Last Week's Games: Moving House and some other bits of faff...

Despite some major positive changes happening in my life lately, this blog will take on a mainly negative tone. None of it is all that bad, in the grand scheme of things, but there are some inconveniences which have meant I haven’t had all that much time for playing games over the last couple of weeks.

Yeah...

The most significant thing that has happened to me in a few years, then, is that I bought a house. This was something that we had to organise quite quickly. Kirsty and I had been planning to move out of our flat and into a house for a little over a year at that point; for various reasons we didn’t manage it until now. We viewed the property back in January and offered on it, then Covid-19 happened which bought with it all sorts of confusion with the solicitors doing the conveyance. By the time we’d got a straight answer and a date for completion, we had about six days to pack down our entire home and move it into a house – thankfully not far away, but it was a confused mess and we couldn’t count on much help! Part of what this meant was that I had to move my entire collection of board games, and this very afternoon I managed to arrange them all against the same wall our spare room, taking the picture you see on your right while conceding that I really do have problems with obsessive hoarding.

Apart from the time it takes to move to a new house and get everything fixed and tidy there, which is still an ongoing process, we couldn’t use our TVs for a while either. The landlord of the flat we moved out of cut the plugs off our TVs and wired them up straight into the mains so that we didn’t have wires trailing everywhere.[1] The problem was of course that with the lockdown, he couldn’t put them back on again, and because the plugs they came are sealed, neither could we. So, we had to wait for a convenient moment to go and buy some plugs to plug the TV in before I could use any of the consoles! Of course, there was always the Switch or my Laptop, but time was not on my side this week, so I didn’t get to play them too much.

I tried to come up with some sort of snide remark about
where I'd like to stick that sniper rifle but it just came
out really rude.

One game I won’t be playing again is Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any of it, but it’s cost me a lot more than it was worth. Basically, my account got hacked, and a certain amount of money was spent on it. I won’t say exactly how much here; it was more than a takeaway, less than the deposit on my house. I’d never had a problem with this before in a year of owning the Switch and came across it within weeks of sharing information with Epic Games, so in addition to changing my password, I’ve deleted Fortnite off my Swtich and I won’t be playing it anymore. I’m currently having some email dialogue with Nintendo to resolve the situation, so hopefully I will get my money back, but this has left a rather bitter taste in my mouth as you might imagine!

I tried to have a go on my Xbox 360 – I was hoping to beat Sonic Generations, and I’ve been able to see my games for the first time in a year and a half (they’ve been in the loft hitherto) so I was hoping to try those of them I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. Two things got in the way of that – first, the HDMI cable wasn’t plugged in, and second, it’s doing that thing again where the controller won’t connect to the console. This is the second time it’s had this problem this year, and it won’t be going away – it might be time for a new one. I’ll try and order one in the next few days; if nothing else I’ll get an extremely helpful new hard drive to download some free games on to!

Until next week…

---

[1] It’s alright, he’s an electrician; he knows how to do it.

Last Week's Games: Cities: Skylines, Super Smash Bros. Ulitimate, Fortnite

Strewth, I’ve been playing a lot this week! I beat Assassin’s Creed 2, you can read about that here, but I’ve talked enough about that game so here are some others:

Yeah, mine doesn't look that good.

On one of the nights in the week I had a go with Cities: Skylines, a city building game on the PC. It’s been out for a few years now and has been talked up quite positively as an alternative to SimCity. From what I’ve been hearing about the most recent iteration of SimCity, an alternative was needed, as many people weren’t happy with the always-online DRM (Digital Rights Management,) and the fact that it almost forced a multiplayer mode on what has been traditionally a single-player experience. Having not played a SimCity game since SimCity 3000, however, I went into Cities: Skylines without much prejudice; games like this have moved on since I last played one and I was willing to see what has changed since then.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised thus far! The zoning is much the same as I remember, but the roads can bend (not that I’ve been able to make it happen yet!) and while there are a certain set of utilities you need to make happen straight away like power and water, other public services – police, fire, healthcare – don’t actually come in to it until your town is big enough to give rise to the need for them. If I have any issues with it, I would say that once the game starts moving, it moves a little fast for my liking. This is arguably because I’m still trying to learn the mechanics, I can’t see the veterans of the game saying the same, and I know you can pause it, but I couldn’t help the feeling that the game was running away with me somewhat.

Absolute chaos for most of this!

I charged my Nintendo Switch and played a couple of games on that as well, namely Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. I bought this game a couple of months ago, and knowing the scale of the game, didn’t touch it for weeks. I’ve had a go with it now and I’ve quite enjoyed it; I’m not sure about the controls (Combining platforming with two-finger fighting is an odd one!) but they can be re-bound, so that’s ok. Fighting in arena battles with characters from major gaming franchises is fun, and with a lot to unlock it’s the kind of game I can dip in and out of and continue to make progress as I’m going along. I’m still getting used to the mechanics; getting your opponent’s damage to a certain point then knocking them off the edge of the stage is unlike any fighting game I’ve played before, but it’s an interesting challenge which I’m enjoying so far. If I get enough games to justify it, I might consider buying a subscription to the Nintendo live service – I haven’t yet, but I think with Smash I may always have the fact that I haven’t got a hope of unlocking any of the online achievements at the back of my mind…

Better get used to seeing this load screen...

Finally, I’ve had a go with Fortnite, the Battle Royale game that everyone’s been talking about, for better or worse. I had a go with it on the Switch; I don’t know how well that version stacks up to everyone else but that’s what I’ve chosen to play it on. It’s alright. Again, I’m finding the controls a little off, and I’m not sure how mapping some of the game’s key controls to the face buttons lends itself well to such a compact machine as the Switch. But as a shooter, it’s fine, I’ve played it for long enough to have an idea of its addictive qualities and have fallen into the trap of the “Just one more go” mentality. It is worth the hype? I don’t think so, but then again I haven’t bought the battle pass (and until I’ve earned enough, what was it again, “V-Bucks” in game to buy it, I won’t,) so I probably haven’t had much of the core experience yet. I don’t know how frequently I’ll come back to this, but it’s not like I’ve spent any money on the game, so...