Last Week's Games: Monster Hunter World, Murder in the Alps, Takenoko

Three things to mention this week:

They don't present a massive challenge,
but they're hard to find!

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World on the PlayStation 4. This is the first Monster Hunter game I’ve ever played, and at this point I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems to be a role-playing game that involves hunting monsters on an island for research; that’s the basic plot. But there’s a lot going on with it, namely upgrading your equipment from parts of the monsters you have hunted, as well as the usual levelling-up progression. I’ve had a decent time with it so far, the combat system is interesting and the world is beautiful, although the most significant challenge it’s offered to me so far has come in the form of the mission where I have to kill twenty Vespoids – and that was mainly because that was the only mission where there was a real possibility of over-extending the 50-minute time limit, as I had to spend a lot of time looking around the map looking for the things!

Apart from that, the main thing I’m having to battle is the game’s insistence on being an online MMO-like experience. I haven’t got PlayStation Plus – I don’t play the kind of games that would make it worth my while. Unfortunately, Monster Hunter World doesn’t seem to want to let that go, assumes it’s connecting to PlayStation Plus when you boot it up, and even when you bypass all of that, it still talks up the multiplayer content as part of the game. Sorry, but MMORPGs are not my thing at all – if I had a group of friends who wanted to play one then maybe but playing with some random people who want to do it a lot quicker than I like to pace myself doesn’t appeal to me at all.

This one is off the... no. No. That's too obvious.

I came back to Murder in the Alps on my mobile last week too. Near to the start of the year I was playing the first run of mysteries, and I thought I’d have a go with the second. It’s basically Murder on the Orient Express – The Game, and I was engaged enough to want to get to the end of it, though the fact that it’s a hidden object game requires some suspension of disbelief. If the character has found the item she’s looking for, why does she keep looking for the other twelve? It’s like that thing people say when they’ve found something they lost: “Always the last place you look.” One might reasonably wonder if they keep on looking after they’ve found whatever they lost. In this game, that’s more or less what you’re doing!

A game about growing Bamboo, with a cute panda.
What's not to like?

The final game I played this week was a board game: Takenoko. This is a game in which you must build a garden for a panda to live in. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually really good – you have to build up the different colours of the garden in a certain configuration, grow a certain amount of bamboo in a certain place, and have the panda eat a certain set of bamboo in order to score. I played it with Kirsty, and I’ve said it before but it’s always a sign of a well-designed game when the gap between your first turn and learning how to play the game is relatively small. It only took us a few goes, and we were building gardens according to our cards, and trying to have the panda eat certain types of bamboo, this that and the other. I won in the end, but only by a point. Kirsty realised quite late in the game that her scoring cards were relatively low, where as most of mine were mid-range, which gave me more points. It was too late for her to do anything about it by then, but I considered afterwards how looking for a lot of low-scoring points cards might be a viable strategy with three or four players. I suspect that you wouldn’t want to get bogged down with higher-scoring points cards when your opponents have three or four completed ones already!

That was it for this week, I’m a little short of time next week so we’ll see what I can get done!

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein, Epic Mickey, Open TTD

I started this week with my run through Wolfenstein 3D. In my previous blog post I may have given the impression that I wasn’t fond of the game. While I stand by the remarks that none of the environments are particularly memorable, it is a competently-designed game and I am enjoying it. The levels are designed in such a way that you almost always must clear most of the level to get to the end. There are no skipping tough sections; if one part is too hard, you need to figure out a way to deal with it. Bottle-necking enemies in doorways usually works, but you also need to remember where in the level the health pick-ups and ammo packs are. Your character doesn’t pick them up straight away if he doesn’t need them but you’re likely to run in to a difficult section later that will tank both your health and ammo, and you’ll be glad that there are some pick-ups to run back to! The fact that there is no map (that I’ve been able to see!) doesn’t help but it adds to the challenge of memorising the levels.

They'll drop you in a couple of hits...

I also enjoy using the Chain Gun. This is the most powerful weapon in the game, but it has a problem with ammo conservation; it never uses less than two bullets and any amount of sustained fire will drain your ammo quickly. You’re therefore forced to fire in short bursts to take out the regular guards and save your ammo for taking down the harder opponents like the SS or Mutants. It’s a simple strategic element but is far more effective in making a challenging game than simply giving you the chain gun and letting you run wild!

We worked this bit out eventually.

Elsewhere, me and Kirsty played Epic Mickey 2 on the Xbox 360. This was a free download a few months ago, and we like Disney so we gave it a go to see what it was like. We wanted to like it, we really did, but it’s been a long time since I played a game in split-screen mode and it was very tough for all the wrong reasons. The solutions to the puzzles aren’t particularly intuitive, and the split screen restricts your field of view. We got stuck at a point where you must use one character to throw the other over a gap in the environment, and we weren’t very clear on what we had to do; it sucked all the fun out of the game, and we called it a night.

I’ve carried on with Horus Heresy: Legions; there’s a new event running now that requires you to fight a Titan. Most of the Imperial decks are Space Wolves, and I find them a lot easier to use than Custodes, and the Titan battles are easy enough, but the Player Versus Player modes are always a challenge.

Wha...? I can't even... no. No.

Finally, I came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: Open TTD. If you don’t know, this is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, one of the most memorable management games I think I’ve ever played, if only for its Jazz soundtrack! It’s a free download and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. The aim of the game is to build a transport network to supply passengers and various commodities to towns around the environment. There is also a competitive element to the game where you have other transport networks attempting the same. Now, I can build the routes, but I’m not great at micro-managing the train lines in order to get them to run efficiently, and no matter how well the signal system should work, I always end up getting one train or the other stuck. I doubt I’ll make enough money to win the game, but apparently the game ends after 100 years of game time so if I get that far, that will be an achievement!

Incidentally, it was my intention to record some footage of this to put on YouTube. Unfortunately, I can’t get my capture software to work with it, presumably because it doesn’t launch from either Steam or GOG. Still, we can always follow the blog to keep up!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Castlevania IV, Torchlight, Horus Heresy: Legions

I’ve been playing quite a few games this week, many of which I’ve never played before; let’s hope I’ve got the space to write about them all:

As with the later Doom, the chaingun eats up
a lot of ammo...

The first one was Wolfenstein 3D on my laptop. This one is often regarded as the Grandfather of first-person shooters, and while it might have been the first game that kicked off a huge part of what mainstream video games eventually became, it hasn’t aged particularly well. You run through the halls and rooms of a grey castle, shooting Nazis and collecting treasure. It works, and it is fun. The level design has a certain “Dungeons and Dragons” sensibility to it, and it’s challenging enough on the right level. But when all the levels look the same with very little variety in what you’re doing, it’s hard to think of a part of the game I’ve played that I would classify as “memorable.”

Robert Foster and Joey.

I’ve also been playing Beneath a Steel Sky. This was a game that I got for free on my GOG account, for some reason, and had never touched it in that time. From the occasional coverage from Jim Sterling, I knew that it was a Point and Click adventure, but unsure as to whether I had the patience, I didn’t bother with it for the longest time. But I’m playing it now, and it’s a pretty good adventure; it was developed by Revolution who also did Broken Sword, so it was interesting to see the contextual mouse system being developed, even if it was in its infancy back then. It’s pretty good, amusing in the right places, but it has the same problem that most games of its time had – if you can’t work out the puzzle, the whole game grinds to a halt. This has happened to me at least once, where I had to use a guide to figure out what to do next, only to find I had to talk to a character I had no practical reason to talk to at that point. Nonetheless, I hope I get to the end of it!

Hands up who remembers THAT music...

On the WiiU, I’ve been playing Super Castlevania IV. This is a game I played a while ago, as my mate Matt had it on the Super Nintendo; it’s arguably as good as the Castlevania series ever achieved and certainly an entertaining game after all this time. A nice variety of enemies, tricky platforming sections, and bosses that you should never be able to beat makes for a fun time, marred only slightly by some cheap deaths and odd checkpoint placement. It works especially well with the WiiU’s internal saving system, and I’m enjoying playing through it again, if only to give myself some ideas on what I might develop in my own DnD campaigns in future!

Spiders. It had to be spiders, didn't it?

I also played Torchlight on the Xbox 360. This was a free download with Games with Gold, and while I’d already bought it on the PC I thought the Xbox would be a more convenient platform to give it a go. It’s a dungeon-basher, with a lot of things to loot, an interesting “Pet” mechanic and a linear and standard storyline. It’s been fun so far, but it hasn’t got the depth of many of the RPGs I play, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much more than getting through to the end of the game. I’ll stick at it for a bit, but I don’t know, I might have wanted a bit more than this. Still, I didn’t pay for this version of it, so I guess it’s OK!

Custodes. A pain in the bum to run or fight.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Horus Heresy: Legions on my phone. It took me a while to get back in to it, but I got there in the end! I’ve joined a new lodge as well – emperors Finest. The reason for this was that my previous lodge, the Emperor’s Daggers, was full of dead accounts. I’d love to be able to win some points for the team in the events, but the Adeptus Custodes cards are very fiddly and I’m not sure yet how I can use them effectively.

Let’s see what next week brings, and whether I can finish some of these games!

Last Week's Games: Wordscape, Rayman, Spelunky and Persona 5.

This week’s been an interesting one. Probably the most notable thing that’s happened is that I had to have my laptop reset to factory settings. It was time for its yearly tune-up and there had been some things going wrong with it; I was told that the best thing to do would be to go for a factory reset. I backed up all the important information; anything that couldn’t be re-downloaded at some stage in the future. I had some faff when I got it back because some of the C++ redistributable files were missing and that got in the way of installing and running, among other things, GOG Galaxy, but I got that sorted and now I’m back up and running. Sort of.

Can you work out the third word?

I now have a blank slate, so to speak. I’ve bought more games for the PC then I’m ever going to fit on one hard disc, and I’ve recently been roughly 30% away from capacity and didn’t feel like pushing my luck by adding to the number of games I’d had installed. At this point, none of them are installed and I can start again from scratch. But like a child with too many toys on Christmas Morning, I don’t know which to play first! Maybe I’ll use this opportunity to play some games I bought but never installed, maybe I won’t. But it’s an interesting experience!

I have found time to play some other bits and pieces as I’ve been going along, though. I’ve made a discovery on my mobile, Wordscapes. If you haven’t played this then you’ve seen an advert for it; it’s the word game where you make several words out of six letters. I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun with this, as the answers are always there in front of you – you just need to know where to look. It’s also nice being able to ask my girlfriend for help, which she’s always happy to provide if she knows the answer too.

I’ve also been playing Rayman Legends on my Switch, when I’ve had the time. As I spent the first part of the week in London, I was thankful for the Switch’s portability! Apart from that there’s not much else to say; it’s one of those games where you can easily do a few levels at a time and leave it at that.

All the characters handle the same, but this one's got
a particularly impressive set of whiskers.

On a similar pick-up-and-play theme, I had a go at Spelunky on the Xbox 360. I’ve had this game for a while, but I haven’t played it much because I enjoyed Rogue Legacy more. But having played neither game for a while I found myself strangely engaged. I’m no better at it now, and only got as far as the Jungle (for the first time!) before something killed me straight away. But I’m glad I’m enjoying it!

Couldn't tell you what's going on here...

Finally, on the PS4, I played a game that I’ve owned for nearly a year and (mainly because I knew it was a long-form RPG that would need some time investment,) hadn’t got around to playing yet: Persona 5. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn’t, in fact, going to have to wait ages for the game to install before I could play it, and was able to get started straight away. I played the first couple of hours of it and spent most of that time wondering what it was all about! It’s very Japanese in style, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it can be a little alienating if you’re not familiar with the culture. You play as a high-school student who, on going to his new school, finds himself between two worlds and must find a way to escape while dealing with the problems the alternative worlds present. That’s all I can say at this point as I didn’t get very far. The actual gameplay consists mainly of exploration and combat so far, and the combat is turn-based with certain enemies weak to certain kinds of attacks. But with the game free from the constraints of western RPGs, some of the combinations aren’t so obvious, and I have a feeling that this will be a lot of trial and error for me!

Backlog Beatdown: A Chicken with a Sword in Cluckles' Adventure

Cluckles’ Adventure came to my attention when I used to watch the Co-Optional Podcast with TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and their guests. This game appeared in the releases section where they did a quick run-down of the games that were scheduled for launch; Cluckles came up in one of those and I found the premise fascinating.

Just to reiterate: A chicken with a sword.

Cluckles’ Adventure is a delightful little game about a chicken with a sword, who has to travel around 108 levels in three different environments saving the captured chicks and killing the minions. Cluckles can jump, double jump, slide down walls and do a kind of dash attack, and that’s basically it. You can only take one hit before you die and have to start the level again, although you can pick up armour and a shield later on to allow you to take more hits. These are the tools you have to complete your main objective, which is to get through the levels. This allows you to proceed, but to truly beat a level you have to collect all the chicks as well.

As a game, Cluckles is pretty basic – but therein lies its charm. The level design is for the most part on point – entertaining enough paths to the level exit, often full of secret areas that reward exploration, and rarely more than a minute or two long so having to return to the start of the level when you die is not a major issue. Your move set might seem rather limited for a game released in 2017, but “how do I get past this bit?” becomes a very different question when the answer lies in one of the few options available to you right from the start. I’ve found that most games that don’t aim for realism in their art style age pretty well, and the graphics in Cluckles are pixel art, designed to resemble an old 8-bit game. This is deliberately designed to replicate an art style that didn’t age well, but Cluckles is a fine example of it’s use, and will certainly look no worse in five years! The sound has the old-style chip-tune bloops and whistles as well, and while the sound track isn’t particularly memorable, it does the job.

Presumably this screenshot is from the mobile port...

The game is a joy to play. The controls are tight and responsive, (I used the Steam controller for my play through because I didn’t want to brutalise my laptop keys with a platform game!) it’s genuinely challenging in places, and the levels are a lot of fun to beat. It’s simple enough that almost anybody can pick it up and have a go, and there are no adult-level themes that would restrict its audience. It’s probably the best game I own for being able to pick it up and have a bit of a play: There’s no contrived game system to learn, no levelling up or extra abilities, no incompetently-coded difficulty spikes, no overly elaborate plot, no belligerent multiplayer communities. It’s just you, a chicken and a sword, for however long you want to play it – and you’ll have a great time doing it.

Cluckles falters only slightly in the somewhat anticlimactic end game. Apart from the fact that the last few levels are slightly longer, there isn’t much differentiation between what you’re doing at the start of the game and what you’re doing at the end. This isn’t much of an issue; if anything it adds to the game’s pick-up-and-play mentality as you can easily come back to it after months and be none the worse for it. But there are no boss battles to speak of, no extra challenge apart from what the level presents, and there’s very little in-game reward for beating the game. None of this detracts from what is overall a very well-designed game – but people who are fans of the old-school platformers that it’s clearly trying to replicate may be expecting a little bit more.

Cluckles’ Adventure manages to present the core experience of video games without augmenting it. It throws out the bathwater, keeps the baby, and while not everybody will see it through to the end, it’s worth a look – you’ll enjoy whatever time you put in to it.

Final Score: 4/5. Great game.

Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Last Week's Games: The Horus Heresy: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Lemmings

I spent the vast majority of last week enthralled with the Horus Heresy: Legions. I mentioned this last week so if you want to know what kind of game this is have a look at that, but for now I’m going to mention my progression. I’m getting quite good at the game now, and I can often hold my own against all but the toughest of decks. I built a few decks around Garviel Loken and whatever the daily mission objective was, but then it occurred to me to build a deck out of Loken and a larger percentage of Chaos Cards – the latter can be applied to any faction, as no legion involved with the Horus Heresy escaped corruption! This works reasonably well, if not particularly consistently. The Chaos Cards have some powerful effects but the higher level cards are also quite unpredictable, and some are as likely to do some damage to you as well as your opponent. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying the deck!

Garro has a cool healing ability, but the rest of his
force will need to hit pretty hard to win...

I also built a deck out of Saul Tarvitz and the Mechanicum. The Emperor’s Children has been an interesting faction to run since their benefits are usually tied to perfection – while powerful in their own right, the Emperor’s Children cards often have a special bonus applied when they use all of your remaining energy to play them. Tarvitz’s effect of lowering the energy you need to play a card by one makes this more flexible, and combined with the Mechanicum, who have some very powerful machines at their disposal, they are a force to be reckoned with. It doesn’t make much difference to my win:loss ratio, but it’s a refreshing change of pace that I need sometimes.

I rarely give a free-to-play game much attention, but I’ve put more time in to Legions than a significant number of games I’ve actually paid for, so it must be doing something for me!

One of the best In Medias Res beginnings I've ever seen in
a video game. You don't even know the hero's name at this point.

On the Switch, I continued with Final Fantasy VII, getting to the point where you leave Midgar after rescuing Aeris from the Shinra building. I’ve really enjoyed playing it again, and even more so now that I’ve been playing pen-and-paper role-playing games for a while and have a much better idea of a class-based system. This isn’t used obviously in Final Fantasy VII, but it’s helpful to remember what everyone is supposed to be doing and, apart from a couple of times when I’ve made a mistake with regard to what materia everyone has when I have the option to change it, I’ve been doing quite well.

Who's done Lemmings before?

Finally I’ve been playing a game that was among the first video games I ever played and has now been updated to a mobile port: Lemmings. I had a great time with this game when I was very young – to this day, I still remember my Dad laughing at the first level without really knowing what to do – and I’ve missed playing it ever since the Acorn Computer we played it on stopped working. This mobile port is not a re-make of the original game. Instead, it is an updated version of the game to bring it in line with mobile gaming. It is, for example, no longer possible to give instructions to individual lemmings. Instead, the game works on a grid-based system, where you click the square you want to affect with an instruction, and the first lemming to get there will do it. For example, if you want a lemming to dig through a square, you touch the square and press the button when it comes up. The lemming will either dig across it, or down it, depending on where it happens to be in relation to the square you’ve clicked.

It works quite well, though it lacks some accuracy that would be useful. There are certain situations where you have to work to avoid traps, and it would be really helpful to just get one lemming to where you need to be. The only way to really do this is to block the other lemmings, and you have to time it exactly right or you’ll let more through than you meant to.

So, a fun-filled week this week! Let’s see what next week brings…

 

Last Week's Games: Crossword and Thoughts on Hobby Games

Does anybody know?

Time has not been on my side this week with regard to gaming. Work, family and band commitments has meant that the time I managed to find to play games was restricted to this crossword game on my phone, which is a great little app to download and play every so often. It is sometimes quite strange that I can look at a clue for days and not know what it means, then come back to it a week later and have the meaning perfectly clear in my head!

There’s really not that much more to say about Crosswords, though, so instead of that I’m going to talk about hobby games for a bit. There’s quite a bit to say, so this blog is a little longer than usual. I’ve used the tag line on this blog a number of times, and I thought for today I would do a piece about exactly what I mean when I say hobby games:

They’re games that you usually play on a table top with a number of people, normally with some sort of tactile element to them such as cards, dice or moving pieces. And I do enjoy playing them, when I get the chance!

The first board game I can remember playing was Snakes and Ladders; still popular to this very day! While it is a very simple game in terms of its rules and structure, it’s a wonderful little way to engage with people, particularly children. My family played it a lot when I was young, and continued to do so all throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of playing Cluedo, and my brother could play Monopoly at a very early age! 

One of the few times I completed a 40K army.

Getting in to games as a hobby came about when I was thirteen and started collecting Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. I still enjoy it to this very day, over twenty years later, although I can never escape the feeling that I’m still finding my feet with it to a large extent! I don’t paint or play games with my models anywhere near enough to develop an instinctive knowledge of the games, rules or painting techniques, but it hasn’t gone anywhere and I’ve enjoyed it on and off through most of my life. I even worked for Games Workshop at one point, although I wasn’t particularly good at that either.

But it’s been within the last ten years or so that I’ve really taken an interest in hobby games as a whole. It started with the Games Workshop games, of course, but then my mate Dave introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh, and while collectable card games are probably the aspect of hobby games I enjoy the least, it was always fun to play with him every now and then. Around the same time I discovered Fantasy Flight games, and played some of their games over the following years before discovering other game developers and publishers. I had always wanted to find out what playing Dungeons and Dragons was like, so I bought a starter set, found a public group of people who meet every week to play Role Playing Games and got involved with that; that’s been a massive part of my social life for a long time! I also started building up a large collection of board games that, while few people seeing it for the first time have a clue what it’s all about, they do find them interesting to look at!

I always enjoy this one!

These days, I play hobby games as and when I can find the time, which currently is not often. I’m fortunate enough to have a steady roleplaying group that I meet with once a month, and I play a few games with my girlfriend and her friends now and then. I make the UK Games Expo an important date on my calendar every year! But I haven’t got the structure in my life at the moment to attend hobby shops and groups regularly. Still, the games are there if I need them!

Hobby games are in something of a “Golden Age” at the moment, where new games are coming out every month and it’s no longer the exclusive domain of unsociable nerds. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of it, and it can be quite tricky to know what I’m talking about, so I thought I’d give you a break-down of what I consider to be the four main categories, and my stake in them:

·        Board Games

·        Collectable Card Games

·        Role-Playing Games

·        War Games

It was my original intention to write it all in this blog post but I found the scope of that was too large for the format my blogs usually take, so I’m going to write them a bit at a time instead, and release them periodically. That should be a bit more interesting!

Last Week's Games: Dungeon Master, Colonization, Murder in the Alps, Chainsaw Warrior, Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords

I started this week having a go with a game I haven’t played for a while: Dungeon Master. Some of you may remember I started playing this game back in April, and I didn’t get very far with it! This was partly due to the clunky nature of the game mechanics being a lot more work than fun in many cases, and also, looking back at the date stamp of the blogs I did last year, I discovered Eternal Crusade a couple of days later. I was a little better at the combat last time, and I understand how to work the spells now, but the latter still isn’t going very well. This could be because I’ve picked four heroes that don’t have a lot of mana about them; apparently spells are a crucial part of beating the later game so it might mean another re-start to pick a more balanced group of heroes!

Always more fun with a funny name...

Later in the week I tried Colonization again, and after a couple of hours of play I did what I always do whenever I play a 4X game – realise I’ve messed it up completely and will need to start again. I anticipated this and kept things fresh by entering my name as a famous person from the relevant country every time I do. England is the obvious one as I know some of the names, and I had the entire English Colony of America headed up by Rowan Atkinson at one point. In my current play-through that I’m almost certainly going to have to abandon, the Dutch are being led by Ruud van Nistelrooy. It’s completely useless but it’s fun to think about!

A murderer amongst you... but who is it?

I carried on with Murder in the Alps as and when I had the time, and ended up beating the third stage which I think wraps up the whole of the trilogy. Currently there is one other episode available and another four planned, according to the list of levels you can choose from, and I’m quite glad that I got to the end of an entire trilogy of levels – getting to the end of a story-based game on a mobile device is no mean feat – without having spent any money on it. I wonder if it’s worth doing a review at this point.

10/10 for style, though.

On Saturday I had a go with another Games Workshop licensed game: Chainsaw Warrior. I bought this in a Steam sale at some point and I didn’t pay a lot of money for it, which is for the best because it’s not that good of a game. It’s based on a board game that’s dungeon-bashing with cards, except that games have come on a long way since 1987 when it was released and it shows. The point of dungeon-bashing games is to go in with as good a chance of winning as possible; apart from selecting your equipment at the start of the game there’s almost nothing you can do to affect this and most of it relies on Random Chance. I know that with a Games Workshop game that’s like complaining that grass is green, but it doesn’t make for a hugely engaging experience. Thankfully it doesn’t last long!

I actually got to run a dragon. A proper dragon,
that fights and everything! My players killed it.

Finally on Sunday I carried on with Rise of the Runelords, with Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve been running this campaign for over two years now and I’m pleased that a solid core of the group that originally started it are happy to keep playing! Currently we’re at Fortress of the Stone Giants, and I’m really enjoying running this dungeon. What I’ve found with the current edition of the game is that when you have a group of players who know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to optimising their characters, it’s very difficult to frighten them with encounters they can easily beat. Some of the monsters I’ve been putting them up against - Deathwebs, Redcaps and modified Stone Giants – have been capable of doing them some serious harm, and I’ve been able to use terrain and traps to a good effect as well. The result is that it feels less of a grind for my players, and it’s a lot more fun for me.

Last Week's Games: Murder in the Alps, Super House of Dead Ninjas, Colonization, Ultra Street Fighter 2.

Last week, I managed to beat Regicide (see my review here) and after finishing a game that took me 60 hours to complete, I got right on a ‘Pick Up and Play’ kick, where I play a few games for a bit and move on. I know what games I ought to have been playing – Kingdom Hearts isn’t going to be finishing itself, and all the games I’ve bought as part of a series I want to collect would probably be a bit more significant if I played them every now and again. But picking up another 40+ hour campaign is something I’m rarely in the mood to do after beating a game of any significant length, (not that it should have taken me anywhere near that long to beat Regicide but somehow that’s where we are.)

I bet it was always cold though.

I initially looked to my phone, specifically Murder in the Alps. I discussed this last week, along with the reasons I was enjoying the game and a little cross with its payment model. However, I carried on playing and watching videos, getting to the end of the first two stories. It’s pretty good in an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery way, although all of the working out is done in the script – all you’re doing is finding the hidden items. The first story was pretty good, the second was ok but disappointingly short; I’m wondering whether Nordcurrent frontloaded their main efforts into the first story to engage people, and put less effort into the rest? I suspect we’ll find out as we’re going along.

A brief moment to collect your thoughts, then...

I tried a game on the PC that I’d been thinking I should look at for some time – Super House of Dead Ninjas. This is a fast-paced Rogue-like game where you play as a Ninja jumping down the rooms of a tower, slashing, bombing and, er, shuriken-ing your enemies as you go through. It reminded me of Rogue Legacy, unsurprisingly, but this has a much faster pace. Generally speaking it’s a solid experience, and does a lot to promote the “Just one more go!” vibe! As a pick up and play game, it’s excellent, though I don’t know if it will keep my interest into the long term.

Hopefully I'll build a map like this at some point.

One of the games that came up on Rock Paper Shotgun’s 50 Greatest Strategy Games was Sid Meier’s Colonization, and I’ve had that game for a while so I gave it a go. This purports to be an offshoot of the early Civilisation games, focusing more specifically on the period of history when what we now call America was colonized, up to the point where they achieved independence from European control. It was described as a far more focussed experience than Civilisation, and I believe it; rather than tell a sweeping tale of the dawn of the earth to the end of the Space Race for whatever that’s worth, Colonization focuses on a specific part of history that defined the people in the country that made the game, and educated me (I’d never really thought about the War for Independence before.) On the other hand, it’s an old game and not that easy to play; if you don’t know what to do in what order then you can fall flat on your face quite quickly. It’s my intention to keep on with this, but I’ll be using a lot of guides to get through it!

Shocking.

Finally, when I had slightly under an hour to spare last night, I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2 on my Switch. I can usually take or leave fighting games, but Street Fighter is probably the ultimate pick up and play game if you’re playing in single player mode, and a nice way to fill 40 minutes. I set the difficulty as high as it would go and played through most of the game as Ryu without losing even once, which I was quite pleased with. I eventually beat it as Vega, and was quite pleased to see his ending sequence substantially different from what I was used to (Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, where it was a text scroll.) It’s not a new game but most of the updates are in the right places!

Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

For the second time in as many weeks I find myself apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.

Well you're about to die, sonflower...

If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!

Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly 60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights, I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the week!

I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly engaged!

Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle
since that's who you play as.

However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an “energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!

I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide, XCOM, 8-Ball Pool, Crossword, Sniper 3D Assassin

An interesting week this week. Six games to talk about!

I progressed with Kingdom Hearts, beating the Deep Jungle and making it as far as Agrabah before I stopped. At this point you have to do some back-tracking to allow the Gummi Ship to fly to other worlds, but I’ll take this opportunity to talk about an element of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 that wasn’t in the original – The Gummi Missions. This takes the form of certain objectives when flying the ship between worlds; like scoring a certain number of points, or taking out a certain number of enemies with a particular kind of gun equipped. I consider this an improvement, as previously there was no real reason to do the Gummi flights other than to get to the next world. It gives something extra for the completionists, and I would love to unlock them all.

This took me a few goes!

I also continued with Regicide, finally beating the end of Act 2 that I had been stuck on for ages! I progressed several missions in to Act 3 as well, the game being good at promoting the “just one more go” mentality, and it was quite late into the night before I realised I should stop! The screenshot was one I did myself (normally I pull them off Google Image Search,) because of something going on with Facebook over the weekend. I’m in a group called Gaming Dads, which given the levels of nastiness that can plague the internet is a really nice group to be in. Sadly, one of the members recently lost his partner after an illness, and her funeral was on Saturday. To show our support, we were supposed to upload a screenshot of what we were all playing over the weekend, with the tags: #tucker #wegotyoubrother. I chose this game because it was most convenient to do it on my laptop; I’m glad I finally found a use for Dxtory in the end!

I was ill on Thursday and had some time off work, and I played a bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I continued a game I’d started in November, and it didn’t go very well. In the space of a few missions I’d lost some of my best soldiers. It might warrant yet another restart but I’d been doing pretty well up until then, and I’d had to deal with a massive setback during the one time I beat the game so you never know.

An old picture but does the job!

But I was very interested in the games I’d been playing on mobile devices! I’ve been playing 8-Ball Pool a lot this week, and I think of all the games I downloaded onto my Kindle Fire 7, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most, simply because there’s a measure of skill involved rather than just clicking on things until you can’t click on things any more.

I downloaded onto my phone a couple of other games: Crossword, which is as it sounds – crossword puzzles. I’ve never been much good at this but I’m sticking to the easy puzzles for now, and the game does help you: The clues you solve correctly lock and have a beige colour on them so you know, and you can ask for a hint. You have a limited number of these but you get three every time you beat a puzzle so that’s not a major issue. Sometimes I use a website to solve the clues, which might be considered cheating, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to find different ways of saying things. It might help next time I play Scrabble!

Also I’ve been playing Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Shooter. This is a game where you’re given a target to shoot at, and you have to kill them with a sniper rifle or suitable weapon. I’ve been having fun with it but I’ve reached the point in the game where I have to start paying for things in order to carry on, as I need to buy a new weapon which I can only do with diamonds. I’m not sure how long I’m going to put up with being forced to watch ad after ad in order to keep enjoying it!

So, a busy week!