Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Doom and Dark Void

 This week I’ve mainly been playing Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. I mentioned last week that I’m enjoying this game a lot more now that I’m in the frame of mind to go around the different areas grinding for Experience Points, but first impressions of the game are a little misleading in this respect, as there is really only one way you can go at the start of the game – the Nashkel Mines is the first major dungeon – and if you don’t go there reasonably quickly, certain party members leave you behind. I wouldn’t want to have to handle the first part of the game without Jaheira’s healing powers! Now that I’m well into the game, having cleared the Cloakwood mines – the second major dungeon – I’m touring round the Southern part of the world map, trying to tie up all my loose ends before I head to Baldur’s Gate itself.

Apparently he gets much
better later on...

The other thing to keep in mind was that while I was initially willing to allow some of my party members to die, I’m building a party around the six I have now that I’m happy with: The main character is a Paladin called Roisin, who I’ve given a two-weapon fighting style. Imoen, of course, is essential for her trap-finding skills and as her main weapon is her bow, she also serves as most of the party’s artillery. I picked up Branwen in Nashkel, and I held on to Jaheira as well – multiple healers in the party give it a little more longevity, especially in the later areas of the game where you need to cast several healing spells to heal a party member completely. Dynaheir is my wizard, and she is at her most useful when her area-of-effect spells flatten a combat encounter before it even starts. Finally, I have Rasaad, a monk who is new to the Enhanced edition of the game I have. He can do a decent amount of damage up close, but doesn’t seem to be able to take much himself – I had to use magic items[1] to bring his Armour Class down[2] to a reasonable level, and even then, he appears to get hit a lot and doesn’t have a particularly high hit dice.[3] Nonetheless, I’m happy with the party I’ve got now and I’ll hopefully see it through to the end!

I mean, I'm assuming this is an updated
version of the Revenant...

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Doom on the PS4. I’ve had this a while and I’ve just gotten around to playing it; I’m liking it so far! While the graphics and gameplay have obviously been enhanced by increasingly good technology since the 1993 originals I still play from time to time, the fast and frantic game play is still there and makes for some intense, thrilling battles. Hit-scan weapons are thankfully a thing of the past, but it’s a lot harder to dodge projectiles unless you’re really on it with your strafing! I’m not very far into the game yet, but it’s one I will come back to when I need a cathartic shooting spree. I don’t have a PlayStation Plus account though, so you’re unlikely ever to see me on Multiplayer.

Has the same 7th gen problem of having
unnerving eyes...

Finally, I downloaded and played Dark Void on Xbox Games with Gold on the Xbox 360. This is an interesting game that looks like it’s going to be a jetpack-based shoot-em-up, but then the main plot kicks in and it’s a 7^th-gen cover-based shooter with some jetpack elements added later. It’s based just before the World War II, where your plane crashes somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle and you find yourself under attack from strange metal beings called The Watchers. It’s alright; it’s tried to implement verticality into cover-based shooting which was a brave move, and I probably would have liked it a lot more were it not for the fact that I’ve just played through Uncharted 2. I’ve heard that Dark Void was something of a let-down in its potential, but I’ll try to beat it and see for myself!

---

[1] Monks can’t usually wear armour.

[2] Baldur’s Gate is based on the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons’ weird THACO – To Hit Armour Class Zero – system, and any enhancement to your armour class goes down rather than up.

[3] D8, I think.

Last Week's Games: The Ultimate Doom, Syndicate

This week I’ve spent most of my time playing the Ultimate Doom. I reached the end of the Inferno episode a week or so ago, and I’m now trying to play through the levels of the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed. I’d tried this before and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult these levels were, I don’t think I ever got past the first level when I played Doom before on the Xbox – and that’s when I was playing it on standard difficulty; I’m at Ultra Violence now! I ended up watching a video on YouTube to show me how to get past it, and while it helped me on the first level and shown me what to do on the second, I haven’t got the accuracy to pull it off yet. Hopefully I’ll do it in the future!

I've used this picture before, somewhere...

Now I’m aware that these levels are designed to be very difficult; indeed, the first two levels are supposed to be the hardest levels in the entire Doom franchise. I’ve also sung the praises of Id Software’s level design in the past, celebrating what they managed to achieve with very limited resources. So, are the levels on Thy Flesh Consumed well-designed? I reckon they are. They’re tough, no doubt about that, but they include some quite unique puzzles of deciding what to do and in what order, knowing where the weapons are, and what is appropriate to use and when. For example, before last week I’d never even have considered wasting ammo for the plasma gun on shotgunners. These days, I’ve developed an instinct for making sure all the hitscan-wielding enemies die very quickly, as they’re arguably more deadly than even the toughest demons.

If you don’t know, hitscan weapons are guns in early video games that don’t faff about with things like bullet velocity or trajectory – you point at the thing, press fire, and the shot instantly connects. In Doom, this is how the Pistol, Shotgun and Chain gun work, and why the Shotgun is pretty much the most commonly used weapon. If enemies have such weapons, which a number of early ones do in Doom, there’s usually a delay between the monster seeing you and shooting you to give you time to react – but if they get a shot off, you have no way of dodging it. This is different from the fireballs launched by the Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, as those enemies shoot projectiles you can see coming and can dodge. It’s also why the Spider Demon is the final boss of the game, rather than the Cyber Demon which guards the end of the second episode. Even though the latter has the stronger gun, its shots are easily seen coming, whereas the Spider Demon has a hitscan chain gun and you don’t get as much of a chance to dodge. (It’s still quite easy to beat if you don’t kill the other demons, as it will be distracted by them.)

So, defeating these levels will be a learning process, but I’m happy to accept the challenge!

Looks like quite a nice day, actually!

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Syndicate on the Xbox 360. I mentioned this last week and having played through a little more of it I can say that this is probably going to be another average game. It’s got some good ideas, like hacking the enemy chips to force them to break cover or shoot their allies. But in fight after fight, their use becomes quite routine, and the occasions where their use is obvious don’t contribute to the challenge of the game. I’d also probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t played the first two Bioshock games to their endings, as what they do to develop the idea of single player shooters added a lot more to the experience. Some critics have said Syndicate was rubbish, and I’m not disagreeing with them; most of them will have played better games than this. It’s not as bad as all that, and I’m having a decent amount of fun with it, but I doubt I’ll feel the need to come back to it once I reach the end.

Let’s see if I can beat a game before the end of the month…

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: Bubble Bath Bunny, Doom and Mordheim

How many tokens can you get?

This week I’ve had to balance being off work for half term with having my daughter for a lot of the time in between. I’d had less time to play games than I might have wanted, though she and I did get in a game of Bubble Bath Bunny at one point. This is a great little game that is designed to improve memory skills, and while I don’t know how much the game itself has been conducive to that in the eight months that we’ve owned it, it’s great to see that she’s getting better! We also had a go with Pop-up Pirate, Crocodile Dentist and Burp the Baby; kid’s toys that rely almost entirely on chance but they’re fun for the time we’re playing them, and it keeps them amused!

Cacodemons. Horrifying when you're low on ammo.

I carried on with Doom, which suddenly got a lot harder once I’d got on to the second chapter: The Shores of Hell. I found myself for the first time ever (while playing Doom) worrying about conserving ammunition. As with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was developed before it became usual to program ammo dumps prior to finding yourself in a situation that needs it, and while it does help you out in certain situations, for the vast majority of the time you’re on your own if you burn through your ammo carelessly. This has created an extra level of challenge that I’m not used to with Doom and means that I’m going into certain sections of the game severely under-powered. I might need another run through the chapter in order to get it right, but it hasn’t stopped the game from being very good fun to play.

Nonetheless, high-octane action isn’t always the experience I’m looking for, and when I found myself preferring to take my time, I returned to my old sparring partner Mordheim: City of the Damned. People who read this blog regularly may remember that I became stuck on the third campaign mission of the Mercenaries campaign, as Luthor – the Dramatis Personae who, as a win condition for the mission, cannot be killed – was the only member of the warband who wasn’t reduced to a gibbering wreck at the sight of a Daemon. So, I rallied my troops, trained up an Ogre, took some skilled archers and gave my troops items that would assist them with fear and terror tests. I won the mission without suffering too much damage to any of my men, though I had some close calls!

Glad to have cleared this one...

The next mission is going to be one that haven’t done yet, and I’m wondering exactly how I’m going to approach it and whether to take the Ogre. Obviously, he’s useful against the enemy’s impressive characters, which they almost always use on campaign missions. It’s just that I haven’t forgotten the mission in the Cathedral with the Possessed warband – the Impressive character you have to fight there (the one that relates to the Sisters of Sigmar; I actually don’t know what that is called because I never recruited one) doesn’t appear until you’re several levels higher, which even if I had taken a Chaos Spawn, he’d never been able to approach.

It doesn’t help that completing those missions takes a fair amount of time that I can’t always guarantee that I have. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, it takes a couple of hours to explore the levels and find what you need to do – which, between work, family and the occasional need to have a rest, isn’t always possible.

But hey, I’m ready to tackle it when I’m ready, and until then I’m busying myself collecting Wyrdstone for when the inevitable requests come in. Although it is possible to have your warband all but destroyed, the only actual lose condition for the game is when you fail to complete those deliveries four times – I’ve been running this warband for so long now, and the requests becoming more and more demanding, that failing the delivery may be a distinct possibility if I don’t watch what I’m doing. But for me Mordheim is a game that’s always kept on giving, and I’m glad that nearly five years later I’m still finding new challenges.

Last Week's Games: Misty, Doom and Age of Empires

Last Friday we had Valentine’s day. Kirsty very kindly bought me a game we’d seen reviewed and talked about in Tabletop Gaming magazine and found intriguing: Misty.

Incidentally, I don't recommend
searching for Misty Game with
Google Safe Search turned off..

Misty is a simple card game that uses a couple of nice conceits and mechanics to make an engaging, if brief experience. The idea is that you’re drawing doodles on a steamed-up window in the middle of a storm, and once you have twelve, the doodles come to life and start moving about. Each player picks one card from a hand of six, reveals it by putting it in a 4x3 “window,” then passes the remaining cards around to the next player. Once all the cards are gone, another six are drawn for each player, then the process is repeated except the cards are passed the other way around. Once all the players have a 4x3 window in place, the cards activate…

What the cards do depend on the card. Anything that can move – a bicycle, falling leaves, balloons etc – moves one space in the indicated direction. And if you have a flower and a monster, the monster will eat the flower. You then score points based on how many cards you have left on the window that can score. Any that have gone flying off the window are gone and won’t score any points. And if a card has moved on top of another card, you’ve lost them both. If the monster eats the flower, you’ve lost the points for the flower – but not the monster. And if you manage to get two smiley faces next to each other, that’s worth an extra point.

The strategy involves building your window and watching out for what the other players are doing. Have they got a lot of flowers? Probably worth sending them monsters. Are they playing a lot of movable cards? Send them some cards that can’t move, so that they will have to lose at least some points accommodating them. At the same time, you must build your own window as efficiently as you can – How can you stop your cards from overlapping each other? Will it really be so bad if the monster eats the flower?

It took Kirsty a while to get the hang of what was happening and I won the first game we played, however we both agreed that it’s a great little game with mechanics that are easy enough to understand and use. We’re looking forward to having another go with more players!

In Hell, they have trousers...

I also downloaded and played the Ultimate Doom on my laptop. I owned this game in 1998 and it is still good fun today. The reasons for this lie with a lot of the things I was saying about Wolfenstein 3D back in the summer – the level design is excellent, and the core gameplay loop is solid. Hardware may have been somewhat limited back in the early 90s, but they squeezed every ounce of playability they could out of that they had to work with.

After rebinding the keys with some finnicky DOS-based lists, (now that I’ve discovered WASD for movement, I’m not going back,) and snarling over the fact that for some reason you can’t bind Left Shift (would have been great for running!) I set the difficulty to Ultra Violent (4/5.) I have played through most of the game on the middle difficulty; that was on the Xbox version with a controller, and I’ve got better at FPS since then so I thought I’d give the increased difficulty a go. I was very glad I did, because the general effect of this was to increase the number of enemies present in the level, leading to some truly thrilling battles! I’ll come back to this every now and then.

This is the level I'll be playing next, funnily enough...

Finally, I carried on with the Greek campaign of Age of Empires. I’m enjoying it, but I got stuck on the mission where you need to attack the temple. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t get my units close enough without the enemy priests converting them! I eventually did it by being a bit more economical with my unit building and pounding the enemy from afar with the catapults – standard procedure for Age of Empires!