Last Week's Games: Forbidden Island, Dominoes, Misty, New Super Mario Bros U

This week I have been sorting out some thing with the new house; it’s an ongoing project and has left very little time for playing games! Most of the games I’ve played this week have been board games, which is just as well really, since as you all saw last week, I’ve got quite a few to get through…

There's just something about that tin...

The most significant one for me and Kirsty was Forbidden Desert, which we played a few nights ago. This is a game in which you play a team of explorers who have crash-landed in a city buried by sand, and have to race against time and the weather to find the four parts of a flying machine that can get you to safety. Once we’d figured out the game mechanics, how to find the various parts and what to do with them, we beat the game on its easiest setting – though not before an extremely tense moment where we would both die of thirst if we drew one more Sun card!

I’m a fan of Matt Leacocks’s board games, and the very distinct style of mechanic that comes with them. I also like the co-operative nature of the games, as I often find with board games that the winner comes down to the level of experience a player has with a game – not so when it’s a shared objective. As we played Forbidden Desert for the first time, we found ourselves making the comparison with Pandemic, and realising that we were probably enjoying the Forbidden series more. Are the Forbidden games better than Pandemic, which since its release has spawned a second edition, two Legacy games and several spin-offs including the obligatory Cthulu version? That’s a matter of opinion. But where Pandemic can be a stress-inducing headache where you never have quite enough in the tank to do everything that needs to be done to stop a global pandemic, (not to mention that the subject matter of Pandemic is a little on the nose these days!) the Forbidden games appear to be more of an Indiana Jones-style pulp-adventure. There’s not quite as much at stake; you’re finding lost relics, and if you don’t manage to do it then you have little to blame but your own hubris in looking for them in the first place. Game mechanics are important of course, but I think in this case, the theme of the Forbidden games may prove a more enjoyable experience for us.

Watch how you're spelling Dominoes, by the way.
Otherwise all you'll get is pizza.

One of the other games we’d played, that I’d not played for a good long while, is Dominoes. We’ve all played Dominoes, but it had been a while since either me or Kirsty played it; we had to look up the rules online because our version of the game was missing the rules. (They were probably there at some point but had been lost in the mists of time.) It was an interesting experience, depending as much on luck as anything else. I won two games and Kirsty won one, but it came down to drawing the right tiles! An enjoyable game, if a little short.

We also had a go with Misty; the simple card drafting and placement game Kirsty bought me for Valentines’ day. It’s an easy enough game to play and understand but there’s a definite strategy for winning – making sure all your moving cards are placed well and go in the right order – which I’ve figured out, but Kirsty isn’t quite there yet. Also, I suspect that playing the game with multiple players would be a very different experience – hopefully we’ll be able to find out in the not-too-distant future!

You can only save at Castles, funnily enough...

Finally, when I did manage to get one of my consoles working, I had a go at New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. This competently-designed and gentle platformer is always a good one to pick up and play, and, as with many of the later Mario games, enough going on to satisfy the completionists among us! Right now, I’ll be happy to get to the end of the game, which at this point I’m not too far away from.

I also bought a new Xbox 360 so we’ll see what happens with that…

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: 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!