Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: Jenga, Dominoes, Snakes and Ladders, and Happy Salmon

I’ve had a lot going on this week. Some of you may remember that I had a massive stack of board games piled up in my spare room. Well, it was never going to take long for my daughter to take an interest in it, and suddenly I found myself having to find some games within that collection that are suitable for a three-year-old to play. We found four in the end, all of which she enjoys to a certain extent but for entirely different reasons…

This is the version of the game we have.

The first game we tried was Jenga, where you must take a block from a tower of 54 blocks, putting the piece you took off onto the top creating an increasingly unstable tower. Strictly speaking, you’re only allowed to use one hand, but we weren’t too pedantic about that as Jessie only has small hands. She showed a surprising amount of dexterity and care as she checked for loose blocks and put them on the top of the tower. We’ve had a few goes with this and I generally win, but for one round I deliberately decided to go for the harder blocks – more to make me feel like I deserved it if I won again, as much as anything else – and after a long and tense match, Jessie was delighted to win one!

Fun fact: I pulled this picture from the Taken 2
Movie website - which now links to gambling.

Then we had a go at Dominoes. This one was probably the one she took the most from in terms of her own development, as she was identifying how many dots were on her dominoes and matching them up on the board. It reminded me of the first time I played this game as a child, where the dominoes were pictures of animals rather than the usual dots; that probably would have been preferable, but Jessie still had a good go. She tends to win by luck rather than judgement, as she usually has the smaller number of dots by the time we run out of moves, but she enjoys it. Probably as importantly, I’m encouraging her to keep her eye on both sides of the board, which should train a sense of situational awareness!

Picking things up and moving them around.
What could be better?

I bought Snakes and Ladders from the Black Country Museum with the intention of introducing it to Jessie at some point. This was an odd one: The debate about whether theme or mechanics are more important can fill entire books, but with both snakes and ladders being something Jessie can recognise, she finds the game a lot more engaging than the abstract puzzling of Jenga and Dominoes – at least initially. But the thing about Snakes and Ladders is that there’s no skill involved – you roll the dice and you move, and if you land at the bottom of a ladder or the top of a snake, you move to the other end. The first to get to the 100^th square wins, and that’s all there is to it. Without truly realising why, Jessie gets bored of that long before the game has finished. Still, it’s a simple enough game for us all to play and that’s probably main benefit: It’s a nice game to play with your family.

Absolutely mad, but a great game!

Finally, we had a go with an absolute gem of a game I picked up at the UK Games Expo a few years ago: Happy Salmon. I haven’t played this yet as you need two things: At least three people, and a safe environment to make a lot of noise. I almost always fall short of at least one of these things. It’s basically a mad version of snap: Everyone has a coloured deck of the same twelve cards with an action on them for two people to do. You frantically search for the person with the same card, do the action then drop the card. The first person to drop all their cards is the winner. We had a great time playing it, and me and Kirsty recognised that this is probably one of the most accessible games I own. That’s worth an entire blog at some point, but for now I’ll say that the fact that Jessie can’t read yet didn’t hinder her enjoyment at all!

So, a nice week of board games, in all!