Last Week's Games: Sonic Transformed, Streets of Rage, Midnight Wanderes

What's it like to drive with no tyres?

As I resolved to play one new game every week, I tend to do that at the start of the week to make sure I’ve done it and give the game a chance to engage me. I didn’t do that this week, starting with a game I’d been playing a few weeks before: Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. I had a fine time with this a couple of weeks ago but had left it alone for most of the previous week; it took a few goes to get back into the rhythm of the game. I had a go at the final section of the World Tour, and chose Vyse for this part of the play through as one of the achievements are tied up in his lap times and I wanted to level him up. However, after a few races, it became apparent that I’d got as far as I was going to get by playing through on Normal difficulty. I tried switching to Expert and got utterly destroyed, so I settled for Hard difficulty and played through the first few races again to earn some stars. This is going to take a while but it’s the sign of a good game that I’m willing to come back to it!

The three original heroes. Shame Adam
didn't appear in any more games!

On Wednesday night Kirsty and I had a go with the original Streets of Rage on the Xbox 360; I downloaded the compilation trilogy when it became free on Gold. I chose Adam for the play through and Kirsty played as Axel. It was good fun going through the game and hearing Kirsty come up with names for the enemies: Stabby McGee, Streetwise Prince Harry, Purple Zombie Dude, Yellow Turtle Guy and He-Man were some of my favourites! We actually did quite well; we got as far as the last stage but we fell down to the Big Ben bosses. The game is re-balanced to accommodate two players, and when Kirsty ran out of lives and continues, I couldn’t handle two of the Big Bens on my own with Adam as he moves quite slowly. It didn’t help that I kept forgetting not to throw them in this edition of the game!

Metal Slug with a crossbow...

So what was my new game for this week? Well, a while ago, I watched one of Metal Jesus’ videos, Discover HIDDEN GEMS in Game Collections and Compilations, which he did with his friend John Riggs. In that video they talk about some excellent games that were part of compilations, and Jason (Metal Jesus) was often surprised to hear John talk about a game he didn’t realise that he owned on a compilation! The same applied to me when John talked about a game that appeared on Capcom Classics Collection vol. 2: Midnight Wanderers: Quest for the Chariot. This was actually hidden in a multi-game, called Three Wonders, so wouldn’t necessarily happen across it. So I gave it a try. It is a platform/shooting game similar to Metal Slug in gameplay, where you control a hobbit called Lou on a quest apparently taken on a whim to find a chariot. I gave it a go and it’s a pretty decent game; I like the way it plays, the jumping feels a little off but it very often did back in the early 90s when jumping mechanics weren’t standardised. The enemy design is really good as well. I didn’t get too far with it since I didn’t have long, but I had a decent amount of fun and I’ll probably come back to it at some point – although, it has to be said, that compilation has a lot of other good games on there that I should probably check out too!

I managed to find time to go to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards and continue to paint my Chaos Cultists. I’ve done the vast majority of them now; I just need to do the flesh and the base and we’re away. I’ve got another ten to paint after this, and I’m hoping to get a Dark Apostle done after that. That will be 500 points of Word Bearers painted, so I might move on to something different after that; I was inspired to paint Blood Angels by Regicide after all!

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Mortal Kombat, Killer 7, Shinobi, Zaxxon, Orcs and Elves.

I’ve played quite a few games this week! Firstly, I finally beat Far Cry 2. It’s been a long journey to get to the end of that game and while I don’t see myself coming back to it, I’m glad I’ve played it. It seems to be the core experience of what modern open world games eventually became; the old games may not be able to match the new in terms of content, but it was developed at a time when the idea was new, fresh, and waiting to see what could be done with it.

After beating a long heavy game like Far Cry 2 I needed something light and playable to enjoy, and I left that task to my old sparring partner Streets of Rage 2. I’m getting quite far in to the final level before I lose all of my lives, but the boss rush on the seventh level still tanks most of them. I’m also enjoying playing as Axel more than I did before; as long as you time his moves correctly, he can be devastating.

I'd love to be able to play the BGM on classical guitar...

I went round to a friend’s flat who had a Sega Mega Drive console, and I played a couple of games with them including Columns and the original Mortal Kombat. Columns is as good fun as ever; I lost the game this time through being very tired (it had been a long day) and doing the cardinal sin with puzzle games, which is to try and be clever and look for combos. I’m sure, with more skill, this would be a great tactic. But right now, just trying to match three gems is good enough. Combos tend to happen by themselves. Mortal Kombat was a pleasure to play again. I found myself remembering some of the old moves that Johnny Cage and Scorpion used to do, and took no small amount of pleasure in using them against Kirsty and her friends who didn’t. It took me right back to when I used to play it at home and organise mini-tournaments with my friends; we’d knock each other out and the winner would get a sweet. Great times.

My new game for this week was Killer 7 on the Playstation 2. I bought it at some point last year thinking that this is a game of some reverence from the reknowned developer Suda51, and therefore must be a good game. It certainly succeeded in making me wonder what in the world it’s all about. I just about understand the shooting and I understand why it’s on rails, but I’m not quite getting the significance of the different characters, and why they’re being guided through the game by a guy in a red fetish suit who feels the need to constantly tell me I’m in a tight spot. Maybe I haven’t had enough time with it yet, and if I give it more time the plot might hook me in a little more. We’ll see how it works out but it’s not like I’ve got nothing else to be playing!

Very hard game!

I had a go with a couple of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I tried out Zaxxon, having heard it mentioned several times on Metal Jesus’ Youtube channel. It’s an isometric shooter that has you moving higher or lower, rather than up and down. It was probably phenomenal at the time it was released but I find it very difficult to aim like that; I guess I’ll get used to it if I persevere. Those games were designed to be hard! So too was the original Shinobi, apparently. You can respawn as many times as you like but it doesn’t help if you keep dying in the same place over and over again! But they were what I needed at that point, which was some mindless fun.

Also I played a bit more of Orcs and Elves; I’m enjoying it so far as the difficulty of the game is just about right for me. Also, as is becoming the case, I’m finding a lot more fun in the games where it’s ok to just pick it up and have a play, rather than immersing myself in a simulation.

Backlog Beatdown: Saving my Bacon with Hogs of War

So Ebay may very well become my downfall in managing my video game backlog. I’ve been ordering all sorts of titles mainly for the PS1, inspired by the game collector and Youtube star MetalJesusRocks. I’ve bought around 15 games so far and I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the ones I’ve played, most of which I’ve previously owned at some point and it’s leaving me in a nostalgic haze.

And what a delight it was to play Hogs of War again…

The idea was best summarised by the Playstation Magazine Demo Disc it appeared on: “Imagine Worms in 3D. Now put pigs where the worms should be, and…” It is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a squad of usually five pigs. They have a limited amount of time to move around and position themselves to attack the enemy, as almost all the attacks are done from a stationary position. The hogs have a certain amount of health each, which is drained with each attack it takes, and the last team standing is the winner.

I had War Pigs by Black Sabbath going round in my
head all the way through my playthrough of this.

Much of the strategy of the game comes from choosing where to put your pigs and deciding what weapon to use. The sniper rifle, for example, does as much damage as a direct hit from a bazooka, however it can only fire in a straight line and leaves you open to a follow-up attack if you don’t kill your enemy straight away and are in an awkward position. The bazooka has area-of-effect damage and can be fired over terrain, but requires you to ‘charge’ your attack to the appropriate amount of power you need for the shot; if you don’t get this right your accuracy will suffer and you’ll very likely miss your shot entirely. Deciding what to use, when to use it, and where to use it from is the key to getting through some of the harder levels of the game.

The game has a campaign mode, where it puts you in a linear series of 25 levels taking over the continent of Saustralasia. Your hogs are somewhat limited in what they can do at first, but you gain ‘medals’ throughout the game as rewards for completing levels and surviving, and you use these to upgrade your pigs. You can take them down a Heavy Weapons route, or Espionage, Engineering and Medic. You can choose them to suit your play style if you want, but you’ll find it much easier to have two of each (you start with a total of 8 hogs) and swap them in and out of your squad as you need to. A fourth promotion brings them up to Commando level, which specialises in all weapons, and the final level is Hero, who can use more or less all weapons and has a few special ones to work with as well.

The true strength of this game is its sense of humour. Your team of pigs is selected from one of 6 ‘Nations,’ very stereotypically based on the English, French, German, American, Russian and Japanese. They all make amusing and borderline-racist remarks when they make their attack in hilariously overblown accents. Plus the cut-scenes, usually “Training” videos, are funny in their uselessness. The whole thing is capped off by having many of the voice-overs done by the sadly-missed Rik Mayall, whose performance brings the cheesy lines and camp over-acting to life.

The game challenges me at the right level; it’s tough enough in places but the campaign took me around 15 hours to get all the way through and that’s quite enough for me. The AI sometimes makes some very strange decisions indeed, and the controls feel clunky – I suspect this was a quite deliberate design decision that adds to the feel of the game. After all, guns are hard enough to use at the best of times, never mind trying to do it with trotters!

I love this game; I regretted selling it years ago and I’ll certainly be hanging on to it for a good long while this time. Maybe I’m getting old, but I found myself thinking around half-way through my play-through that we just don’t get this kind of game in the mainstream these days. Turn-based strategy games are still something of a niche, and in a Triple-A release, the edgy dialogue would be focus-tested out of the game before you’d even got on to Rik Mayall’s booking agent. Plus, it’s fighting pigs; not relatable in any obvious way (though the game has a surprising amount to say about the futility of war!) and a ridiculous concept. You won’t see this on any Youtube advertisement, and if people still make games like this, then they are consigned to the depths of what is now called Indie Gaming. A bit sad, really.

*EDIT*

Chances are some of you may now be thinking: "Well, this seems pretty good, I'll give it a go." If you do, be advised the PC version of this has slightly better graphics and is inferior in all other respects. The main problem with it is that the enemy pigs don't move, they just stand and fire. This is not a bug but was deliberately coded into the game, and I'd like to find out why, because it should be coded out again with extreme force. It removes any challenge from the game and you're basically just playing a shooting gallery. Get it for the PlayStation, or the handhelds if you can.