Last Week's Games: Pokemon Leaf Grean, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Space Marines

What might lurk in the grass? Rattata probably.

So I had a request to play a game! I’d never got one before and I was quite excited to do it. Katie, someone I know from the open mic circuit, asked me to cover a Pokémon game, and I remembered I had Leaf Green on my Game Boy Advance so I was happy to oblige! I hadn’t played it or any Pokémon game for a long time, though I remembered it being basically being the same game as the original Pokémon games released in 1999. (I don’t remember anybody talking about it before then – and people talked about it a lot at school!) I enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far; I named my player character Katie after the girl who asked me to cover it, and the rival Boris because he keeps appearing to mess everything up, rather like our current Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson. I didn’t get very far because I started with Charmander, which is all but useless for the first two Pokémon gyms so I had to do some grinding with my other Pokémon to beat Brock. I’m currently at Moon Mountain, and I intend to keep playing! But I’m not going to go for 100% completion. Even if I could be bothered, the chances that I’ll find someone with a GBA and a copy of Fire Red to trade the necessary Pokémon with are slim indeed. 
 

Ezio before he becomes an assassin...

My new game for this week was Assassin’s Creed 2. You’ll remember from my previous blogs I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed when I played it last year, and I found I was missing large open worlds with things to discover and do so I gave the next one a go. It’s a good game; I haven’t noticed much difference between it and the first game yet in terms of how it plays but the Assassin’s Creed 2 seems a lot more invested in its own plot than the previous game was, which is making for a far more compelling experience. I’m a couple of hours in to the game and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next!

And my new game for last week – I did play one, but I forgot to put it on the blog – was Dynamite Heddy from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. This is an oddball platformer typical of the time, where you controlled a little puppet that could attack by throwing its head in different directions. It’s competently-designed, and fun enough, but I don’t have much interest in coming back to it simply because I’m not all that invested. If it had been a game I’d been playing since I was nine, it would be another matter, but having just picked up the game at thirty-two, I couldn’t honestly say it held my interest.

They grow ever more numerous...

Finally, in the space of about a week, I built and painted five Chaos Space Marines in Word Bearers colours. I was tidying around in my room in preparation for having new windows installed, and found a box of Chaos Space Marines I’d had for years but hadn’t built (it was my original intention to build them as Thousand Sons.) I enjoyed painting them, and the vast majority of that was done in Warlords and Wizards in Netherton where I had some great company as well! I’ll never be allowed to use them in a tournament because the bases are the wrong size (the rank and file of the current edition of 40K uses slightly bigger bases than previously, and unlike Age of Sigmar, 40K measures from the base rather than the model,) but I’m not bothered by that. I’m no tournament player, and I’d rather they were built and used than never touched again because someone was being funny about their base sizes!

I’ve built and sprayed some more models that I’m hoping to paint next week. I’ve also re-found the fun in micro-managing army lists, and I’ve found that I can fit two squads of Chaos Cultists into a 500pt army, so that’s where I’m going next. I’ve got an old box of cultists that I never touched, so I’ve built them now and I’ll try paint scheme that fits in with the Word Bearers!

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: X-Wing and Final Fantasy II

This week I’ve found myself short of spare time, so I didn’t play many games. But I get to talk more at length about the games I did play, so here they are: 

The main game I played was Star Wars: X Wing. I talked about this last week, but I’ve been getting really in to it again because of how the game plays. It is a space flight simulator; there’s all sorts of different controls and buttons and you have to use most of them at some point in order to succeed. It’s challenging for a number of reasons, the main one being the power distribution system, but it’s not insurmountable and is still a lot of fun.

I'm pretty sure this is the edition
of X-Wing I am playing...

I beat the A-Wing proving ground: a track where you have to fly through gates and shoot targets, some of which shoot back. The track is the same layout no matter what ship you’re in. There are eight levels you have to beat in order to gain the reward for it; a flight badge. You have a limited amount of time to beat it, which gets progressively smaller as you beat the levels. If you miss a gate, you incur a penalty of 15 seconds; for some of the middle levels, that’s disastrous. Also, the targets shoot more aggressively in the later levels, and in the last one, they even shoot you from behind – but if you shoot them, you gain 2 extra seconds to complete the level. There are certain stages that are all but impossible to beat without this.

The challenges in the proving ground are more or less substantial depending on what ship you are flying. The middle tier levels have the tightest time and usually present a significant challenge, but less so with the A-Wing as it moves fast enough for time to be less of a consideration. It doesn’t do such a good job at boosting its shields though, and for that reason, the later levels with the more aggressive targets were more challenging. If your systems start to shut down then you’re in trouble; if your guns are taken out then you can’t fire back, if your shields are knocked out you’ll be destroyed in seconds, and if your flight control or engine goes then you lose a lot of time getting them repaired. Despite all this it was a surprising amount of fun addressing the different challenges each level presents, knowing that there is way to beat it if you can only get it right.

I also enjoyed the A-Wing historical missions; they’re less challenging and a relaxing change of pace. Here’s where a lot of the genius of the game design comes in to play: The missions rarely take more than a few minutes to beat, and you can play through them quite quickly, but there is a reward for each one. It’s a graphic of a badge on a display uniform; not much in itself, but because the game shows you a tangible reward for doing these training missions, you have the incentive to beat them all.

I started the main campaign mode as well. More on that next week!

These hornets are a threat at the beginning.
Not for long...

I also progressed with Final Fantasy II. I love the Final Fantasy games but rarely see one through to the end; the first game is the only one where I’ve managed it so far. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’ve arrived at the point where I’m heading for Mysidia Tower. I’m playing it on my Gameboy Advance, although I find that the game is best enjoyed when I have my phone to hand. I don’t know whether it’s a design error in this edition of the game, but whatever command is supposed to display the world map isn’t working! I’ve had to call up an image of the world map come up on more than one occasion so I can see where I’m supposed to go. The game itself isn’t all that challenging, although I am aware that the difficulty level was re-balanced for the GBA editions.

So, what’s next? More of the same, or will I try a different game? Will I even have time? We’ll see…

Yu Yu Hakusho - Ghost Files, Tournament Tactics

It's been a while since I did a video game blog, but then it's been a while since I've played a game long enough to finish it...

Some of you may remember last March I talked about Yu Yu Hakusho - Spirit Detective, and that I wasn't overly impressed by the game and that I hoped Tournament Tactics would be better. Turns out it was a significant improvement on the last game. When I turned it on and started playing, my thoughts were: 'Hey, this is more like it, the graphics are about as good as the GBA ever got, and the gameplay is far closer to what I've come to expect from most of what Nintendo have released on their handheld consoles for the last decade.' Well, I didn't actually think that word for word, but you know...

This game apparently follows the story of Yusuke Urameshi during the 'Dark Tournament' period of the saga, where Yusuke and his friends enter the tournament to destroy Toguro and his team. All the characters from the first game are there, including Kuwubara, Hiei and Kurama, plus a supporting cast of other playable characters. The plot for the game centres around recruiting these other characters in various different locations in the island, and journeying to the Dark Arena to face off against Toguro. Dialogue is basically limited to speech-bubble cut-scenes in between levels, and while Atari's script is certainly not on par with their Square contemporaries, the personalities of the characters are brought out more by their interaction with each other. Kurama, for example, is nice and polite to everybody, while Hiei goes out of his way to annoy Kuwubara, who appears to have a thirst to prove himself. Ironically the least interesting character is Yusuke, who's brattish spite but with his heart in the right place is about all you get from him throughout the entire game. Nonetheless, if only for this reason the game is far superior to it's predecessor.

The actual gameplay won't be a surprise to anybody who's ever played a game with 'tactics' as a suffix. You take a maximum of five characters out in to the game. The action happens on a 'game board' style series of levels, and the characters can move a certain amount of squares that the level is divided into, depending on their move rate. They have a selection of actions, including attacks, which develop as the game progresses, using items and performing actions such as taunting the opponent and recovering your spirit energy (more on this later.) Some of the levels have specific missions, however most of them involve killing demons, which take the shape of humanoid animals and get progressively harder as the game goes on. So far, so Final Fantasy meets Dungeons and Dragons.

A Lion roars at the Masked Fighter, while the team prepare to stike...

Where this game differs slightly from this very popular and some may argue saturated style ('tactics' style games have been around at least since the mid 1990s, in fact I'm pretty sure some of them were derived from Space Hulk, but anyway,) is combining the Spirit Energy system with Initiative. I'll explain how it works, but it will take a minute; skip a few paragraphs if you really don't want to know about it and read on in the knowledge that I haven't come across a system that uses quite this same set of circumstances before or since.

Right. Spirit Energy starts off as what most RPG players would recognise as magic, mana, MP, whatever. You have a certain amount of Spirit Energy you can use in one particular stage, or level, and once it's gone you either have to manage without it or use a special action to recharge it. Where it differs from the usual incarnation of magic is that the greater majority of standard attacks also use Spirit Energy; you can't decide not to use it or you'll never make any attacks. That's certainly the case in the first few levels, anyway.

Initiative is in essence the order of turns; certain actions take more initiative than others. Moving, for example, costs initiative, all attacks do, some more than others, and the special actions certainly use initiative as well. So you might do a fairly low-powered attack which uses 10 initiative and be able to move again almost straight away, or Yusuke's Spirit Mega Gun - the best attack in the game - costs 50 initiative and the other characters might get another two or three turns before he can act again.

Combine these two things and the tactical nature of the game with the implicit strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and you've actually got quite a complex and well-thought-out system which can actually be quite interesting to analyse. Very broadly, most of the characters have most of the following:

• A fairly basic, low powered attack that doesn't use any Spirit Energy and not much initiative,
• A basic attack that is quite powerful and does use Spirit Energy,
• A ranged attack,
• A linear attack, that is to say an attack that hits the 2-4 spaces in front of the character,
• An attack that for lack of a better word I'll call a blast, that affects a number of squares around the character in different shapes depending on the character,
• A reasonably powerful attack that uses no Spirit Energy but uses a lot of initiative.

Learning how to use the different characters effectively is an interesting challenge and in the latter stages of the game becomes crucial. Chu, for example, does not move very quickly, his ranged attack is poor and he doesn't have a linear or blast move, but once he's levelled up and gets in close, he can be extremely powerful. He also doesn't carry a lot of Spirit Energy, which when Chu has all his attacks lends a new level of tactics - if speed is of the essence, it may be better to use his Crusher Kick, which uses a lot of Spirit Energy, than his Headbutt, which is his most powerful attack but uses a lot of initiative. Yusuke and Kuwubara do not have attacks that don't use Spirit Energy, so in the longer battles they will be useless for at least one turn while they recover it. Hiei is awesome - he can't take a lot of damage (relative to some of the tougher characters, anyway,) but can hit the demons very hard and very fast with his dark attacks, and has a reasonable selection of attacks to keep using once his Spirit Energy runs out.

A great system, but one that unfortunately only really has the chance to shine in the more difficult levels towards the end of the game. Up until about two thirds of the way in, most of the battles can be won by splattering the nearest demon with your most powerful attack and hoping for the best; some battles are harder than others but you'll rarely get stuck to the point where you need to take the time to think about what you're doing. There are a few levels, though, that are absolute beauties. One specific stage quite late in the game is where the characters have to kill all the demons on the stage plus three floodgates, which spawn out another two demons every so often. The floodgate towards the back of the stage spawns Wolves - by far the hardest of the demons to deal with - and if you try to fight your way through the two gates that spawn Cats and the other demons on the level, you'll find it flooded with Wolves that you haven't got a hope of beating before they beat you. Your best chance is to take that gate out first, and very quickly - but the only character who can take out Floodgates with one attack is Yusuke, and even then, the attack needs to be overdriven (the overdrive system being remarkably similar to Limit Breaks and such.) So Yusuke needs to do enough on his way up there to fill his OD meter, still have enough Spirit Energy left in the tank to perform the attack, and the other characters need to be nearby as well in order for them to support Yusuke so he doesn't get left out on his own. Therefore the other characters need to use their ranged and quick attacks, perhaps not dealing with the demons as systematically as would be usual, but nonetheless necessary.

The sound is as good as it needs to be; the background music is cheesy and not-too-overblown, and all the bells and whistles happen in the right places. Instantly forgettable, but let's be honest, how many games have you bought because someone's said to you, 'Wow, did you hear the BGM from that game?' Not many.

While I'd hardly say this is the best game I've ever played, it's an entertaining enough package to keep you going for a while. Both the storyline and the level-up system is quite linear, so there's almost no replay value (unless you re-he-hearly enjoy setting yourself challenges like, I don't know, max out all the characters, or play through the entire game using Yusuke as little as possible, in which case fine but there are other games out there, you know?) but if you can keep at it, it's fun while it lasts. How it measures up to the anime or the manga I don't know, probably not all that well, because game adaptations of this sort of thing rarely go as well as the publishers would probably like. But if you're not a fan of it, it is if nothing else a solid game that will give you probably about a weekend's worth of entertainment if you really push hard.

So what's next? I'm playing Medal of Honour - Frontline on my Xbox at the moment so maybe...

Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective

This is the first video game I've been able to finish for a while!

On an impluse I decided to buy this game for he Gameboy Advance, I'd never really heard anything about it before but it looked suitably anime/fantasy for my usual tastes, and appeared to have a good storyline to it as well. On playing it, however, I wasn't too impressed...

There's not a lot to it to be honest, all you're really doing is running around an isometric gaff punching things. This would be OK if the game made you feel it's part of something huge, but it really doesn't; the characters have quite extreme and obsessive personalities to the point where they're just not believable, and while the stages of the game do have a 'mission based' feel to them, there's not much to suggest it's linked to any overall huge plot beyond the first couple of levels where Yusuke dies and becomes the Spirit Detective. The game ended on a bit of a low, where you fight the final ridiculously-tough-but-disappointingly-normal-looking boss Toguro, and the game ends with the idea that there is more to do. I mean yes, keep them wanting more, but when there wasn't all that much there in the first place it's not really given me that incentive.

To be fair, there's some fun to be had from the fighting elements of the game. The actual fighting never really strays from the "let's find something and kill it" speil, but you can manipulate the game's tougher fights by being extremely careful on your approach so that only one enemy appears at a time. The best levels are probably the timed ones, where you have to pick up a certain amount of items to win the level, and therefore you need to pick your fights carefully. It's one thing to gain a lot of experience from winning fights, but it won't help you if you can't finish the level!

You get four characters to play with in the main bulk of the game, but to be honest I couldn't see the point. They each have a different special attack, and one of them is supposed to be slightly faster, but in reality there's not much difference. Yusuke has a ranged attack that none of the others have, making the other characters a bit redundant. Hiei, for example, has the ability to teleport short distances, but there's no real reason to use it. Kuwumara has a spirit sword, but that can only be used in close range, and as the enemies can't attack you while you're pounding them anyway, the only real reason to use it is if you're heavily outnumbered and re-he-hearly need something to die quickly. You do have to use them all though; at some point in the later stages of the game they each have to take on a boss alone, and they all need to be levelled up before they can stand a real chance. Thankfully, I've played some of the video RPGs before (by which I mean games that are NOT based on Dungeons and Dragons or anything like that, where it actually matters what experience you're doling out to what character) and picked up on this fact early; if not I'd probably have played most of the game using Yusuke, got stuck and have to play through the entire game again.

The game is quite short; I'm not sure what I think of that. On the one hand, the approach to fighting monsters in the game gets old, so I probably wouldn't have played it for much longer anyway. On the other hand, the short game doesn't really give it time to develop. Having looked in to it a little, I've now discovered that it's based on an old Manga comic of the early 1990s, and it appears to follow the plot faithfully, to the point that they literally couldn't have made the game any longer than they did without making a competely different game anyway. For fans of the series, it is at least a faithful reproduction - but I'd be interested to know how many people old enough to remember the manga have a GBA or a DS. All in all, not a very good game.

But do you know what, I've actually read manga comics, and there is usually a far more intricate development of the plot than this game suggests. It's something I'd be interested in checking out, if I had time. For now though, I bought Tournament Tactics as part of the same purchase, so you may be hearing about that in future...