Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Last Week's Games: 221B Baker Street, Ultra Street Fighter II

Last week me and Kirsty tried a board game out for the first time – 221B Baker Street.

The smell of freshly-printed
card was curiously absent...

This game, as you might expect, is built around the Sherlock Holmes property; not something either Kirsty or I have much investment in but from what I understand, Sherlock Holmes was the progenitor for a lot of how certain kinds of modern fiction were developed – detective stories, of which I’ve enjoyed many even if I can’t remember many of them, and also the “buddy cop” trope where the protagonists are polar opposites in terms of personality and approach, and this variation is often what leads to the results. The actual game presents you with a murder mystery, and the gameplay loop revolves around visiting different places in London to find different clues – some are word games that point to the solutions, and others are background information to support the given facts.

Now, there’s two ways you can play this – competitive or collaborative. The former involves up to six players using a die to move around the board, arriving in different locations and receiving their respective clues. You can also play a “Scotland Yard” card to block players from visiting certain areas, and a “Skeleton Key” card to remove the blocks. If you think you know the answer – usually the name of the murderer, the murder weapon and the motive – you travel back to 221B Baker Street, reveal your answer, and if you get it right, you win the game.

A board game without dice may seem a little odd,
but the visual representation helped.

However, Kirsty and I chose to play it in the collaborative way, where we travel to the different locations finding the clues and try to solve the mystery in as few moves as possible. You’re graded on how many turns it takes – a maximum of 14, and a minimum of 1, and you need to get between 1-5 to get the highest grade of Master Detective. Straight away this presented some mechanical differences – we eschewed the die, as there was no need to randomly determine how long it would take us to get to a location once we’d agreed where we were going. We also managed without the Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key cards as well, since there was nobody competing against us to block off. Finally, we saved ourselves a lot of time – the instructions were talking about roughly an hour and a half for one game, we managed it in 30 minutes. Instead, we focussed our attention on the clues themselves, trying to work out what they represent and working out the answer. The first case, we didn’t do very well – we got the worst possible grade of Watson, but we were struggling with the motive and it didn’t become clear until we’d gone around all the locations. The second case went much better; I think we were more familiar with the gameplay by then!

Straight away, Kirsty began wondering whether we can run this game online – if you’re reading this in the future, either when Covid-19 has been eradicated or when it’s caused the downfall of the entire human race and the ants have taken over, we have limited social contact in these times and much of it is over Zoom. We have done a few social deduction games with some friends and family, but a collaborative effort like this might make a nice change. Not bad given that the only reason we bought the game was because we’d accidentally bought each other two copies of the same games for Christmas 2019!

Fei Long's quick attacks make him
absolutely nails...

Elsewhere, I played Ultra Street Fighter 2 with Jessie. This was one of the first games I had on the Nintendo Switch, and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’d been doing Street Fighter for about 25 years at that point, and there was nothing new in there other than Way of the Hado. Playing it with my four-year old daughter was… interesting. Of course, I could have flattened her straight away if I’d wanted to, but that wouldn’t have been fun for either of us. Instead, I held back a bit and found Jessie’s unpredictability a refreshing challenge on the game! We didn’t need to play it for very long, but we enjoyed the time we had nonetheless.

Last Week's Games: Horus Heresy: Legions, Ultra Street Figher 2, Final Fantasy VII

In my quest to play all the Games Workshop licensed games, I downloaded and played The Horus Heresy: Legions. This is a collectable card came based around the Horus Heresy era of the Warhammer Universe, and was free to play so I thought I’d give it a go.

Who can play the better hand?

I’d never played a collectable card game on the computer before. I know Hearthstone is the standard but I’d never been tempted to play it. I’ve played the real thing – I used to play Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. I don’t anymore, because I don’t have the financial structure to keep up with the ‘meta[1]’ of the games, and even if I did, I don’t play often enough for it to be a worthwhile financial investment; I intended to do another blog in this later. So I had some expectations, which I had to shift to accommodate Legions. Your first card on the table is always your Warlord, and they come with their own abilities you can use in the game. Legions kicks you off by giving you Garviel Loken; the hero of the first Horus Heresy books. After that, the game works on an energy-based system: Each card is worth a certain amount of energy (1-10) that you need to play it, and you can only play as many cards as you have energy for. Your energy for the turn increases each turn you play, up to a maximum of 10. The idea of the game is to reduce the health of the opposing Warlord to 0, at which point the game ends and you win.

Apart from that, the main difference between video games and their table-top counterparts is the health system. Each card that represents a fighting unit has two numbers: Left is how much damage each unit does, and right is how much damage it can withstand. The number on the right goes down cumulatively to the attacks it takes, and when it reaches 0, the unit dies. This is different to the table-top games, where it is usually necessary to hit a unit hard enough to eliminate it entirely or it loses no defensive power at all – and rightly so, or the game would get bogged down while the players try to keep track of it. But I expect the whole point of playing games like this on a computer is to have the CPU make those calculations for you!

I’ve been having fun with Legions so far; I win about as many games as I lose. I don’t intend to spend any money on it, and I’m not sure how much more time I’ll want to put in to it, but for now it’s doing what I need!

I had another go at Ultra Street Figher 2, getting through most of the game with various different people and beating it with Dhalsim, of all people! He’s not the easiest character to use, however it becomes a lot easier once you remember that you have other options than to use his most powerful attacks – the lighter ones are often easier to aim. I also played Street Fighter with my daughter, which was lovely. She’s only 2 at this point, but she found it engaging! I think the thing with fighting games is that it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to be doing – beating the other guy up. There’s no tricky platforming, no levelling up or looting; you just press a button to make a thing happen which she enjoyed. I let her win a few times – I wanted her to enjoy it – and called time after 10 minutes. I guess for her, it’s about winning, but it’s also about doing something with her Dad, and with video games being a large part of my life, it’s great to be able to do that!

Beautiful...

Finally, I’ve been enjoying Final Fantasy VII again on the Nintendo Switch. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, except that it really does look good on the Switch! Let’s see if I can beat it this time!

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[1] The system by which you’ve only really got a chance if you keep on top of the latest releases

Last Week's Games: Fallout, Ultra Street Fighter 2: Way of the Hado

It’s been a very busy week in terms of work, band and family commitments so I haven’t had much time to play games. The game I probably put the most time in to was the original Fallout.

I’m not sure what drove me to start playing this again. It was possibly because I watched Yahtzee Croshaw’s review of Fallout 76 on Youtube earlier in the week. He panned it, as most independent critics have, but it took me back to the first game when I realised I never really got very far in it; I certainly never finished it. In fact, the only Fallout game that I managed to beat was Fallout 3, and that was nearly six years ago. But whatever the reason, I got the game out and had another go.

Rest in Peace, Max Stone.

Unusually for me, I shied away from creating a character in favour of using one of the pre-gens – Max Stone. He is the strong, combat-orientated archetype, and while he lacks the subtlety of the other characters, and the roleplaying opportunities of a created one, this time around I just felt like flattening people and blowing things up so that’s the character I chose to use. I got as far as the Radscorpion Caves before getting killed, after grossly over-estimating my own ability.

I started again as the same character, except I made him into a woman and called her Maxine. I found the idea of a muscle-bound goddess running around through Fallout’s wasteland an intriguing prospect, and I feel that female characters don’t have to be faces and thieves all the time! This time, after arriving at Shady Sands I went on to Vault 15, as there was opportunities there to increase my experience points and level the character up to the point where she might survive the Radscorpion caves. This worked up to a point, but I still found myself having to go back to Shady Sands to get healed by Razlow – though, if you give him a Scorpion Tail, he does it for free. I manged to clear out the caves after a few goes.

And here I hit the same wall I very often do when playing Fallout – I have no idea what to do next. Do I go to the raiders and clear them out? I tried that a few times; it didn’t go very well. Do I head on to Hubtown? I gave that a go but died after smart-talking to the priests there, I can’t remember what they’re called off-hand. Do I go to Necropolis? I tried that as well and nearly died, though I was surprised by how quickly Maxine heals. Don’t get me wrong, all of these options are valid to try, at least – but as you’re on a time limit, I can’t get my head out of the idea that I’ve messed the whole thing up if I pick the wrong direction. I’ll probably give it another go a bit later on.

The boss of the game is boss hard...

Also I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers on the Switch, specifically to play the Way of the Hado mode. This is a first-person section where you control Ryu, and use the motion controls on the joy-con controllers to do his special moves. I’d played it before using the Switch screen, and found it a laugh, but quite difficult to do. This time, I plugged the Switch into the dock and tried it like that. I found it a much more enjoyable experience, and the moves a lot easier to perform. I still struggle with the Hurricane Kick, as I can’t get the motion quite right and more often than not it thinks I’m doing a Fireball, but it’s fun to try!

When you’re playing, you can increase the stats of your character if you beat one of the three available stages. I’m not hitting quite hard enough yet to be able to beat M. Bison, who appears right at the end of the final stage and is very difficult to beat, but I’ll keep trying! This is very much the Switch’s gimmick so it’s worth using this mode to explore what this iteration of Street Fighter II has to offer.

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: Roll the Ball, Ultra Street Fighter 2 and Plot Depth Discussions

I’ve been playing a lot of Roll the Ball on my phone this week, as my gaming time has mostly been limited to whenever I can get a moment to sit down and do some none-work related recreation! If you don’t know from my previous coverage, it’s a puzzle game where you have to connect tiles with paths through them to roll a ball from the start of the level to the end. I downloaded it onto my phone last summer and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since.

This is a different mode entirely,
but we'll get to that...

I played through and beat Bianca level pack on Star Mode. The basic principles of this are described above; what Star Mode brings to it is that certain of the tiles have stars in them; three per level. You have to connect the two ends of the path using the tiles, and the more star tiles you use, the higher number of stars you get at the end of the level. This rarely requires much thought, as it’s usually pretty obvious what you have to do to make the path, and only becomes challenging once they start introducing star tiles in the tiles that can’t be moved – you then have to work out how to move the rest of your tiles around them. But for how much of a faff the rotation levels turned out to be, it was nice to be able to blitz through some of the levels. I proceeded to the Bravo level pack in Classic mode, where you have to create the path for the ball in as few moves as possible, with three stars given when you achieve the target number. Usually this is obvious but there are a few challenging levels in there which take a few goes to get it right – the paths are often easy to make, but doing it with maximum efficiency is a different matter entirely! I’ll be on these levels for a while.

I might have to write a review of Roll the Ball soon. I usually only do this once I’ve beaten a game, or when my time with it has reached its logical conclusion. But the time it’s going to take me to do this with Roll the Ball could potentially run in to several years; I may even have a new phone before I do! As it stands, I’ve had a go with all four variations of the level design. Nothing will be news to me now; I’ve seen all there is to see, so I might as well give it a review!

Will a Sonic Boom help against Fei Long?

I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers on my Switch too. This is the only game I’ve played on the Switch so far, and I’m enjoying it. Most of us have done Street Fighter 2 at some point; the addition to this game other than re-done voice-overs and graphics is that Akuma, Evil Ryu and Violent Ken are available to play from the start. I played it a lot over the Christmas break and managed to beat the game on its hardest difficulty, my favourite character being E. Honda due to his power, speed and reach. But I had another go at it recently and couldn’t even get past the first fight! Arguably I was out of practice, but it didn’t help that the game kept putting me against Fei Long, who is absolutely nails.

I also had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend Kirsty while she was playing Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on her PS4. Four out of the seven games we have for it are remakes or remasters of older games, in some cases several generations old. Kirsty was talking about the difference between Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, the nearest the PlayStation really had to mascot platformers, with regard to the plot. Crash never had much going for it in that regard but Spyro’s seemed to be fleshed out a little more. I don’t know, I never really played much of either game, but perhaps it highlights the evolution of story-driven games during the 5^th console generation. It’s worth thinking about, if only to get some insight on the level we enjoy games on these days!