Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: Speculations, Sine Mora, Warhammer Battlemarch, Anno 1602

It’s been a while since the last blog, sorry about that. The main reason, and one of the main problems I have with working from home,[1] is that I find it very difficult to justify doing any of my own things until I’ve done all my work. This amounts to filming a few videos, and uploading them, but until I’ve done that, I find it very hard to justify writing blogs or even doing my own music videos that some of you may have seen.

On top of that, I’ve been giving some serious consideration as to where this blog is going to go in the future. I came to within one post of stopping this blog altogether and moving it to Wordpress because I thought I’d overextended the picture limit on Blogger; this turned out not to be the case, but I have some other things to think about as well. Obviously, I talk about video games nearly every week, but I find myself with a lot more things to say about hobby games as well, especially now I’m at the point in my life where I can play more of them – if in a slightly different way to how I’ve done it in the past! I’ve been playing a lot more games with my daughter, for example, and talking about that is usually on a very different level to talking about games I’ve been playing by myself on a console or computer.

So, I might do some less-regular blogs regarding certain other aspects of playing games. With the hobby games, I rarely find myself with enough to say in one week to justify doing a new blog, but maybe after a month I could find some things to say. Painting is another one, I go through batches of not painting anything at all but if I could get something done every month it might be the spur I need to proceed – and with the new 40K due in a few weeks, I’m going to need to get a move on with my painting! And I’m still hopeful that I might be able to do an entire campaigns worth of blogs on certain of my board games, though that’s still in the pipeline for now.

A beautiful but deadly game...

So, what I have I been playing lately?

Quite a few new games, actually. I downloaded Sine Mora on the Xbox 360 a week ago and I’ve had a go on it; it’s been a long time since I’ve played an honest-to-goodness shoot-em-up and I really enjoyed the opportunity to play it. It seems to have an interesting story as well, though it is also ferociously difficult after the first couple of levels. The time-based mechanics are interesting, and the shooting and boss battles are fun, so I’ll keep coming back to it whenever I need to let my brain unwind from the day!



My painting isn't as good as that!

I’ve also had a go with Warhammer Battlemarch, the Warhammer strategy game released on the Xbox 360. This game is probably the closest a relatively modern release got to Shadow of the Horned Rat, which I absolutely loved back in the day and still dip in to every now and then. You have an option to play through an Empire, Orc and Chaos campaign, and for now I favour the Empire (that was my army when I played Warhammer!) The interface is a massive faff, but I get used to it, and I’ve been using a rather slow-paced shooting strategy where I get close enough to the enemy for them to see me and approach, shoot them as much as I can and if there’s anything left when they get close enough, finish them off in close combat.

"In 1602, we sail the open seas..."

Finally, I’ve been playing Anno 1602 on the PC. I played a demo of this years ago, I think even before the millennium, and even though I hadn’t played it since I never forgot it and wanted to give it another go. It’s a great colonisation strategy game; it looks gentle, but it isn’t afraid to let you fail if you’re not careful!

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[1] I’m not going to complain too much about that though, at least I’m working; some people aren’t so fortunate!

Backlog Beatdown: Being some sort of James Bond figure in Alpha Protocol

I’d been aware of Alpha Protocol through several Youtube videos I’ve watched, but the influencer who said it was good to the point of being worth buying was Metal Jesus. I’ve been playing it over the last couple of weeks and managed to reach the end:

Alpha Protocol is an action-RPG, with a greater emphasis on the action than we might expect from an RPG. You play as Michael Thorton, an agent recruited into Alpha Protocol, a clandestine United States Agency. You are sent to a mission in Saudi Arabia to assassinate a terrorist leader; when transpires that all is not what it seems, you go on the run as a rogue agent, working your way across Asia and Central Europe to piece together the evidence you need to clear your name. Along the way, you’ll make friends, enemies, and uncover a conspiracy to cause structural and economic disaster on a huge scale…

The game has two main elements. The first is the action sequences, where you run, gun and stealth your way through a series of field missions. The second is the dialogue sequences, where you have conversations with people, developing your relationship with them depending on what approach you take. How you handle these missions is up to you but for every choice, there is a consequence…

I'm having some faff uploading pictures
so I'm recycling my old ones...

Many games boast that latter point, but in Alpha Protocol it is true. There are three main campaign areas, and countries you visit later make references to the events that happen in the previous ones. How you treat various characters makes a difference to what extent they will support you later. And some people like certain styles of attitude better than others – people rarely respond positively to aggression, but some characters like the professional dialogue, whereas others prefer the confident and suave talking.

All of this promises much, but sadly falls just short of delivering. The action sequences work, but the shooting is a little off. The viewpoint is over-the-shoulder third person shooting, which is great for short-to-mid-range combat, and not much use for anything else. You can create a build that focuses on melee combat, for example, but melee combat in Alpha Protocol is not fluid enough for this to be a consistently good option. Thankfully I’d decided from the beginning that I was going to focus on pistols and assault rifles –the two most standard weapons in the game but the ones that gave me the most flexibility and strategy. Also, the interface is very clunky; even in 7^th generation games it should never take more than one button press to access your map and switching between weapons is a lottery, gambling on which of the directional buttons brings up which menu.

The dialogue sequences work OK as well, although given the huge number of variables involved with making this, there were some slips – talking about in-game situations before I’d found out about them, repeating lines of dialogue from previous conversations, that sort of thing. I’ve managed one playthrough so far so I don’t know how much difference taking different options makes; it would be good if it was substantial, but I’m not hopeful. Nonetheless, it’s voice-acted very well, the graphics look good for their time and the sound is fine, with the Brayko boss battle being particularly memorable!

But it's well worth showing this bit again!

With all that having been said, I’ve really enjoyed Alpha Protocol. I could have used a roadmap to unlock more achievement points by aiming for certain results, but I found it oddly liberating just to play through the game, pick the dialogue options and courses of action that made the most sense at the time, and seeing what happened as a result. I was content to let my mistakes be mistakes, for example one NPC that I had a lot of investment in died near the end of the game because I went the wrong way to try to rescue her. It’s by no means a perfect game, but it’s an experience that relatively few people have had, and one I was very pleased to get to the end of. I’d recommend giving it a go if you fancy doing something a little bit different with shooting and role-playing games.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week Games: Alpha Protocol and FOMO

On Saturday night I beat Alpha Protocol, which I started to play last week. I’m going to save my remarks on the game for a review that I’m hoping to get out by Friday, but for today I wanted to talk about a concept that has been doing the rounds lately: FOMO, how it applies to Alpha Protocol and why, in some cases, FOMO is justified.

Do you fear missing out on Alpha Protocol?

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out. This applies to many things including gaming; video games and hobby games. It represents the fear of the idea that the game will become obsolete at some point, so you must spend an ill-proportioned amount of money on it as soon as possible to avoid missing out on the experience it provides. This can lead to several consequences: massive game collections that you may or may not ever play; and rather more seriously some people could put themselves in to major financial difficulty because of their compulsive fear of missing out.

Because, and it’s the simple truth: Games aren’t good forever.

Fortnite is one of the perpetrators of
this with their "Battle Pass..."

If you look after physical games properly, they’ll work forever. But that’s only part of the story. We buy new consoles when they come out, because the consoles we currently own have a limited time before developers and publishers stop making games for them. We have yearly iterations of Call of Duty; which the fan base will buy the week it comes out because that is where the multiplayer community – the lifeblood of any game selling itself on its multiplayer – is going to be. The same is the case with FIFA; once that multiplayer community has moved on to the next game, there’s little reason to stick with the current one. Currently, a lot of the bigger games are doing online events with opportunities to win specific collectables for the game; there’s usually a cost for this but if you don’t pay it then you’ll never get the content; missing out on this is a genuine fear. Personally, I see offers appear on my Steam and GOG wish-lists, where the price of a game that interests me has been reduced – along with the other games in the same series. So, I’ll buy the whole lot knowing that there’s not much chance of buying those games again at the same price. I’ve ended up with nearly a thousand games, and while individually they rarely represent any substantial amount of money, thinking about how much I must have spent in total is something I rarely choose to do.

Lazy to re-use the photo, I know, but it
 turns out this is literally the bit I meant.

How does this apply to Alpha Protocol? While I was researching the last blog, I found that the game had been taken off Steam and other online platforms, because their music license had run out. This was confusing because most big-budget games handle their own soundtracks, so music licensing shouldn’t come into it. That very evening, I played the game again and reached the boss battle with Konstantin Brayko – a Russian gangster obsessed with 80s American Pop Culture, whose fight takes place in disco/ball room with Turn Up the Radio by Autograph blaring out over an overly-large sound system, so that solved the mystery!

I previously mentioned certain games becoming obsolete because the platform those games are played on is superseded by its next iteration. That’s less of a problem than it was in the 90s, because a great many of them are available to download onto PC or the later consoles – but problems arise when we run in to licensing issues like Alpha Protocol. This isn’t surprising; it’s a good game but nowhere near profitable enough for Sega to gain any benefit from renewing the license. But it does mean that if you want to play it now, you’ll have to look for increasingly rare physical copies.

Fear of Missing Out is in many ways an exaggerated effect; the worst it will mean for me is that I won’t get to play one specific game, and it’s not like I’m short of those. But it’s worth considering the issues it raises, how we can miss out on certain experiences if we don’t react to them straight away – and whether it represents a significant problem to those affected by it.

Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.