Last Week's Games: New Super Mario Bros, Diggy's Adventure, Hey, That's My Fish!

This week, I’ve been very pushed for time with work, gigs with the bands, playing video games took something of a back seat for me! But I managed to get some games in.

This happened quite a bit...

The first one was, to my surprise, New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I happened across someone who had the same game and we had a go with the multiplayer mode; Mario vs Luigi. In this, you have to collect five stars before your opponent does, using power ups and platforming to hamper your opponent any way you can. There’s a lot of fun to potentially have with this mode, however I should point out that the person I was playing against is very young and there was something of a disparity in skill level, so we didn’t play for very long!

The Dark Angels...

I continued my eternal crusade on, er, Eternal Crusade in those evenings where I had a bit of time. I’m still enjoying it, and I’m becoming a lot more familiar with the different classes now. I’m still absolutely hopeless at it, typically finishing somewhere in the bottom third of the leader board, and against players who have been playing since launch I haven’t got a chance. I’m also starting to notice the fact that there’s not really that many maps. It could do with a few more, to vary things up a bit! But on those times where I manage to sneak up behind someone and one-shot kill him, or capture a control point, or take out three guys at once (the latter happens at very infrequent intervals!) it’s really good fun, and I think this will see me through a long time yet.

With a chin to rival
Buzz Lightyear...

My new game for this week was Diggy’s Adventure on my Kindle Fire. This is a game where you have to make your way through a top-down cave by digging through collapsible squares of sand, gravel and the like. Each dig takes a certain amount of energy, and if you run out, you either need to manage your resources to make it last longer, or buy some more in micro payments! It’s competently-designed, doesn’t take itself too seriously (either that or the developer’s writing team had the week off!) and was a nice enough way to fill half an hour. But there’s not much challenge in the game that I’ve been able to see, apart from a couple of lever puzzles that are easy enough to work out. I guess later on there’d be an element of resource management in there, where you dig just far enough to achieve your objective and come back and clear the level later (the game rewards you for clearing the entire level.) There’s nothing wrong with Diggy’s quest, but like with most mobile games, I’m not sure how long it will keep me engaged.

Damn that robber!

I went in to Warlords and Wizards again and had another game of Settlers of Catan, where it got very competitive! We had to call the game early due to time allowance, but it was a pleasure to play again and I’m looking forward to the UK Championship at the UK Games Expo! I’m not expecting to do very well, but it will be interesting to play some different games with some different people. I also continued painting some Chaos Space Marines, I’ve nearly finished them now which will bring me up to 20.

Brutal but fun!

Finally, I had a few games of Hey! That’s My Fish with my Mom and my girlfriend Kirsty. It’s a really nice game to play because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, the rules take about a moment to work out (apart from working out what order to place the penguins in, I didn’t need to refer to the rules even once,) it’s really good fun and surprisingly tactical. I won the first two games and my Mom won the third. We helped her out with a move at one point near the end which turned out to be the deciding point, but as long as everybody is having a good time, it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses. I know that sounds like a very wishy-washy thing to say but it is absolutely true!

Last Week's Games: Rayman Origins, Dark Souls, New Super Mario Bros and Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes



A kid's game it may be, but there's
something Lovecraftian about these villains...

After the rather intense experience of playing Max Payne 3 all the way through in a single weekend, I felt I needed something light to lose myself in for a while, so I tried Rayman Origins. Rayman is a franchise that I thing I should have given more time to than I ever really did; it came at a point where 3D graphics were becoming the standard, and a 2D platformer was not what I was expecting of the 5^th console generation. It was my loss, really, because Rayman was a very good game, one I currently own for the Playstation and hope to return to at some point. I haven’t played any of the games in between, but Rayman Origins is a very competently-designed action platformer. It’s addressed some of the issues presented by the first game – the difficulty appears to be reduced, you have unlimited lives etc – and this makes for a very fun game. You run and jump across some beautifully-drawn and colourful words, trying to free the Electoons (Little pink blobs,) punching bad guys, and capturing Lums (the game’s equivalent of coins.) Occasionally there’s a shoot-em-up style mini-game with a mosquito which breaks up the action nicely. I’m enjoying my time with it so far, I’ve got to the second ‘World,’ and I mean to carry on. As the achievements are all earned in-game and none of them are tied up in online multiplayer as far as I can see, this is one of the few games I have a hope of 100% completing; it’ll be an interesting journey if nothing else! 

Strewth...

It will be worth remembering how much fun I’m having with Rayman, because the other game I’ve been playing this week is Dark Souls. I’ve started this game a few times and never got very far; all the rumours about the games difficulty are absolutely true. You play as an undead fighting your way through the land of Lordran, to… actually I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve, other than avoiding spending eternity locked in the Undead Asylum you escape from at the beginning. You fight your way through other undead and demons, each and every one of which wants to see you dead. Which is for the best, really, because you’ll be obliging them on multiple occasions before you’ll get anywhere. Dark Souls has a very technical combat system, and you have to work out the function of each of your moves. A light attack does some damage, a strong attack does more damage and can breaks defence, which is its primary purpose. You can do a jumping attack for the same purpose and to close some distance, while a front kick will knock enemies back; great if you’re fighting near a sheer drop. If you have a shield you can block, and also parry attacks. The latter is almost mandatory for getting through the game, but requires precise timing to pull off. I’ve been playing it a lot over the last week and had to look at a Wiki to find out what I was doing wrong; quite a bit as it turns out. Also it was far from the first time I’ve tried to play through this game and this time I found the lower section of the Undead Burg I’d missed completely for the first time! I think I might have to restart again and follow the Wiki. Is that cheating? Possibly, but even armed with that information, Dark Souls is a very hard game.

Oddly compelling...

When it was convenient for me to be playing on handhelds, I kept on at New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS. I’m enjoying it, but I like being able to put this one down now and again. For some reason, playing through this one knowing I’m almost certainly going to have to do so again to unlock everything isn’t filling me with a determination to do so. On my Kindle Fire, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes. I’ve been enjoying that; it’s a Match-3 but with an element of strategy to it. Can I beat it without spending any money? I hope so, but it’s a bit of a grind!

Last Week's Games: Crazy Taxi, Reigns, Mordheim: City of the Damned, Guitar Hero, New Super Mario Bros

Pretty crazy...

I started this week by downloading Crazy Taxi off Xbox Live’s Games with Gold. This is a game that has been talked about fondly for many years but as far as I can remember, I never actually played. I didn’t own the Dreamcast, and while a version of it did come out for the PlayStation 2, within six months of buying one I was bought Grand Theft Auto 3 for Christmas, in which the same essential experience can be created by stealing a taxi and starting the taxi mission. I initially thought it was going to be another pick-up-and-play game, which was fine by me, but I sat playing it for two hours so I definitely enjoyed it! I’m not very good at it though; the advanced driving techniques performed by the somewhat clunky gear-shift mechanic elude me at this point, and I haven’t yet managed more than a “C” rank. I’ll probably keep trying, though!

I also had a quick go with Reigns, a whimsical decision-making game about being the king, and trying to remain so as long as possible before you die in some way. I didn’t get too far in the game before being pulled apart by various people in the church. I’m not quite clued up on how all the mechanics of the game work yet, as in what decision is likely to affect what outcome – but it looks like this isn’t a game you “beat” in the usual sense. More likely, you’ll be unlocking all the possible characters, all the deaths, all the events etc. I’ll probably have to look at a guide or something to get to the last few, but it looks like a game that would work great on mobile; a filler for a spare ten minutes.

Of course I returned to Mordheim: City of the Damned, and continued my campaign as the Red Death Possessed warband. At the moment I seem to be doing well against most of the other factions except the Sisters of Sigmar, whose morale and resilience are at odds with my somewhat low level of damage output and not quite having the right spells to deal with it. The first campaign mission is ready to go but having attempted a playthrough as Chaos before I know that the opponent for this is the Sisters, so I’m making sure my warband s is ready to go before I do this – even though this is usually how I get bogged down in the game and find progress very difficult.

Not sure which game this shot comes from,
could be any of them...

And then for some reason I had an urge to dig up my old Guitar Hero controller and try the first Guitar Hero game. I’ve never been especially very good at these games because I find that when I watch the scroll bar going up for a while, my vision starts to do the same so five or six songs is usually quite enough. Somehow in spite of this I managed to get through the entire game on Easy mode and earn a 5-star rating on all the available songs.  I had a go on medium difficulty, but I found myself thinking that if I’m going to work that hard to get through a game, I might think about doing some more practice on the real thing so I can play some more songs!

Someone want to tell me how to
open up that bottom path?

Finally, I continued playing New Super Mario Bros. I beat the first world, and got up to the first save point in the second before going to bed. One thing I’m noticing about the later Super Mario games is how well it accommodates varying levels of play; the levels aren’t that much of a challenge to get through and you could potentially get through the whole game by running to the right and jumping at the right time. But some of the content is gated off by a certain number of collectables you have to pick up, in this case the large coins. It gives an incentive to take your time, explore the levels and really get the most out of the game. I found it was a similar situation when I covered Super Mario 3D World last year; it’s a sign of good game design!

Last Week's Games: New Super Mario Bros, Mordheim: City of the Damned, 911 Operator

Since I’ve been trying to play a new game every week this year, I tend to play the new game for the week on Mondays. I found that while I was playing through Far Cry 2, I was so heavily invested in that game it became difficult to justify playing a new one for its own sake. So these days I give myself some time to play a new game on one of my days off, so that my obligation is out of the way and I’ve got time to do whatever I want later in the week, whether it’s playing the new game if it’s engaged me enough, or continue with whatever game I was trying to beat before. I haven’t been so invested in a long-form game since Far Cry 2, I enjoyed Theme Hospital of course but most of that had been done roughly a year before.

I'm enjoying the shell power up.

So my new game for this week was New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS, as this is a great pick-up-and-play game. It’s always interesting to experience the new gameplay mechanics that run across the different Super Mario games – new for me anyway, as up until Super Mario 3D World, I hadn’t play a Super Mario game for any significant amount of time since Super Mario World for the SNES. I had a lot of fun with the Blue Shell, even when I accidentally used it and ran in to something that killed me. The giant mushroom is fun as well, though I suspect that as you can destroy Warp Pipes with them, you’re closing off secret areas that could contain the giant coins you’re supposed to be picking up. I’ve not got very far in the game yet, but the point of my DS is that I can play it for a little while when it’s convenient for me to play a handheld system, so I’m not expecting to make rapid progress through this one. It’s there when I need it!

I did mine in Red, funnily enough...

I also had a go at one of my favourite games: Mordheim: City of the Damned. I downloaded it for my laptop a few years ago and, after a bit of faffing around with the graphics card, found the strategy experience hugely enjoyable. I’ve definitely put more hours in to this than any other PC game I own! Unfortunately the game is a little buggy, and some game-breaking bugs coupled with an ironman saving system has meant that I haven’t beaten it yet. I might do this time though. I’ve started a Possessed warband called The Red Death; we’ll see how it pans out.

Assigning units, taking calls... the life of a 911 Operator!

As you’ll see from the Pickups and Trades blog I’m putting out on the last Wednesday of every month I’ve gone a little mad with downloading games off Steam, and with the school holidays on at the moment, I thought I’d take the little more time that afforded me to play one or two of them. I started with 911 Operator. This was a game I think I heard about over the releases section of the Co-Optional Podcast, and I’m enjoying games that are doing things a little bit differently. From what I heard, I was expecting an L.A. Noire style negotiating style of gameplay as you desperately tried to sort out what was wrong before it was too late. That’s in there, certainly, but a lot of it is an “assign your units” point and click strategy game. You assign police, fire fighters and paramedics to various vehicles with different strengths and weaknesses, and purchase equipment for them. You then go into deployment mode, where you assign those units to various emergencies that crop up over the cities in the game.

I’m in Miami at the moment, and brilliantly there’s a team of veteran cops in a sports car apparently referencing Miami Vice, an 80s cop show I’ve never actually seen. They can usually get to an emergency quicker than any squad car, but you need to assign another car to the emergency if they need to take any criminals in. It’s a great game so far and I’m enjoying playing it, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.  
 

Last Week's Games: Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, Theme Hospital, 3D Pawn

Yeah, she's terrifying.

My new game for this week was Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS. I wondered how many other franchises were brought to the system with a suffix that abbreviates to DS, as one of my other games is Resident Evil: Deadly Silence. Still, at least Dragon Sword makes sense in the context of Ninja Gaiden, as that is the weapon that the player character, Ryu Hayabusa, is using. It’s an odd game in many ways, not least because you hold the DS vertically and control the character almost entirely with the stylus. Hold the stylus down in a location, Hayabusa will go there. Tap a location or an enemy, and he will throw a shuriken. Swipe across an enemy, and he will slash them with his sword. There are a number of different combinations of swipes that will do different techniques that are more difficult to do but more powerful if you manage it. The only control mapped to any of the buttons is block; you can press any button for this. 

I played it for a while, and even though the combat can get repetitive, doing it with the stylus is enough of a novelty that it remains fun. The trickier move combos are satisfying to pull off; some semblance of physical effort is required so you feel like you’ve earned it when the move is executed. The boss battles are good as well: It’s not enough to mash the controls; you need to learn their attack patterns and wait for your opportunities. I’m enjoying the game so far and I’m looking forward to playing more of it!

Someone needs to buy more drinks machines...

I continued playing Theme Hospital after getting stuck on the tenth level. I had to re-start it; the vomit virus around the hospital was getting out of hand and the rapid succession of epidemics was haemorrhaging all my money. I beat the level by making sure I had enough Handymen (who keep the hospital clean and stop viruses from happening) to keep the area clean, and spamming GP’s offices and receptions around the hospital. These are the busiest areas because the patients visit the GP regularly, so I arranged it so that the patients were spread out and that there were no more than six people in a queue at any given time. That worked for the tenth level; I now find myself on the eleventh, where I tried to create an efficiently-running hospital in the same manner, only to spend a lot more money than I had and got fired due to an increasing amount of debt, as a rather on-the-nose metaphor for recent changes in UK health policy.

Incidentally, that Epidemics mechanic is a pain in the bum. The idea is that some of your patients have an illness that is contagious and could spread. When you get the memo, you have two options: Either declare the epidemic, take a fine and a reputation hit, or try to cover it up by curing all the relevant patients in a given amount of time. There is a cash bonus if you manage this, but if you fail, your hospital is either fined or all your current patients are evacuated. The trouble is your time is instantly over if any of the patients go outside – even if it’s to access the other buildings in the hospital. I’ll have to plan it so that the patients can get through the entire diagnostic process and be cured before they have the opportunity to go outside – this will take some doing!

An impressive concept, if nothing else.

Finally, Kirsty and I had a go at 3D Pawn, the game with the name that sounds ever-so-slightly suspect when you say it out loud. It’s a magnetic cube with a 3x3 grid on each side, with nine pawns of a light and dark colour on opposite sides. The pawns move like pawns in chess, except you can move sideways. The object of the game is to get one pawn onto your opponent’s side of the cube without being immediately captured. Not an in-depth experience, but a nice ‘travel’ game to be played in bed or in the back of a car. Which also sounds suspect when combined with 3D pawn…

Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month! 

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Orcs and Elves, Dungeons and Dragons

Happy New Year, people! I make the usual resolutions every year – eat more healthily, practice my music more, write more songs etc – and I very rarely see them through to the end. However, as this blog series is doing reasonably well (roughly 100 views every week, which isn’t much but it is consistent!) I thought I’d try a new resolution in to it for 2018, and that is: Play a new game every week.

This might sound expensive, but I’ve also got a massive backlog of games, many of which I’ve owned for years and never played. I’m missing out on quite a bit in my collection of games without having to buy necessarily buy any more of them! So I’ll try to find time to play a new one every week. It will be tough, not least because many of them are long-form games that need weeks or even months of play to beat, but I’m up for the challenge and I’ll give it a go!

Funnily enough, sniping's not really
my thing any more...

For the Christmas Holiday week I’ve mostly been playing Far Cry 2. As I mentioned last week, this is a game I’ve owned for years and I’ve got really now! Maybe I’m enjoying games at a different level these days. For example, I like the fact that the separate missions take roughly 20-40 minutes to beat; you can do them in small chunks and feel like you’re making progress. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with hunting for the diamonds. I like the shooting, and the certain sense of vulnerability you get from not quite being able to see due to the haze. I’m enjoying the Buddy system as well, where they give you alternative ways to complete missions, give you more missions and rescue you if you get hurt. Indeed, I was actually quite sad when Josip, one of the buddies who’d been with me most of the game, died because he’d got in to trouble and was too badly injured by the time I’d got to him to help. I find the campaign is moving very slowly, as there’s a lot of faffing about with side missions – but as there’s almost always a valuable reward for these, it doesn’t feel like filler. Open world games have arguably lost their way over the last few years, as there was only so far this could go without becoming bloated, but Far Cry 2 managed to create a compelling world with just enough to do that it keeps me coming back. Whether it’s enough for me to see the game through to the end is a bit of a, er, Far Cry, especially since I’m back at work tomorrow and won’t have as much time for games like this, but we’ll see how we get on. I’d like to see it through to the end after all this time.

The wand talks to you. Yeah,

I also got Orcs and Elves for the Nintendo DS for Christmas and I’ve been playing that when I’ve got a spare few minutes. This is a roleplaying game somewhere between Legend of Grimrock and Fatal Labyrinth; you play as the son of an Elf adventurer and you’re on a quest to find out what happened to the Dwarven King. It’s a roleplaying experience with, from what I can tell, all the fat chewed off: There’s no assigning points to level up, or min-maxing stats, or customisation that I can see. It’s all about dungeon bashing, and collecting loot. And I’m fine with that; it’s a simple enough experience and one that I think works very well on the DS. I’ve not played many games that meld pick-up-and-play with a compelling plot and good gameplay mechanics so well!



I might talk about the orange cover
if it's a slow week...

Finally, I’ve volunteered to run a Dungeons and Dragons game at the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I’ll be running Palace of the Silver Princess, a 1^st edition module converted in to 5^th edition for the purpose. This is a bit of a risky move for me given that I don’t have a lot of time to prepare and run sessions these days, but it’s a simple-enough adventure and I’m hoping to do a lot of the legwork in the run up to Thursday when I run the first session.

Last Week's Games: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Lock's Quest, Shinobi III, Streets of Rage II, Vectorman 2 and The Story of Thor

With a well-received week off one of my two jobs, I found myself with a bit more time to play games this week, including some important finishers. Let’s see what they were:

I recently downloaded Hydro Thunder Hurricane for free from Xbox Live Gold, and inspired by Youtube’s MetalJesusRocks, who likes games like this, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a speedboat racing game, and is good fun; it has a good selection of modes and there’s plenty to unlock. I probably won’t ever complete it, as some of the achievements rely on local multiplayer of all things; I currently only have one controller. But I’ll dip in to it now and then to see what it’s got to offer.

Also I had another look at a game I’d been meaning to finish for roughly five years and have now got round to coming back to: Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. I started the campaign again as I’d forgotten most of the plot and the mechanics, but I found it coming back to me quickly enough, even if I had forgotten how hard the game is! I’ll try and get to the end of it this time, when it’s convenient for me to be playing a handheld system.

But the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection is still in my Xbox360 and is not leaving any time soon. I can’t think of any other Xbox360 game other than XCOM: Enemy Unknown that I’ve got more mileage from during the time I’ve had the console. I gave Shinobi III another go, and very nearly got to the end. I lost on the last stage; the fighting is easy enough but at one point you come into a section of the final level where most of the floors and walls are electrified, and you need some precision platforming in order to survive; I just don’t have the right set of skills! Also, during a quiet night at work, I transcribed the tune “Whirlwind” from the game’s soundtrack into Guitar Pro. One of my hobbies is listening to old video game music and transcribing them; it’s a great way to train my musical ear!

I attacked Streets of Rage II as well, because why wouldn’t I. Once again I fell down on the last boss rush, however I’ve been varying my runs by playing as Axel every so often. Normally I would play Max, but Axel has his own charm. His Grand Upper attack does a huge amount of damage, and spamming it is a great approach to most of the bosses, but I find other aspects of his style a little hard to deal with – he’s nowhere near as good with the heavy weapons as Max.

I played, and to my surprise beat, Vectorman 2. After being stuck on the fifth level for goodness knows how long, I took a more methodical approach to playing the game, and got to the eleventh level with a good amount of lives in reserve. Feeling that I had a good chance of beating the game, I ploughed ahead to the end and did just that. You can read my full review here.

Finally, I played the oddly-titled The Story of Thor. Oddly-titled because in North America and Europe it’s actually called Beyond Oasis, which makes more sense in the context of the game, and also the story has nothing to do with any iteration of the character Thor that I am aware of. It was called The Story of Thor in Japan. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good Zelda-like RPG, designed for the Mega Drive’s 6-button controller and with surprisingly good graphics and sound. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I’ve only got as far as I needed to unlock the Water shrine, which is what I needed to do to get the achievement points.

This brings my quest to get all the achievement points for the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection to an end, and it’s been quite a journey! There’s still mileage out of some of the games and I don’t think I’ll ever say goodbye to Streets of Rage 2 again, but it’s still a milestone for me.