoplites and Cavalry. They had destroyed all my catapults, and I was getting to the point in the game where all the resources are starting to dry up so I wouldn’t have been able to mount an effective counterattack. I’ll probably come back to it at some point but those missions take anything up to a couple of hours to reach their conclusion, and I’m not keen on having another go just yet.

Funnily enough I'm several hours into the game and
I've only just started fighting goblins...

I carried on playing Arcania on the PS4. I stopped playing it for a while; not for any particular reason, I just don’t play the PS4 much these days for TV-related reasons. I remembered, whilst dealing with the clunky controls and the not-brilliantly-voice-acted dialogue, that it’s not a very good game. But I found it engaging enough to keep going, at least for a while. It got me thinking about the way I do review scores. Those of you who have been keeping up with this will know that I review games out of five, but as I only review games once I’ve beaten them, and that I will at least have had to have been engaged enough by the game to see it through to the end means that the chances that I will ever give a game the lowest score of 1/5 is quite low. The one game that I would have given that score to was Sweet Fantasy, a visual novel that took me less than 45 minutes to see in its entirety – a feat I accomplished before I started scoring my reviews. If I get to the end of Arcania that’s probably the score I will give it, but as it’s quite rare for me to do this with a long-form RPG, we will have to see…

I also continued my campaign on Assassin’s Creed 2, which I’m enjoying on the basis that I dip into it every now and then and not worry too much about the plot, or what in the world is supposed to be happening. In fact, I’ve bypassed all the plot missions and am in the process of doing all the side quests in the town I’m in now (I can’t remember what it’s called. The one with the port.) Coming into the game every now and again, rather than trying to defeat the entire game in one go, is proving a much more enjoyable experience.

At one point, my three-year-old daughter had a go with SSX World Tour, a game I’d downloaded years ago and hadn’t played for a while. It was amusing to watch her trying to control the snowboard (with a little help from me and my partner,) and I’m not convinced she knows she’s racing, but you know what, she’s having a nice time and that’s what counts.

Note the Blood Angel that this Raptor has killed...

Finally, I completed some Games Workshop models for the first time in a while, in this case some Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I was inspired to paint these by playing the Horus Heresy: Legions game and wanting to build a Chaos Space Marine army based around the Sons of Horus. Their thing in Legions is that they like to attack the Warlord, or whatever the enemy is counting on in order to win, and I’ve always liked that idea, so I decided to paint some Raptors. I was quite pleased with how it worked out in the end. There may have been a top layer of gold I forgot to put on but other than that I’m enjoying how they look. The Champion’s power sword is the second time I’ve used this technique, and while it definitely went better than the first time, it’s still going to need some practice. But that’s what I like about my collection of models; they showcase what I could do at the time and tell the story of how my painting progresses as I’m going along.