Last Week's Games: 221B Baker Street, Ultra Street Fighter II

Last week me and Kirsty tried a board game out for the first time – 221B Baker Street.

The smell of freshly-printed
card was curiously absent...

This game, as you might expect, is built around the Sherlock Holmes property; not something either Kirsty or I have much investment in but from what I understand, Sherlock Holmes was the progenitor for a lot of how certain kinds of modern fiction were developed – detective stories, of which I’ve enjoyed many even if I can’t remember many of them, and also the “buddy cop” trope where the protagonists are polar opposites in terms of personality and approach, and this variation is often what leads to the results. The actual game presents you with a murder mystery, and the gameplay loop revolves around visiting different places in London to find different clues – some are word games that point to the solutions, and others are background information to support the given facts.

Now, there’s two ways you can play this – competitive or collaborative. The former involves up to six players using a die to move around the board, arriving in different locations and receiving their respective clues. You can also play a “Scotland Yard” card to block players from visiting certain areas, and a “Skeleton Key” card to remove the blocks. If you think you know the answer – usually the name of the murderer, the murder weapon and the motive – you travel back to 221B Baker Street, reveal your answer, and if you get it right, you win the game.

A board game without dice may seem a little odd,
but the visual representation helped.

However, Kirsty and I chose to play it in the collaborative way, where we travel to the different locations finding the clues and try to solve the mystery in as few moves as possible. You’re graded on how many turns it takes – a maximum of 14, and a minimum of 1, and you need to get between 1-5 to get the highest grade of Master Detective. Straight away this presented some mechanical differences – we eschewed the die, as there was no need to randomly determine how long it would take us to get to a location once we’d agreed where we were going. We also managed without the Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key cards as well, since there was nobody competing against us to block off. Finally, we saved ourselves a lot of time – the instructions were talking about roughly an hour and a half for one game, we managed it in 30 minutes. Instead, we focussed our attention on the clues themselves, trying to work out what they represent and working out the answer. The first case, we didn’t do very well – we got the worst possible grade of Watson, but we were struggling with the motive and it didn’t become clear until we’d gone around all the locations. The second case went much better; I think we were more familiar with the gameplay by then!

Straight away, Kirsty began wondering whether we can run this game online – if you’re reading this in the future, either when Covid-19 has been eradicated or when it’s caused the downfall of the entire human race and the ants have taken over, we have limited social contact in these times and much of it is over Zoom. We have done a few social deduction games with some friends and family, but a collaborative effort like this might make a nice change. Not bad given that the only reason we bought the game was because we’d accidentally bought each other two copies of the same games for Christmas 2019!

Fei Long's quick attacks make him
absolutely nails...

Elsewhere, I played Ultra Street Fighter 2 with Jessie. This was one of the first games I had on the Nintendo Switch, and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’d been doing Street Fighter for about 25 years at that point, and there was nothing new in there other than Way of the Hado. Playing it with my four-year old daughter was… interesting. Of course, I could have flattened her straight away if I’d wanted to, but that wouldn’t have been fun for either of us. Instead, I held back a bit and found Jessie’s unpredictability a refreshing challenge on the game! We didn’t need to play it for very long, but we enjoyed the time we had nonetheless.

Last Week's Games: Beating Lego Star Wars with a 4-Year Old

 Many of you will have noticed that I’ve had a lot of time this week playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga with my daughter Jessie. Last week, we managed to beat the story mode of the game! It was an interesting journey, to say the least; beating a game of any significant length with a four-year old as the co-pilot is a fresh challenge on what by now is a very familiar game to me, but we managed it! But I’ve covered Lego Star Wars a lot on this blog so I’m going to use this one to assess what Jessie thought of it:

May or may not be a
screenshot from the game.

She liked playing her favourite characters from the films, and as they all appear in the game at some point, she had a lot to choose from. She initially preferred the Jedi characters: apart from the fact that everybody loves the Jedi, these are the characters that are presented to you first so she’d got to grips with their mechanics and preferred to play as them where possible. She also liked playing as the droid characters, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. Later in the game, she liked playing as Chewbacca and Wicket because she thinks they’re cute, which is as good a reason as any. Of course, the Ewoks are adorable, but Chewie has some great additions to his character. He doesn’t handle any differently to Han Solo or Princess Leia, and you play as those characters a lot in the second half of the game, but his melee attack involves pulling Storm Trooper’s arms out of their sockets, and when he tries to put a Storm Trooper helmet on, it doesn’t fit properly.

Jessie also really enjoyed the parts of the game that didn’t involve combat, including the “build-its” and the puzzles. Putting those elements in the game was a great idea: In many cases, you need to do these to progress the game, but as they don’t involve any fighting, it was a great way to help Jessie feel like she was getting through the game. It also helped on those situations where the build-its have to be done during a fight, since I could use the “other” character to keep the heat off Jessie while she did the build-it – occasionally it worked the other way around as well! Therefore, Jess likes the droid characters: They’re necessary to get through the game by activating their switches and doors, but with little-to-no combat ability, the fighting can be left to someone else.

Post-Game Hero Shot.

She wasn’t so keen on the boss battles where it was necessary to fight. This only happens a few times – certain sections of the fight with Darth Maul, Count Dooku and the final battle with Darth Sidious – but the boss characters are harder to deal with for someone still getting to grips with 3D movement in video games, and she doesn’t like the feeling of being in way over her head. She liked it better in those boss battles where she could play as a droid, leave the fighting to me, and use the functional aspects of the environment to help the fight along.

She didn’t like the flying levels – those levels where it is necessary to pilot a flying vehicle – much either, because the speed of the movement and the smorgasbord of obstacles that very often litter those levels made them frustratingly hard. She did, however, enjoy them a lot more when it becomes an option to play with the Millennium Falcon. Even though it doesn’t handle substantially differently to most of the other ships you can play, she loved the idea of playing it!

Our Victory Pose!

It’s also worth noting that in most cases we wouldn’t do more than a couple of levels in a day. With games, stories, films, lessons or whatever it happens to be, the level of engagement lives and dies on its pacing, particularly with young children. Trying to beat entire sections of the game completionist-style would have sucked a lot of the fun out of it for Jessie!

I’ve got some other Lego games – Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter – and we might play these in the future, once Jessie has been introduced to them!

Last Week's Games: Skyrim, Lego Star Wars, Monster Match

 This week I find myself running into the same problem I always do whenever I’m trying to play through a long-form game – trying to find something new and interesting to say about it. Fortunately, while playing Skyrim this week, I played through A Daedra’s Best Friend. This is ostensibly yet another side quest, however it adds to what – memes aside – the games has been sorely lacking up to this point: a sense of humour.

A nasty piece of work,
but brilliantly played.

After exiting Falkreath by the West exit, I was met with a dog called Barbas. He tells me that he’s had a falling out with his master, and requests to accompany him to meet him and make amends. I followed the dog – who uses a distinctive American accent quite remote from the Nordic dialects we’ve been hearing so far – to a dungeon I’d already looked at earlier in the game: Haemar’s Shame. I went through the dungeon again, killing all the vampires and at least one spider along the way, until I met with the shrine of Clavicus Vile himself: Barbas’ master. And my word, what a character. He speaks to you in your mind with slight Cockney twang, as an entity that loves nothing more than causing chaos by granting wishes in the most self-damaging ways possible, and will only agree to take Barbas back if you retrieve an axe for him…

There are multiple ways this quest can end so I’ll leave the actual description of it there, but even though the gags in this quest are hideously dark in places, it is a refreshing change to the grim fantasy world presented for us so far! This was the first situation for a while where I wasn’t chasing quests to level up my character or progress the main plot in some way; I genuinely wanted to see where this quest was going. It wouldn’t work if the whole game was like this, but a little humour in a game can like Skyrim go a long way, create some very memorable moments, and break the cycles of questing and quite nicely.

If you were wondering how they'd do the
"I am your father" bit when none of the
characters actually speak, here it is...

I carried on with Lego Star Wars with Jessie, and we’ve reached some areas that are surprisingly challenging to traverse, especially when you’re still learning the nuances of 3D movement in video games! The highlights include The Empire Strikes Back sections: Traversing Dagobah has a wonderful moment in it where you play Luke Skywalker in the middle of his Jedi training. As Luke isn’t a Jedi at this point, the usual mechanics don’t apply for certain parts of this level – he can use the force, but not well. To use the force normally, he must pick up Yoda and put him on his back. This came to a head when Jessie – who desperately wanted to play as Yoda and had grudgingly resigned herself to the fact that putting him on Luke’s back was as good as it was going to get – had to use the force to lower some Lego Mushrooms so that R2-D2 can use the gate at the end of the scene. The problem was that this required some quick timing, and Jess kept getting attacked by bats. It took a few goes, to say the least! The other part we enjoyed was the boss battle with Darth Vader, which was nicely designed in the way that Jessie – who didn’t want to fight, so was playing R2-D2 – was able to be useful by turning on steam vents and raising platforms. It will help to build her problem-solving skills if nothing else!

A simple but very entertaining game!

We also enjoyed a tabletop game called Monster Match, in which you must roll two dice and try to match the numbers and body parts they present to the cards on the table. We had to modify this down a bit – the cards score between one and three points each, we had to take that out – but it helps to build up her number recognition. As an aside, Jessie bought this game for me for Father’s Day last year. We had a go with it then, and she didn’t enjoy it much at the time; it’s lovely to see how well she’s coming on when we see her enjoying it now.