The Tenth Year Anniversary of my Gaming Blog...

The thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: “Strewth, I’ve been doing this blog for 10 years!”

My coverage on Batman Begins
remains my most-read blog...

For ten years, I’ve been talking to you about games I’ve been playing, wins, losses, video games, my thoughts on game design, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a long time to keep something going, and while the return isn’t necessarily representative of what you might expect for someone who spends that long on the internet (at the time of writing I’m coming up on 60,000 views across the entire ten years and 325 blogs, and it’s never represented any financial reward) I’ve enjoyed it, people I share it with enjoy it, people I don’t share it with enjoy it, so in some capacity or another, I’ve kept doing it.

My speculation on the 6th edition of 40K was
probably my biggest blog for comments...

Mind you, it did take me a long time to come up with a regular format for the blog that I was happy with. My original intention was to document the games I was playing in Games Workshop, as it still was at the time. I did it for a while, but I didn’t go in regularly enough to blog it in a consistent routine, and even when I did, it sucked some of the fun out of the games knowing that I was going to have to write about them later. The same applied to when I tried to create a journal for the Roleplaying games I was just starting to get involved with; documenting my first character’s journey through Pathfinder’s Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv was entertaining at first but quickly became a lot more work than fun. It didn’t help that I was trying to do the same thing with a music blog every time I did a gig, which meant I was doing a lot of writing! Funnily enough, even though more people I knew in person read my music blog than my gaming one, my gaming blog was engaging a far wider audience. I kept writing on and off about some hobby games I was playing, and some video games I managed to beat, even writing about a game of pool at one point, but it took a long time before I found a format that I was happy to do regularly.

I covered Lego Star Wars in the
original No Game New Year...

Then in 2014 something happened: I came across a Youtube video from a guy called Brian Castleberry who had been talking to his friend Norm Caruso a.k.a. The Gaming Historian about a concept called No Game New Year. The idea was that they had built up a huge backlog of games, some of which they rarely played, so they set themselves a challenge and invited others to join: Don’t buy any new video games for 2014. Instead of that, we were supposed to play through all our old games, keep the ones we liked, get rid of the ones we didn’t, and really try to tackle our backlog. There were roughly 30 people on board to begin with, but by the time the year ended, only a few of us remained, including me, though I had come close to falling off the edge by erroneously buying a new copy of Final Fantasy VII! I don’t know how much of their backlogs the other people involved in the challenge managed to clear, but what I did notice was that without permission to buy new games, they were actually playing games a lot less – and doing more things with their families. That can only be a positive thing! Part of the challenge of No Game New Year was that we were all supposed to update each other on how we were doing with either a video, blog post or even just a Facebook status, (we had a group for it which I still share even to this very day!) so I tried to do the blog in a weekly format. It worked for a while, but I eventually found myself with very little to say without repeating myself, so I changed the format slightly and only wrote about games when I’d beaten them. This is the format of what eventually became Backlog Beatdown, my longest-running series that I created after No Game New Year.

Age of Sigmar was a refreshing change...

I went through some significant life changes in the following few years. I’d taken up singing lessons, started a self-employed music business, became a regular at some of the open mics in Wolverhampton and became a Dad. I found a lot of my spare time was taken up with all of that, so I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in hobby shops as I had prior; most of the games I played were video games and while I kept the roleplaying groups going a little longer, I had decided not to write about those experiences anymore. The fact that I’d bought what was at the time a reasonably powerful laptop capable of playing PC games was also conducive to this, so I kept my blog going with Backlog Beatdown.

Mordheim's been one of my favourite games
of the last decade...

As part of my quest to try to play all my games, I found myself listening to the Co-Optional podcast while I played, featuring TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and a guest for the episode. It was a three hour show in which they would all talk about, amongst other things, the games they had been playing that week. And somewhere around September 2017, I found myself thinking “wow, people are actually interested in this!” and decided to have a go at it myself. Thus, I began my biggest and most popular series of blogs: Last Week’s Games.

Painting this boxed set was an achievement...

The idea was simple: write down what games I’d played in the week and find something to say about them. This usually amounted to two or three games every week, and if I found anything to say about the painting or hobby gaming I’d been doing that week, I’d write that down too. I’d try to release them on Mondays, (regular readers will know that it doesn’t always work out that way!) and run it as a weekly series that I’d share on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to include some of the hobby games, including the one Roleplaying group I managed to stay in. Quite quickly, though, I needed to put a restriction on how much I was writing, because I didn’t want it to become more work than fun. What I decided to do was keep the blogs to exactly 700 words each: this is about a side of A4 paper and is about as much time anybody has to read anything. I quite enjoy editing the blogs to fit in with the word counts, and I rarely stray from it. It was a challenge to do this every week without repeating myself, and I didn’t always manage it, but I did find a massive uptake in my readership – I was getting a lot more views with regular content than I had before. Most of them were from overseas, funnily enough; Russia and Italy are two countries that often have people reading my blog!

TotalBiscuit - Gone but never forgotten.

This carried on for about a year, up to the point when I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time. I found myself needing to re-balance what I was doing in my spare time, owing to the adjustments I had to make to accommodate both mine and my partner’s working patterns and my daughter, to whom I was able to provide a home for the first time. But in the new year of 2019, I started the blog going again and apart from a couple of wobbles where I found myself caught up in all sorts of things with little to say about gaming, I have kept it going ever since.

Murder in the Alps - an interesting, if
not-well-paced mobile game...

At this point I would like to interject that around 2014, as a result of No Game New Year, I created a list of all my Xbox 360 games. I’ve developed it to include all my systems and games and keep track of how many I own, have played, beaten and 100%ed on an Excel spreadsheet. The original plan was to share it on the blog; I never did this because looking at the numbers is frankly embarrassing. But it did give some structure to what I’ve been playing and when, rather than blindly buying and trying games every so often!

Pandemic became oddly prophetic...

All of this makes me wonder where to take the blog from here. I’ll keep Last Week’s Games going, I still enjoy that, and I’ll keep Backlog Beatdown going when I remember to do it! (At the time of writing I still need to write a review to Gears of War 2 which I played last Autumn.) But the way my life and hobbies have changed over the last couple of years has given me some different things to say. For a start, I don’t talk about painting on Last Week’s Games anymore; I put that in a separate blog called Last Month’s Painting – I don’t paint anywhere near enough to make it a weekly series!

Nice to let games become
a family thing...

Also, having huge stacks of games around my house is all well and good, but here I find myself with more to say about how that relates to my daughter. She was pre-school age when I first bought her a board game, and she enjoys playing with me. It’s very interesting to observe her level of engagement, and her enthusiasm for certain games over others developing as we’re going along, to the point where it’s something she wants to do to entertain herself, rather than something she wants to do with me specifically – though that’s still an important point. I’m at the age now where many of my contemporaries are starting families – in many cases already have – and they’re wondering how their hobbies and interests can relate to their children. It’s nice to be able to talk about my experiences in that area, and it may become something I focus on in the future, but I certainly don’t want to make a job out of playing with my daughter so I’ll approach that with a certain amount of care.

The UK Game Expo is a lovely opportunity
to see my long lost friends from Swindon...

There were some plans that fell by the wayside. I wanted to start attending tournaments and blog that, and I tried doing a blog series called Tournaments and Tribulations. Unfortunately, that never really got off the ground, as my week allows little time to rock up at tournaments and spend weekends playing games! My experiences in this area are mainly confined to games I’ve played at the UK Games Expo. I also wanted to do a series of blogs where I go through the campaigns of some of the Dungeon Crawling games that I own (Space Hulk, Descent etc.) That never happened either, though it would have been a mission to coordinate even before Covid-19 became a thing we were all going to have to get used to hearing about! I’d still like to try it out at some point though.

The Horus Heresy: Legions is a game that
took up a fair amount of my time.

It’s also been suggested to me that I record video footage of games I’ve been playing and put them up on Youtube or something similar. I have thought about it and even had a go at streaming The Horus Heresy: Legions at some point. The problem is that making videos takes a fair amount of work and time that I don’t necessarily have, and the equipment I own isn’t up to it – I can’t get a decent framerate out of my laptop if I’m running recording software on it; domestic laptops aren’t designed for that, and I don’t have the hardware necessary to record footage from my consoles either. I could address both of those issues, but that would be a large investment to make for not necessarily a huge return – most games I play are several years old, and common interest in them has waned.

And there’s the fact that somewhere, out in the world, there’s a small sub-set of people who still like to read the written word every now and again…

Backlog Beatdown: Oh, oh, oh, Oh Borderlands we rruuunnn!!! (Sing to A Sort of Homecoming by U2)

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s because I’ve been playing Borderlands and it took me absolutely ages to complete…

I bought Borderlands in late 2013, before I started No Game New Year. I can’t remember why, most likely because I’d heard it was good and I needed a game to make up a special offer of buy two get one free. Borderlands is a first-person shooter action game with role-playing-game elements. The latter only applies in the woolliest sense; you have quests, variable weapons and armour, and you level up. The obvious comparison is with Fallout 3, but while Fallout prides itself on being gritty and realistic, Borderlands is very much high adventure and silly. And it took me a while to get in to it. I started the game several times and would get as far as the Pisswash Hurdle before I’d start wishing I was playing XCOM. But this time, after watching The Completionist get through the game, I thought I’d give it another go.

This time, I was better equipped to deal with it: Borderlands is a game best enjoyed in short bursts. You can have fun shooting up Skags, Bandits and Spiderants (your main variety of enemy for the first three quarters of the game) and doing fetch quests, and I was enjoying myself. But the pacing is rubbish. For every quest that advances the plot, there are several more side quests that make you feel like you’re jumping through hoops.

I chose Lilith for my playthrough. Her Phasewalk
ability got me out of a lot of tight situations!

The obvious counter-argument here is “Why don’t you skip all the side quests you don’t need to do and advance the plot?” Well, apart from looking for the achievement points, I’m in two minds about this: The game would have been better paced if there weren’t so much side questing. Yet if I skip it, I’d miss probably two thirds of the game. And I wasn’t in a hurry to get through the game. So I played for one, or two hours at a time, doing a few quests, increasing my headshot count and my skill with sniper rifles, and whenever I needed I break I’d stick the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on and have a go through Streets of Rage 2. The quests in Borderlands rarely presented a massive challenge; it was only the Arena levels and the final mission that gave me any significant trouble. I think this was because I’d done all the side quests and levelled up to the point where there wasn’t much challenge left in the game, but I have no problem with that; that’s the whole point of levelling up!

The pacing issues changes once you get to the end. After you beat the missions on The Salt Flats, the game gives you entirely plot-related missions, and a sense of urgency that you didn’t have before. At this point, the game becomes difficult to put down. The principle enemies you have at this point – the Crimson Lance soldiers – are far more challenging than the other enemies in the game and there’s a sense of achievement for taking them down, rather than mindlessly killing bandits. Also, the game becomes quite linear. This is no bad thing, as instead of skirting around obstacles you have to think about how you’re going to tackle them.

The final Boss Battle with The Destroyer took a while, because I didn’t realise there was more than one place you were supposed to be shooting. Once I’d figured it out, I did it one go, and was rewarded with the ending. I know Borderlands has been criticised for having a rubbish ending. It’s true that there is much left unexplained and that you don’t get what you came for in terms of your original objective. But to be honest, I didn’t mind. It fits in with the tone of the rest of the game and leaves a lot open for the DLC and sequels. The only thing that left me unsatisfied is that I would love to have known who the Guardian Angel was, and her level of investment in it.

I have the Game of the Year edition, meaning that I have the four DLC packs as well. I haven’t touched these yet; once I’d reached the end of the game I was ready to move on to something different. I might come back to it at some point. I certainly have no immediate desire to rush out and buy Borderlands 2, which I’ve heard is much the same game with some slight differences. I’m all Borderlandsed out at the moment!

Incidentally, I bought Catherine for the Xbox 360 during my playthrough. This brings the total number of games I’ve completed vs the games I’ve bought to 4-3 to me for this year. I’m toeing the line!

Backlog Beatdown: Kicking Ass with One Finger Death Punch

Free from the constraints of No Game New Year, on New Years Day I downloaded One Finger Death Punch from Xbox Live. You may remember early last year, this was one of the games that tempted me away from NGNY. I didn’t go for it at the time, but I was reminded of it when I had a look at TotalBiscuit’s Top 10 games for 2014. He mentions this game in his top 10, and I remembered his WTF is video and wanting to try the game out for myself. Well, why not?

Most people reading this probably know the score, but if not, here’s how the game works: Enemies come running at you. When they get close enough, you press the X button to attack to the left and the A button to attack to the right. There’s absolutely nothing else to it. No movement, no special moves, nothing that involves anything other than pressing X to attack to the left, and A to attack to the right.

Simple? Yes, definitely. But it is so much fun.

Two buttons. This game is brilliant.

There’s a lot to be said for a game that only does one thing but does it very well. Mechanically, it’s

fantastic. As the attack animations happen instantly, timing is essential but there’s no faffing about waiting for a move to wind up. However, if you miss, you’re left vulnerable to attack for about a quarter of a second, which for a game of this speed is a very long time. The player character and enemies are stick men; an odd decision, but it fits the light-hearted nature of the game and keeps the attention where it needs to be: On the action.

Variety is provided by the different ways in which the levels and enemies are organised. Most levels are ‘Mob Levels,’ which simply require you to kill all the enemies. But there are some that require you to do it in a certain amount of time, smash a certain number of items, or do the level in black and white so that you can’t distinguish different enemies and there are even some levels that give you a Light Sword or Knunchaku. Some enemies require more than one hit – from potentially more than one direction – to take down, and others, called ‘Brawlers,’ cuts away from the main stage and requires you to press X and A multiple times in a sequence to beat them. Your character can pick up weapons, which increases your reach or gives you a ranged attack. Outside the levels there is a ‘map’ screen where you can choose what levels you play and activate the skills you acquire in certain levels. These ‘power-ups’ usually involve either being able to use weapons multiple times, or slowing the enemies down in some way. All this content from a game that uses two buttons.

But doesn’t it get old? Well, the whole game takes around 4-5 hours to complete, and you’re probably not going to get through it all in one sitting unless you’re determined to do so. But that’s not the point of this game. It would work very well on a Mobile device because it’s absolutely fine just to pick it up and play. There’s no exposition, no plot, no reason for you to be doing anything other than the fact that you are. The levels are generally over in about a minute, so you can do as much as you like depending on how much time you have. Finally, your score for the level depends on how many times you missed – the fewer, the better – and whether or not you took any damage yourself. You can always replay the levels and aim for a better score, if you’re interested in tackling the game this way.

As for me, I’ve got to the end of the game on the easiest difficulty. While I’ll probably come back to it at some point if I need something to fill half an hour, I will mark this game off as beaten. But if you’ve got £2 to spare, I recommend you check this game out. We could all do with some more games that don’t take themselves too seriously!

No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year: Collecting stuff in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a game I downloaded a couple of years ago for no reason other than I wanted the achievement points for it. This seems pathetic now; I already owned Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox. I played through the first few bits a year or so ago and had barely touched it since; it’s just been sitting on my Xbox 360 gathering E-dust. Until now…

The Lego series is a bit of a funny one. There are those who say that they’re not true games because they don’t have a fail state, or they’re too easy, or they’re just for “casual players.” Well, it’s true that you don’t fail for dying too many times. For that reason, it’s not usually hard to beat the ‘Campaign’ mode.[1] Such violence as appears in the game is in context and not graphic at all; the worst thing that happens in the game is that Lego pieces fall apart. And it’s also almost the only series of games I’ve played with my girlfriend (although we play Lego Harry Potter, rather than Star Wars,) so it’s absolutely true that the game appeals to casual players.

Well, I’ve got two answers to that:

Zooming through Mos Eisley with Jango Fett?
Don't mind if I do...

The first one is that the challenge in the Lego games is whatever you make of it, pun not intended. If you embrace the collect-em-up nature of the game – which, at their heart, is what the Lego games are – and find all the collectables, characters, gold and red bricks etc, the game is quite challenging, if only because it will take you ages. In my case, this is pretty much the only game I’ve got where I’ve got a hope of 100% completing it and seeing all the content, so that is what I am aiming for. Now, I know you can use Minikit detectors and Power Bricks to help you, but even then, you’ve still got to move your characters into the right places and use the right powers in the right order, etc. There is challenge here – if you can look past beating the story.

The second one is that none of those supposed criticisms are a bad thing. Today’s markets are not patient enough to sit through a whole game where they might have to start all over again if they die three times – I rarely find a campaign mode in a modern action game that would punish you for anything other than forgetting to save.

As for appealing to the casual market, well, why not? For some people – especially younger children – games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Space Marine are just not for them. Either they find the violence in such games objectionable, or they’re not mature enough to appreciate it. Take Gears of War, for example. One of the principle actions you can take is to instantly kill an enemy by attacking it with the chainsaw attached to your gun. Most people are capable of making the distinction between this graphic violence in a video game and real life, but my girlfriend doesn’t find it even the slightest bit entertaining, and a younger person would not necessarily appreciate the spectacle – the enemy is dead, either way.

And it’s not just the violence. Graphically, the games are great, if only because of the art style. They looked great in 2005 and are still looking great nearly 10 years later. Does the first Medal of Honor game still look as good as its last iteration? I think not. Also I follow someone’s Youtube channel who has a sister who is disabled. About a year and a half ago she made a video and blog post about how easy modes and casual games can open doors for more players, including her sister. Here’s the blog post: http://icklenellierose.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/accessible-gaming-gaming-with-disability.html

As it is, I’m actually quite enjoying Lego Star Wars right now because it’s one of the few games I’ve bought where it’s OK to just pick it up and have a play, rather than devoting hours to the story or campaign. I’m having a good amount of fun collecting everything, I’m about 60% of the way there now and I’m looking on course to get all the achievements in a game for the first time ever!

I’ll probably still be at it next week, so I’ll talk some more about it then…

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[1] A generic term probably mis-applied to Lego games.

No Game New Year: Down and Depressed with Deadlight

Deadlight is another Xbox Live Games with Gold download. Zombie Apocalypse games are nothing new, but I hadn’t played one in a 2D side-scrolling platform game before and I thought it would be interesting to see this take on it.

I set myself a different challenge this time: Get through the game without looking at any of the achievement trophies. This is because I’ve ruined games before by playing them and looking for the achievement points; they’re nice to get, and I won’t usually get rid of a game until I’ve got all that are possible, but they take away some enjoyment of the game if you’re too pedantic about it.

This is the title screen; even the music that
accompanies this is bleak and tragic...

The game puts you in control of Randall Wayne, who’s teamed up with a group of survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse in search of his missing family. At the start of the game you’re separated from the group, and you have to run, jump and fight your way through the horde of Zombies – in this game called Shadows – to reunite with your team and your family. That is, of course, if any have survived…

For those of us who remember the 80s and the 90s, side-scrolling platform games were the standard back then. They lost touch once 3d gaming came in; platforming was quite difficult to pull off accurately in 3d environments and not many games managed it. But they never went away either. In the early 00’s we had emulation. In the mid/late 00’s we had retro-gaming. And in the previous/current generation, they seem to be… not making a comeback; there has been a definite shift in what is considered to be mainstream, but they have a strong presence in the sub-triple-A market.

With this new surge of platform games, some elements have stayed the same across the generations, others have changed. What has remained is art style, in that every platform game worth its code has its own distinctive look and feel to it. And Deadlight is BLEAK. The backgrounds look worn down and hopeless, the character models are barely more than silhouettes and the soundtrack evokes misery and despair. The cut-scenes are graphic novel-style drawings and subtitles that remind me, more than anything else, of Watchmen. It makes you feel that, even if you do get to the end of the game, surviving is as good as it is going to get for your character and anybody fortunate enough last to the end.

See what I mean? Bleak.

What has changed from the old platform games is combat. The combat mechanics of platform games have never been complicated, but in new games, the emphasis seems to be taken away from the combat and put on the exploration and platforming. That works well for Deadlight, which boasts a very small number of enemy types; munching your way through zombie hordes gets old at the best of times and is presumably incredibly dull if you can only do it in two dimensions. In Deadlight, you have an axe, a pistol and a shotgun at the very most, and very limited ammunition for the latter two. You avoid combat as much as possible; aiming is quite tricky and you don’t swing the axe very fast. You can’t take many hits before you die, and you’ll find yourself blaming the clunky controls for the occasional plummet, or a missed shot that costs you the game. It creates a challenge where you have to think about what you’re doing in order to proceed; more satisfying than ‘kill everything in the room then go on to the next bit.’

Yet for all that, I can’t decide whether I enjoyed the game. It’s a great game, no doubt about that. It’s a well presented; if not entirely fresh take on an idea that’s becoming stale now. The art style carries it for the most part, and telling a single story that’s over in a few hours is a refreshing change of pace. But my word, it is depressing. Any sense of achievement you gain from completing the levels and objectives is subsequently crushed by the heavy atmosphere and the feeling that no matter what you do, you’re only delaying the inevitable…

I might go back to this later to look for all the achievement points, but for now I’ll move on to something more cheery.

No Game New Year: What Next?

So Norm posted on the NGNY Facebook page the other day about what’s going to happen when the next year starts. His post read: “As the year winds down, we prepare for another instance of No Game New Year! For those in this group, what are some rules you would like to see changed / modified / added?”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m looking on course to beat the challenge, and I think for those of us who didn’t, another go at it would be more than welcome. However, I don’t think I’ll be doing No Game New Year again for 2015.

Several of us have said that it’s changed the way we think about and play games, and while that’s absolutely true in my case, it’s not something I particularly want to keep up. Part of the appeal of NGNY for me is that it is not forever; it is a way to challenge myself on the way I spend my money and acquire new games. I’ve learned a lot from NGNY and it is certainly going to have an affect on how I handle it in the future, but I don’t want another year of not buying games.

For one thing, I’ve been quite interested in the Wii U. It looks like this is where all the consistently good console games are, and seems to be operating below the radar of the Triple-A market. It looks like good fun as well; far too many games take themselves too seriously and I’ve enjoyed games the most this year when they’ve actually been fun, not the gritty realism often mistaken for fun and tragically mis-applied in many cases.

There are a couple of Xbox 360 titles I could pick up as well, and now that I view enough youtube channels to be able to make an informed decision on what Steam games are good or not, I might branch out into PC, assuming my computer supports it. The likelihood is, then, that if NGNY continues into next year, I won’t participate in the challenge.

How Ever…

... but what will happen next year?

One of the major things that I’ve… realized from participating in No Game New Year is just how many of my games I’ve never beaten or even played. This is what many people call the Backlog. I’ve got backlogs in almost all my hobbies; songs I never learned on guitar, models from Games Workshop I’ve never built, board games I’ve never played, the list goes on. So the major challenge for me when playing games this year was getting through as many of them as I could, so that I can say that at least I’ve seen the story mode through to the end. Getting what I can out of the game, then moving on to another – with the option to come back to it, of course, if I’m in the mood.

This was made all the more special by the fact that I got to share that information on my blog with the NGNY guys, and while I think it’s only those guys who read them judging by my view count, it is great to know that people actually care what I’m putting out online!

So I might make that my challenge for next year. I’ll call it…

BACKLOG BEATDOWN.

The idea behind the challenge will be to beat as many of my games as I can, while still allowing for the possibility of new ones. I’ve seen some good ideas from some of the NGNY guys that might help with this; Andi for example suggested that you could only buy a game if you’ve beaten one previously. And if I can get enough people to do it, (All the NGNY guys are welcome!) it would create… a support network of gamers who comment on what they’ve cleared, ask for help if they need it (or if they’re playing Dark Souls, which basically amounts to the same thing,) and generally making getting through the ever-growing pile of games a lot easier.

I’ll have to think carefully about how I’m going to do this, but I’m definitely up for the challenge.

Who’s with me?

No Game New Year: Kicking More Ass with Dynasty Warriors 7

Dynasty Warriors is a series I’ve enjoyed since 2001. I’ve played several of the games and always enjoyed the power fantasy of having a huge unstoppable hero ploughing his/her way through countless enemies. The series has received criticism for being the same game seven times[1] and while it is absolutely true that the series iterates rather than innovates, Dynasty Warriors trades on doing a small number of things very well.

Lu Bu. He's really hard. Except when he isn't.

The game play is classic Dynasty Warriors: Slash your way through hordes of soldiers who haven’t got a hope of beating you, and then kill the enemy commanders whose prospects aren’t much better. This involves much hammering of the X button. Similarly, the plot is the story KOEI have been telling since the 80s, based around The Romance of the Three Kingdoms – rich, but nothing new. The background music, while pleasing to hear in a generation where it is not that common, is the same shreddy techno-metal with familiar themes that has always accompanied the franchise.

The main difference from the previous iterations[2] is in the way the Story mode works. In the past, you would pick a character, play through a number of battles while the plot unfolded around them and that would be it. You’d get endings, but as they weren’t substantially different from the cut-scenes between battles, it wasn’t much of a reward.

In Dynasty Warriors 7, you pick one of the Factions: Wei, Wu, Shu and later Jin, and play through the story using characters from that faction. You play as the character most relevant to that part of the story. In my play-through, I’m playing as Shu, and started as Guan Yu. I later got to play Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei. I didn’t get to play Zhao Yun – the poster boy for the series – until much later. The plot is filled by explanations over a map of China and the usual cut-scenes. This sounds like there is less content overall, but given that all the characters function similarly with only minor differences between them, it makes for a more streamlined game. You no longer have to play the game through twenty times to unlock all the characters and cut-scenes!

The character design is more camp, hammy and androgynous than ever before, but the only other difference is the way the characters develop. You increase your stats by defeating an officer then taking the items they drop, and you also get skill points for taking out officers. You then spend them on upgrades: extra hits to the combo, extra Musou attacks, extra speed etc. You also upgrade your weapons bought with gold.

Now, I’m not one to complain about similar game play across the different editions. As any Call of Duty player would say, if you’re going to buy a game that’s functionally identical to its previous iteration, you can’t complain that it’s functionally identical to its previous iteration. But, joyous experience though the power-fantasy-style game play is; it is starting to show its age now. The different characters and weapons differentiate things for a while, but you can still win most battles by hammering X. The strategy of the game was never comprehensive, but they’ve almost completely removed it from story mode; you travel from one place to another as directed, take everybody out and repeat until you beat the level. The fire, water and catapult attacks that you at least felt you had a hand in instigating in Dynasty Warriors 5 are set pieces in this game. You don’t affect it, you watch as it happens around you. You can’t avoid the set pieces in order to beat the level, as you could before. It feels like a game of Simon Says,[3] and as you rarely have an objective beyond ‘kill everything in sight,’ it makes the repetitive game play monotonous.

Oh, and turret sections? Really, KOEI? That’s how you were going to vary the game play? They function and are thankfully rare, but even for Dynasty Warriors are anachronistic and rubbish. I doubt anybody in third century China had access to a Ballista that could fire at a rate of most modern machine guns.

The game also has a Conquest mode. I haven’t tried this yet but I think it’s going to work like a light version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a game I’ve enjoyed on the PS2. I’ll give this a go eventually but I’m looking to finish story mode first.

I can’t be far from finishing the game now; the next battle is Wu Zhang Plains which approaches the end of the story. While there are still three other factions and an entirely different mode to beat, for the purpose of NGNY, I’ll probably put Dynasty Warriors 7 to bed when I beat the game with Shu.

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[1] At the time of writing we’re up to Dynasty Warriors 8, not counting the spinoffs and handheld games, and the first one doesn’t count because as I understand it it’s essentially a fighting game.

[2] I missed out on the 3^rd and 6^th games so I’m not entirely sure where these changes occurred.

[3] And I haven’t forgotten I levelled a similar criticism about Grand Theft Auto Five months ago.

No Game New Year: Street Fighter IV, Arcade Edition.

After the debacle with Final Fantasy VII, I was rather miffed that I wouldn’t get to see the game through to the end and therefore felt the need to kick something’s ass. Hence the choice for this week’s game:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition

Another free download from XBL Gold, Street Fighter is an intellectual property that few are unfamiliar with. Most of us have played an iteration of Street Fighter II back in the mid 90s. Some have even seen the films; Street Fighter: The Movie is probably my favourite film for “so bad it’s good.” But I haven’t played a full Street Fighter game since then.

Not managed to beat anyone playing as Fei Long yet...

I have heard that, out of the fighting games on the Xbox 360, Street Fighter IV was the most technical. Certainly the set combos are hard to do, which means I probably won’t do very well with the challenges in ‘Trial’ mode. I’ve mainly been playing Arcade mode, and of course online. I’ve been having good fun with both, in Arcade I particularly enjoy the cut-scenes at the start and end of the game depending on who you’re playing. Some of the characters aren’t too familiar to me and it’s good to get a bit of context with each one. While I don’t very often win Online, (I’m around 40% wins at this point,) I think I’m competent enough to offer a challenge to all but the most hardcore players.

That being said, I’ve noticed a couple of small but significant ways in which Street Fighter IV is different to the other fighting games I’ve played on the Xbox 360:[1]

Firstly, Street Fighter differentiates between fast and slow attacks more than any fighting game I’ve played. Normally, a character’s faster or slower moves would be a standard part of the move set, but Street Fighter actually has buttons for the different speeds of attack that offer a balance of speed and power. This can result in some technical situations where you have a split second to counter a slow move with a fast one; it’s risky, but it can be done – more so than with the other fighting games.

Secondly, the controls are difficult. The basic controls work OK, but the combination of directional waggles and buttons needed to do the Super and Ultra moves are really hard to do – and that’s if you can even remember them. Of course, there’s a reason for this: If you look at other fighting games for the 360 you’d find their control system optimised for its controller. Street Fighter, on the other hand, was very much designed for an arcade stick. Some of the moves, for example, require you to do a 360 degree rotation of the analogue stick – quite hard to do with just your thumb. And some of the moves require you to use all three punch or kick buttons. They’ve tried to get around this by mapping this function to the left bumper and left trigger. When you get a combination that requires you to make two complete rotations of the left analogue stick then pull the left trigger with the same hand, it’s nigh on impossible.

I’ve only played as four characters so far: Ryu; Ken, E. Honda and Ibuki. The first two are good all-round characters and stand a reasonable chance against anyone, but I’ve really been enjoying E. Honda. He was actually my favourite character from the earlier games and not much has changed! He’s easy to underestimate because he’s fat and slow, but his strong kicks have a surprising amount of reach and do a lot of damage. And if he gets in close, he can do a lot of damaging combos as well. Plus, his diving headbutt provides him with some much needed speed in the game. He’s got me my highest proportion of online wins so far! Ibuki, on the other hand, I haven’t been enjoying so much; she relies too much on speed in what is already a very quick game and doesn’t fit my play style at all.

Of course, this being a Capcom game, I’ll have to download a lot of DLC in order to complete the game fully and earn all the achievement points, which isn’t going to happen for a while. Now that I’ve completed the game with four characters, I’ll probably mark the game off as complete and move on to something else next week.

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[1] Which for the record are Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us.

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!

No Game New Year: Dark Souls

It hasn't escaped my attention that my blogging has been somewhat inconsistent of late. Usually the reason for this is that I haven't had time to write a blog about what games I'm playing. So to counter this, all subsequent No Game New Year posts - or indeed anything I write on the subject of getting through video games - will be 700 words or thereabouts.

With that in mind...

Dark Souls

So for the past couple of days I’ve been playing Dark Souls, a game of some renown amongst the so-called “Hard Core.” For the rest of us, Yahtzee sums up the core of the game quite well: “[You] must best a series of castles, dungeons and bosses by doing the equivalent of firing yourself from a cannon at them an infinite number of times.”

It’s true; the game is very hard. Horribly unforgiving, it doesn’t suffer fools or their mistakes. This action/horror RPG is frustrating to play, depressing to experience and has probably by now caused several cases of advanced delusionary schizophrenia.

And do you know what? I love it.

 

I’ve played most of the RPGs for the Xbox360 and a significant number of them for the Xbox and other systems. The high-fantasy swords and sorcery basically-the-same-plot-each-time-but-with-slightly-different-controls are enjoyable enough for the first few hours but get a bit samey after a while, when you realise you’ve been playing for two hours and made absolutely no progress in the game.

Dark Souls is different. Its setting is of a dying world largely populated with undead, lending itself to its dark, oppressive atmosphere straight away. There are no elves, dwarves, orcs or equivalent: Here you’re a former human, now an undead soul, trying to battle your way for something remotely resembling a purpose. I say this because I know no better. There’s not much exposition that explains the plot, and such that there is comes from talking to the VERY small number of NPCs you happen across on your travels. It actually is your story.

It also does away with a lot more of the common RPG tropes, which is very refreshing. For a start, the Tutorial - such as it is - explains the game mechanics and that is it. No button prompts, no hand holding. It will take you up to the first boss, and then you’re on your own. There’s also no village you use as a home base. Sure, there are bonfires, which is about as good as it gets for the purposes, and there are NPCs and Merchants scattered around the gaff, but nowhere you would feel safe or even free from the imposing environments. There’s none of this tedious mucking about with crafting, no lore explained to you in 24-page long books you can’t be bothered to read, no ‘relationship’ mechanic. It does a good job of keeping the focus where it needs to be: On the aforementioned Castles, Dungeons and Bosses.

Yes, this caught me out first time...

On that subject, there’s plenty going for it here as well. A lot of the regular enemies are easy enough to kill but can still make very short work of you indeed if you are careless. Anything tougher than a regular hollow man (who makes up the majority of enemies in the earlier section of the game) really does need thinking about in order to come up with strategies for beating them. The fact that I’m playing The Sorcerer adds to this, since I’ve got to decide whether to use my very limited magical resources for an easy kill, or risk attacking up close with my melee weapons and taking more damage. Dying – which I do a lot – sends you back to your last bonfire without any souls (awarded after you kill enemies, and brilliantly used as both currency and experience points) and though you do have a chance to recover what you’ve lost if you manage to get to the same point on your next run-through, it does shut down anybody who thinks they can get through the game by scum-saving.

So while it is perfectly possible to play this game for two hours and not get anywhere, it’s not because the game is designed with faffing around in mind. If you die, it’s because you’re rubbish. Or you’re careless, which is the same thing. Or it could be because you haven’t analyzed the attack patterns of the enemies yet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s something very old-school about this – and a welcome change of pace from the games I’ve been playing for the 360 this year!

No Game New Year: Charlie Murder

Charlie Murder was another game I downloaded off Xbox Live Games with Gold. I started playing it because I knew I only had a few days before my girlfriend came up for the weekend, and usually once she’s gone I have the urge to play a different game. I have no idea why things work like that, but they do! So I decided to play what howlongtobeat.com told me was a relatively short game.

The band sound as good as they look...

I think the game is best described as a side-scrolling beat-em-up with RPG elements. You play one of the five members of the titular Charlie Murder, a hardcore punk band that was murdered by a rival death metal band Gore Quaffer. You can have anything up to four players involved with the game playing as the other members of the band, and the main differences between the characters seem to be their special attacks. The ‘singer,’ Charlie, screams blue murder, as does his backing ‘vocalist’[1] Kelley “Skelekitten” Skitten. Guitarist Lester Deth makes fire shoot out of his guitar, and bassist Tommy Homicide makes acid-coated buzz-saws run across the floor. Finally, the drummer ‘The Rexecutioner’ makes bits of his kit fly around and hit things. You have a basic set of attacks, which when done in the right order can develop in to combos, and you have to battle your way through to the “battle of the bands” through witches, ninjas, pirates and devils to name but a few.

I probably would have enjoyed this game a lot more had I not spent most of the summer playing Streets of Rage II, which is the best game ever created and as far as I’m concerned was as good as side-scrolling beat-em-ups ever were or ever will be. The most enjoyable aspect of the game for me was, of all things, the story. This very rarely happens with me, because by the time I usually get to the end of a game that prides itself on its story, (40 hour RPGs, anyone?) I find the scale has been blown right out of proportion. But the game's story really did have an affect on me...

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the plot (it’s about right):

The game's protagonist, Charlie Murder, is a member of a garage punk band of the same name. Charlie kicks one of the founding members, Paul, out of the band, and begins to experience chart-topping success creating music in a new genre with new bandmates. Under the name Lord Mortimer, Paul forms his own band, Gore Quaffer, and makes a pact with a demon, raising an army of demons and undead in order to destroy Charlie Murder.[2][3] Charlie and his band are killed at the beginning of the game, fight out of hell, and are reborn on Earth amidst an apocalypse caused by Lord Mortimer and his army.[5][8] In order to stop the apocalypse, Charlie Murder must defeat Gore Quaffer in a Battle of the Bands.[4]

During the game, a series of flashbacks detail the game's backstory. As Charlie and his new band mates experience success without Paul, the latter becomes increasingly upset, eventually vowing revenge. The flashbacks neither paint Charlie Murder in a wholly positive light, nor Paul in a wholly negative light.

Now, spool time back to what is at this point eight years before the ever-moving now. I was playing in a band called Jack’s Legacy. There were four of us in the band, for the most part we were all good friends and we had the potential to be the best band in the world. That sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, or casting aspersions on everything I’ve done since then – but we just were that good. Sadly, a few months before we really hit our stride, our drummer joined a different band, which was no better than Jack’s Legacy, but a lot more busy. The inevitable happened, and a conflict of interest came up with the band’s schedules. This and some of the most underhanded shit-stirring I’ve ever had to deal with on the part of the drummer resulted in some blazing rows, missed gigs and an almost uncontrollable amount of bitterness on my part. We went our separate ways, and I’ve never spoken to him since then. And as the drummer has the luxury of not having to give a shit about what I think since the band broke up in February the following year, I doubt I ever will.

Can you see how the story in this game resonated with me? It struck a little too close to home. While I certainly never made a diabolic pact and murdered the rival band, I did sometimes wonder for a couple of years afterwards what might happen if I were to turn up at one of their gigs and smash up their equipment. I never did that either, I would never actually do such a thing, but it gave me a moment of grim satisfaction to think about it… but seriously, there is a flashback cut-scene where Paul, devoid of a band, is playing an acoustic guitar at an open mic while the audience is more interested in Charlie Murder on the TV screens behind him. I’ve definitely been there.

 

The game is presented very well and I was interested to see how it all worked out in the end. I got the ‘bad’ ending, and I suspect it was because I missed one of a set of five collectables. (I defeated the appropriate boss which left behind an eye; I didn’t realise you had to grab it, and by the time I came back the boss was gone.) But I got to the end credits, which was really all I was looking for with this one. There are more achievement points available for multiple play-throughs, but here my problems with the game start to come out of the woodwork:

First, I don’t think the game is anywhere near as good as Streets of Rage in terms of its fighting. While there are different combos available, there’s very little – if any – combining different attacks to do a huge amount of damage. There are different enemy varieties but you rarely have to alter your tactics in order to beat them. There are points in the game where you have to think about what you’re doing – boss battles, harder sets of enemies – but only because it’s hard, not because there’s a specific tactic you need to beat it.

Second, the pacing of the game was all off in terms of its checkpoints. I’m glad you have unlimited lives, don’t get me wrong, but having to go back and play a good half an hour’s worth again because you died seems a little cheap.

The RPG elements basically involve experience points, loot and shopping. There is a huge variety of collectables, clothes and accessories you can use to enhance your character, but having to equip everything slowed the game right down for me when I’d rather have been kicking the tar out of something. The XP system is reminiscent of role-playing games, but since the enemies scale up with your levels, it doesn’t make much difference. It’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, in that respect.

Finally, while the art style is excellent – and I will always praise a game for trying to do something other than gritty realism – it’s not really my taste. It all looked a bit… washy and grimy for my liking.

I might give it another go at some point, but for now, I’m pleased to have got to the end of the game so I can play something else, probably next week.

See you soon!

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[1] Of course, I use the terms ‘singer’ and ‘vocalist’ loosely…