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

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

There's just something about that tin...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Rhino Hero, Sonic Generations, Dragon Quest, New Super Mario Bros U

Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win...

Over the last weekend, I continued running Rise of the Runelords for my Pathfinder group. We are trying to maintain the game during lockdown by doing it as a video call; it worked well with some connection issues. Long-term readers of the blog will know that running a game online is nothing new, but when I’ve done it before, it’s how the game stared – not as a contingency plan for not being able to meet! The group completed their task in the Vault of Greed, and journeyed on to the Shimmering Veils of Pride where they encountered their own reflections in the mirrors! Not to put to fine a point of it, but there could have been no better time for me to not have to hand out their character sheets, as for perhaps the first time I had access to all their information and was able to run their characters. Unfortunately, I had to cut the battle short due to family illness, but we will hopefully pick it up again in the future.

There is talk of members of that group doing a game in the week as well; I’d like to be a part of that but we’re in discussions about that system to run and who will be running the game. I’ll see how it works out; I would prefer to play this time as I don’t get to play very often, but it depends on what the other lads want to do.

Spider monkeys. See what they did there...

Earlier in the week, Kirsty and I had a go with a board game that I’ve had for a while and not done anything with yet – Rhino Hero. This is a game about stacking cards to resemble a skyscraper and getting your hero to the highest point on the skyscraper without knocking the whole thing down. It’s aimed at younger people and is a good game; perhaps not with the depth of some of the other games that we play, but certainly the most dextrous and one of the better ones for spectacle. We had a great time building the towers and trying not to knock them down! Kirsty won both games that we played, and we’d be happy to show this to our friends when we’re out of lockdown and they can come around again!

Sonic Generations. It's a lot of fun!

One game I forgot to mention I’d played the previous week was Sonic Generations on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to play this partly by YouTube’s The Completionist, partly because I’d downloaded if for free off Games with Gold, and partly because I’d just finished Assassin’s Creed 2 and wanted something light-hearted and fun to play. I’ve enjoyed it so far, although I find it better in short bursts rather than prolonged sessions. If it were just a case of getting through the game, I might have beaten it by now already, but while the number of stages may appear to be small, there are a lot of challenge modes attached to each stage and that is taking a decent amount of time at this point! I’ve been playing Sonic for almost for as long as I’ve been playing video games and there’s little to surprise me now, but it’s a good fun game and one that I’m hoping to see through to the end.

You would not believe the faff I've got to go through
to get a screen grab from the Switch to my computer...

One game that I actually did see through to the end was Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Switch. I’d bought this a few months ago, played it for a few hours in November, and didn’t play it again for a while, mainly because knowing the time investment generally needed for RPGs, I waited until I had some time before committing to it! I don’t want to say much more than that right now because I’m hoping to get a review out either this week or next week.

Finally, I’ve been playing New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. As it’s been a while since I played it, and the levels I tried to play through last time were very difficult, I started a new save file. I may or may not see it through to the end but it’s a Super Mario game; they’ll always be fun while they last!

Last Week's Games: Into the Breach, X-COM: UFO Defence, Sega Megadrive and Ninja Gaiden 3

The first thing I did in the week was beat Into the Breach for the first, and hopefully not last, time. I’ve written the review for it and it’s coming out on Friday, but I thought at this point I’d make a few additional remarks that I didn’t think fit the purpose of the review:

Always a fun time splattering bugs...

It came to my attention, I can’t remember how, that the scope of the game was quite a bit bigger than what we eventually received. There was supposed to be a much deeper strategic element to the whole campaign, with some XCOM-style base management in it. However, at some point the developers had to have a very difficult conversation when it emerged that those wider elements of the game just weren’t any fun. It was just bulk, micro-management, padding out the game, and their play-testers weren’t enjoying it. So, the decision was made to scrap those elements of the game and make a game based almost entirely around the tactical game I’d been enjoying. I’ve got a lot of respect for decisions like that; it’s never easy to look at something you’ve been working very hard on over months and years and decide that it’s not up to standard and needs to be shelved. Maybe we’ll see those ideas come up in a later game, I don’t know. But it was a brave decision to chop out a lot of the game’s intended content to make a better game, so well done on that.

After XCOM Enemy Unknown it was surprising
how squishy these soldier's were...

Elsewhere, I had a go with the original X-COM game. On the icon on my laptop it’s called X-COM: UFO Defence, but I know it better as UFO: Enemy Unknown. I’ve always enjoyed the X-COM games, Enemy Unknown and Interceptor were my favourites, but playing it back twenty years later I couldn’t get quite as in to it as I had been before. Maybe it’s a bad time for me to be throwing myself into another long-form strategy campaign, maybe it’s because the interface really hasn’t aged that well and I’m getting frustrated at losing soldiers and battles because I’m getting the implicit rules of the games wrong, but it wasn’t happening for me that night.

Eternal Champions. Another tough one!

Kirsty bought me an ATGAMES Sega Megadrive Plug & Play for Christmas in 2017, and a few nights ago I finally got around to having a go with it! It’s got quite a few games on there, many that I can only describe as “The Usual Suspects,” (Sonic, Golden Axe, Columns etc) plus several arcade games that I’ve never heard of. I had a go with Comix Zone, Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions, perhaps because I just wanted to beat something up after the complexity of some of the other games I’ve been playing. Unfortunately, these were all games that I’d either owned or borrowed in the past, and because of this, I realised that the emulation wasn’t quite on point. The games were playable enough and I had a decent time, but the music and sound effects were all about three semitones too low, and with Comix Zone in particular, it made the music in the game sound horribly out of tune. But it’s a fun enough time, and I’m sure I’ll give it another go in the future.

No idea who this is but it took a few goes to beat...
Him? Her? I couldn't tell. The sound was down on the TV.

Finally, I had a go with Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge on the Wii U. I’ve played a couple of Ninja Gaiden games in the past, but this is the first time I played one in a while and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult they can be! At this point I’ve just about got past the boss on the first stage. It’s a strange one because the game seems to want you to learn all the moves and the combos when you just want to be mashing buttons, but there’s a sense of satisfaction when you analyse the attack patterns of the bosses and work out the best strategies to beat them. Nonetheless, the game is brutally hard! We’ll see if I can see this one through to the end, but it’s always good to play a game I’d never played before.

I’ve also installed Elder Scrolls: Arena, so we’ll see what next week brings!

Last Week's Games: ZombiU and Greyhawk

Because of my usual problems with time allowance, this blog will be more of a review of ZombiU. I started it last week and, continuing on this week, I’m finding it tough to play – sadly not for the right reasons.

I’ve been spoiled over the last ten years or so by Autosave, where I expect a game to save itself every so often so that I don’t have to do the last half an hour again if I lose during the game. ZombiU works differently to this. When your survivor dies, you carry on from the same point in the progress of the game with a different survivor; functionally identical but a different person. The problem is that the game doesn’t save when this happens. To save the game you have to sleep in the safe house. I didn’t know this, and lost all the progress I’d made on Monday through forgetting to save the game.

A cricket bat. Could it be more British? Good for conserving
 ammo but it takes a lot of hits to drop a Zombie...

“No problem,” thought I, “I wasn’t doing very well, let’s start again.” I got to the point early on in the game where you have to go to the supermarket and hack the security camera junction boxes. I died a number of times – usually as I’d managed to traverse to a different area. When I’d finally finished what I was supposed to be doing, I headed back to the safe house, to find that the game had glitched and hadn’t registered that I’d made it to the supermarket. This was a requirement to end the mission, and because it hadn’t registered, the game would never progress beyond that point. I could have started again, but I was tired and went to bed instead.

The game itself plays OK. The handling’s a bit off but I’m choosing to believe that it better represents the relative skill of the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re controlling. The best – and simultaneously the worst – bits are where there were more zombies in the area than you were expecting, or you trigger a trap, and you have to make a quick blind decision as to where to go next. You can barely see, you’re panicking and the chances that you’ll get it right are slim indeed. You’ll probably die at these points, and it can feel quite cheap. On the other hand if I was caught up in a Zombie Apocalypse that’s probably what would happen to me!

The WiiU game pad works better in some situations than others. It’s good for inventory management; touch screens are ideal for those situations. I also liked it’s utilisation for things like opening sewer drains, or setting and removing barricades; that’s representative of at least some of the physical effort required by your character to do those things. It reminded me of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS, essentially the first Resident Evil game that included some added bits of touch screen functionality.

Less welcome are those times where you have to use it to aim the heavy machine gun near the safe house; you have to aim in first person using the gyro and the screen on the pad. Those guns should be a challenge to use. But you hold the pad flat to play the game, and hold it up to your face in order to aim on the screen with the full range of movement. The trouble is if the aiming begins while your pad’s still flat, you’ll hold it up and will be looking straight at the floor. Even though I later found that you could use the right analogue stick to correct this, it disrupts the flow of the game!

ZombiU’s OK, but that’s all. I might not through to the end before moving on!

I expect Simeon looks a bit like this...

At the Roleplaying group we’ve changed games for this rotation; we’re continuing a Dungeons and Dragons: Greyhawk campaign started a while back. It’s not a deliberately funny setting, but I’m playing a half-elf fighter called Simeon D’sai who has a Wisdom score of 6 with a -2 modifier. This has created very fun situations where my character is easily fooled, both in the adventure and my colleagues who take advantage of it! It’s been fun so far, and it should continue to be.

Last Week's Games: X-Wing, Ticket to Ride, Castlevania, ZombiU

This week I played a surprising number of games…

The first one was Star Wars: X-Wing. I’m playing through the main campaign mode and I’m about two thirds of the way through the first episode; I’m enjoying it so far. I like how there’s always a specific objective you need to work within the game parameters to achieve; there are escort missions, combat missions, missions with specific targets to destroy, rescue missions and everything in between. You might be forgiven for thinking that’s standard, but the game doesn’t hold your hand. You get a briefing, and then you get dropped into the mission – after that, you’re on your own. You get some support in the form of wingmen and updates from your computer, but you need to work out how you’re going to tackle the mission; the game doesn’t tell you and your wingmen won’t win it for you. Quite often, you’ll work it out through trial and error – but that’s a positive thing; it puts some necessary thought into the process of beating a level.

Also, there’s a risk of you getting captured or killed in the game. Again, you might think this an obvious point, but let me explain: If your ship gets destroyed when you’re on a campaign mission, one of three things will happen. If you auto-eject, you’ll either be rescued by the Rebels or captured by the Empire. If you can’t eject because of bad luck or a systems malfunction, you die. If either of the latter two happen, your character can be revived, but he loses his rank and experience and is demoted to Flight Officer, the second lowest rank.

In this edition of the game this doesn’t make much difference, but in previous editions, this could potentially have an effect on your wingmen. You could have several pilots on file, and before you launched a mission you’d have the opportunity to deploy these pilots into the ships that would be flying with you – the higher their rank, the more competently they would fly. You’d run the risk of them dying but you’d also have a wing of pilots you’d created and nurtured yourself. They even had pictures! This was removed from the Windows version of the game I’m playing, presumably to streamline the experience, but it also removed the potential for some X-COM-like storytelling in there in addition to the main campaign.

Great game.

I also spent some time in Warlords 'n' Wizards, a new hobby shop in Netherton, and managed to have a game of Ticket to Ride with one of the lads there. Most people who play this know what a great game it is. I won the game, but with Ticket to Ride, the time between playing the game for the first time and understanding what you have to do is quite short, and the guy I was playing picked it up very quickly, so he had a lot of fun as well. That’s the mark of good game design, in my opinion! I might talk about it more in depth on a slow week, but it’s a very well-designed game that everybody should play at least once.

Hard game!

I dug out the WiiU and played a couple of games on that as well. The first was the original Castlevania, and I’d forgotten how brutally hard that game was. I’m going to have to exploit the WiiU’s infrastructure to scum-save the game, because there’s no way I’m going to finish it any other way. Some might say I’m not getting the true experience if I play it with an option to save, but these old games were designed in a time where the length of the game was extended by its difficulty. I’m having fun with Castlevania – but I’m not looking to get bogged down.

The other one was ZombiU. This was an interesting take on the Zombie game genre, because it functions like a Rogue-lite: you take a survivor up until the point where you die, and then when you take over as another survivor, you have the opportunity to fight your previous character – now a Zombie – and pick up your old equipment. I’ll talk a bit more about it next week! 

Backlog Beatdown: Saving the Sprixies in Super Mario 3D World

I’ve played quite a few games this year so far across a whole load of platforms, and the first one I managed to get to the end of was Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U, of all things…

The reason is to do with a mix of the game’s design, the length, the optional extras and the plot. You see, there are quite a few things that often get in the way of me seeing the game through to the end. Here are a few:

·        The difficulty. I don’t like to admit I’m rubbish at a game, but if I can’t figure out how to get past a certain point, or haven’t developed my character well enough to do it (I’m looking at you Dark Souls,) it’s not going to last very long. I could probably work it out if I keep trying, but as long as I’m doing that, there are other games I could be playing.

·        The Length. I know gamers like their money’s worth, but the fact is most games are too long for me to see through to the end. Most of the time, the plot can be wrapped up relatively quickly. But there’s usually so much extra content to play that if you breeze through the main areas in order to finish the game, there’s no escaping the feeling that I’ve missed most of it.

·        The Plot. Should we expect a good plot from a game? Well yes – but therein lies a lot of what gets in the way of me beating them. Tied in with the length, if I’ve played the game up to a certain point then dropped it for something else, I can’t remember what’s been happening in the plot of the game when I come back to it! So I necessarily have to start again, and get caught up in a cycle of having an almost obsessive compulsive need to play the game “cover-to-cover,” so to speak, and not having the stamina to do so.

·        Game Design. This one’s actually quite straightforward: If a game is so poorly designed that I’m not having fun playing it, then I won’t play it.

Super Mario 3D World is a game that addresses most of these issues. This being one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, it is a very competently-designed game, and there’s frequently a sense of satisfaction as you beat the level or a boss. Some levels are more challenging than others, but there’s always a sense of possibility in the level design – you can get to the end if you just get that jump right – and a nice feeling of satisfaction when you eventually beat it.

Hoe the screen handles all 4 players at once
is a mystery to me...

It’s not too long – I didn’t count but How Long To Beat reckons it lasts around ten hours – but the genius move in this game is that the optional content is just that: optional. It comes in the form of collectables – Green Stars, Stamps, getting to the end of the level and reaching the highest point of the flagpole – and while there are bonuses for collecting all of these, none of them get in the way of you making progress. You can only unlock certain progression points once you have enough Green Stars, but the chances that this will ever get in your way are very slim indeed. There’s no new equipment, or levelling-up: The game gives you everything you need, and it’s down to your skill as a player.

And of course, the plot is very basic. About the only difference between this and the other Mario games is that Bowser has captured the Sprixies rather than Princess Peach – who is a playable character in this game – and there’s no need to play through the game or read a lot of journals in order to remind yourself of what you’re doing.

The result is a game that was enjoyable, casual and well-designed enough for me to see it through to the end credits, with an option of going back through the game and getting all the collectibles if I wish so to do. There either aren’t enough games like this these days, or if there are, I don’t know where to look for them!

So now that I’ve gone off on one about how it was a Super Mario game I managed to beat for the first time this year, let’s talk about the actual game…

It’s true that Super Mario has come a long way from very humble – but no less well-designed – beginnings, and it can be argued that the franchise has come as far as it can go. A lot of the design choices were cherry-picked from previous games, and the ‘3D’ nature of the worlds had a 2D sensibility about them; a free-roaming game this is certainly not! The “Cat Suit” which allows you to climb walls and make dive attacks at an angle was new, and I don’t think controlling Princess Peach or Toad in a 3D platformer had been done before, but other than that, most of it was treading old ground.

Did that hamper my enjoyment of it? Absolutely not. You see, having not owned a Nintendo console since the SNES, and no later game than Super Mario World, I actually missed out on a lot of the Mario franchise over the past twenty-five years. Most of the game mechanics and designs that were re-hashed in this game were new to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed the new challenges they presented.

This was the only screenshot I could find
with just Mario in it.

I played through the game as Mario, as I wanted to play the most balanced character and let the game challenge me. And challenge me it did; the platforming mechanics are stable enough and there’s usually a gimmick on each level, a new idea you have to think through in order to progress. This becomes especially true in the later levels, which force you to think outside the box – but not too far! This gives each level its own specific challenge, a philosophy I try to adopt when designing levels on Super Mario Maker, and does a fine job of keeping the gameplay varied enough within the confines of a 3D platformer.

As the game progresses, it’s peppered with various other bits and pieces to shake up the gameplay. Boss fights are the most obvious ones, and here I think the games’ design comes into its own for its intended market: The boss fights are not hard, but if you keep bashing them they will kill you. Instead, you have to analyse their attack patterns, wait for your opportunities and dodge out the way for the rest of the time. Once you’ve figured it out, it’s not that much of a challenge – but for younger gamers, having to think about what you’re doing is a far more effective process than doing the same thing over and over again and hoping it will work this time.

Other variations include the Captain Toad levels, where you play as a Toad who can’t jump at all having to navigate his way around 3D labyrinths to gain five stars, dodging traps and using doors and elevators to negotiate the levels. This got its own spin-off game that I’m looking forward to playing. There’s also a few points in the game where you have a series of puzzle-levels; a rush where you have to beat in short levels in sequential order in a very limited time in order to get the ten green stars on offer. There’s also a series of mini-games in which extra coins, lives and power-ups are available.

There is a multiplayer mode, but I haven’t tried this yet for lack of having anyone to try it with at this point! This might come in useful for me in the future though.

So, now that I’ve got to the end of the game, what about the rest of it? Should I aim for a completionist run and go for all the green stars, stamps and flagpoles? Well, I probably will at some stage, but again, the game has happily given me the option not to do it. I’d like to have a go at the multiplayer mode at some point; when I do it will probably give me an additional challenge to the game. I think that’s a testament to a well-designed game: I’ve got to the end-credits, but I’m more than prepared for it to keep on giving!

My Unfinished Games of 2016

Well we’ve come to the end of another year and once again I’ve bought more games than I’ve got a hope of playing through. I’ve not beaten anywhere near as many games as I was expecting, although I would attribute a change in my personal circumstances and an almost compulsive need to keep myself busy to at least some of that.

Of course, there are games out there that I have played and, for whatever reason, I haven’t beaten them. Maybe they’re too long, maybe they’re too hard, maybe they’re not supposed to be ‘beaten’ in the usual sense. Maybe in some cases they weren’t very good. As I write this I’m still trying to get through a couple of games in time for the New Year but I’m not going to force it, since that sucks a lot of the fun out of playing video games for me. Nonetheless, there are a few games that I’ve had a lot of fun with, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you about some of them:

Mordheim: City of the Damned

A battle in full swing...
 

I love this game. Mordheim was always my favourite of Games Workshop’s intellectual properties, and when I heard a video game was in production I really hoped it would be good (as Games Workshop have taken a somewhat cavalier approach to licensing their property for video game development, this isn’t a guarantee!) What we got was a game that grew on me as I was going along, to the point where I can look at my Steam screens and see that I’ve sunk 140 hours into the game. Not since XCOM: Enemy Unknown have I played a game so obsessively, and it certainly filled a strategy game-shaped hole left when XCOM 2 failed to engage me in the same way.

There’s plenty that I like about Mordheim. Firstly, the tutorial is kept separate from the main game. Far too many games these days introduce the mechanics as they’re going along; useful in itself but makes replaying the game far from a joy as you’re basically following a scripted sequence for anything up to the first hour. Mordheim shows you the game mechanics in the tutorial, but after that, you’re on your own. It’s up to you to learn your warband’s various strengths and weaknesses, what strategies work best with each faction, and what loots and rewards you need to be aiming for.

Developing your warband into a fighting force that can take on the game is a fulfilling experience when you know what you’re doing in terms of customisation. The skills and stats they build up along the way are always fun to apply, and even the injuries they pick up contribute to the organic story that you’re telling. Character development, when done well, can be a game’s greatest asset and this one is pretty good.

Finally, the game lets you go at your own pace. You have to collect enough Wyrdstone in a certain amount of time, and the game is over on the 4^th time you fail to do this (I’ve never had this happen to me, yet!) Other than that, it’s up to you. If a large percentage of your best fighters are injured, you can make the decision not to go on a mission while they recover – there’s no penalty other than wasted time. There are campaign missions which you have to do at some point, but if you want to raise the value of your warband so that you can beat it more easily – but risk more injuries in the process – that’s up to you.

Unfortunately the game is let down by two major flaws: Game breaking bugs and the Ironman saving system. There have been times when I’ve reached a certain point in the game – and put a significant number of hours into the relevant save file – to find that I’m unable to complete a mission because the game will not end it. Either the AI won’t take their turn, or one of your objectives doesn’t register. You have an option to abandon a mission if this happens but this comes with penalties that could potentially cripple your warband. And while the idea behind an Ironman save system – the game is constantly saving on one file so you can’t go back and load a previous save – is great for a game that relies on the consequences of the choices you make, it also means you can’t reload a save file if it is effected by a bug. Things came to a head when playing the 4^th campaign mission with the Sisters of Sigmar warband I’d spent weeks building up, and I couldn’t complete the objective without abandoning the mission. I quit out of the game and haven’t played it since. I probably will again at some point – but I have other games I could be playing for now.

Rogue Legacy

Dodge this, squire...

Since watching some TotalBiscuit videos I’ve been hearing the term ‘Rogue-like’ bandied around a lot, with Rogue Legacy being the crowning achievement in the genre. Now that I’ve played the thing, I’m starting to see why it’s so popular! The gameplay is excellent – tight controls, a charming art style and competent procedural level generation. Even better is the upgrade system, where you upgrade your skills and equipment after every run.

Because of course, that’s the whole point of Rogue-likes: You’ll never beat them all in one go but nor are you supposed to. Instead of that, you’re supposed to carry on until you die and then use what you picked up along the way to improve your chances of getting further next time. I have actually played a few games with so-called ‘Rogue-like’ elements and this one has been by far the best, for this reason: You’re always clear on how well you need to do for your next upgrade. You buy the upgrades for a certain amount of gold, and provided you know where to take your next upgrade, you always know how much you need to aim for. This might seem like a minor detail, but in actual fact it does a really good job of gauging the success of your run, rather than champing at the bit all the time.

It will be a long time, if ever, before I beat this game. And even if I do, I understand there’s quite a bit of post-game content to enjoy as well. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with it so far, so it made my honorary mentions list.

Super Mario Maker

Spiny's can go upside down? What devilry is this?

Well how do you beat a game that has ongoing and almost entirely user-developed content? The answer is that you don’t; you just have some fun with it. And fun I have had! It’s good to fight your way through different levels made by other people, it’s good to have a go at some dev-designed levels that don’t appear in the Super Mario games that these are based on, and designing your own levels and seeing how they challenge people is a rewarding experience.

You make your own fun with Super Mario Maker, and when I’m building levels I try to make a gimmick for each one; a puzzle or a challenge to overcome. Whether that’s building a set of pipes in the shape of a hill, sending several Bomber Bills flying at you, or creating levels that look like a chandelier, I want to make a level that challenges low-mid level players on the right level. I may never reach the giddy heights of designing a level where you don’t have to move; just let the platforms carry you. And I may never build a super-difficult level that only the most precise platforming can overcome. But I like to build what I would consider to be challenging levels.

I come back to this game sparingly as I tend to prefer games that have an ending that I can aim for, but for a bit of creative fun every now and then, you could do far worse than this.

 

Hand of Fate

I'll beat you in the end, dealer. Oh yes.

Not going to say too much about this one as I am expecting to beat it at some point; a very difficult game but enjoyable to play and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the end. It will be one of the few PC games I’ve seen through to the end!

Backlog Beatdown: Old School Platforming with Mega Man X

Mega Man X is a game that I first played when I was about 10 or 11, my friend Matt had a Super Nintendo and borrowed it off someone. I remember enjoying it at the time; it made enough of an impression for me to download it onto my Wii U 20 years later.

While I wouldn’t have consciously thought this when I first played it, I guess Mega Man X is a “gamer’s game,” and as standard as they come. A side-scrolling platform game with colourful characters, bosses and upgrades, easy enough for me to get more or less all the way through the game without me discovering many of its secrets, but challenging enough on the right level for it to be fun. Also there were plenty of optional upgrades to discover for those people who wanted to look for them.

Watch for the attack patters, or just
shoot it until it dies - game's fine either way.

I haven’t played many Mega Man games, but as far as I know the pattern scarcely varies between each game – you go through a number of levels, fight a boss at the end and take his weapon if you beat him, and then go on to the final level where you get a boss rush (fight all the bosses again) and defeat the game’s final boss for the win. It’s a simple enough concept, and is solid enough for it to still be popular even to this very day, with new games in the series being released as little as a few years ago.

The gimmicks of the ‘X’ series – and what sets it apart from the other games – is that you can upgrade Mega Man himself. In the main series, your upgrades were limited to the weapons you received from the bosses you defeated. In Mega Man X you get that too, but you also get upgrades to his legs, chest, helmet and gun, allowing him to dash, take more damage, break certain ceilings with his helmet and charge more powerful shots, respectively. You can also pick up items to increase your maximum health, and even ‘sub-tanks’ that allowed you to store health pick-ups to re-fill your health bar when you were ready. Finding and using all of these upgrades is the real challenge and reward of the game.

The levels are well-designed and challenging. Very few of your enemies put up much of a fight and will die if you hit them a few times, but some of them exist to get in your way and force you to come up with strategies to either avoid or kill them quickly. You die far more often to traps and pitfalls than you do from taking damage! You can access the levels after you’ve beaten them to search for the secrets, and brilliantly, areas hidden areas of some levels are only accessible once you’ve beaten others. This is a classic example of good design – you’re not forced to discover these secrets in order to beat the levels, but it is a rewarding challenge for those who do.

Most of the bosses can be beaten by analysing their attack patterns and reacting accordingly, but you can make things a lot easier for yourself by finding out which boss is vulnerable to which weapon. The classic example is Spark Mandrill – once you have the Shotgun Ice weapon, he freezes as soon as you hit him with it. Boomer Kuwanger is almost impossible to hit, but is particularly vulnerable to the homing missiles you get from Launch Octopus. The final bosses of the game are also weak to certain weapons.

I’ll admit that I used a wiki to help me to discover some of the game’s more obscure secrets – the last few health tanks, and the final bosses’ vulnerabilities. Some may call it cheating, but these were tricky enough moves to make and did not detract from the challenge of the game. I’ve had a lot of fun with Mega Man X; it’s a splendid platformer from a strong development team at the very top of their game. I’ll keep it on my Wii U in case I fancy another go, but I can’t see that happening any time soon as I’ve seen most of what there is to see.

Backlog Beatdown: Being alone with Thomas in Thomas Was Alone

What a delightful game this turned out to be! I can’t remember where I first heard about it; most likely TotalBiscuit, but I remember the idea of moving coloured blocks with some amusing narration was intriguing, if nothing else. I didn’t play it for the longest time because I was trying not to buy more games than I could beat, or at all, but then when I bought a Wii U and found it available on its virtual console, I thought I had to give it a go.

So this game shouldn’t be news to anyone really but what Mike Bithell managed to do was create a game with very simple puzzle-based mechanics and use a fantastic musical score (David Housden) and an incredible performance from Danny Wallace as the narrator to maintain engagement. It follows the story of Thomas, a little red rectangle, as he tries to escape the world he is in. On the way, he meets some different coloured rectangles, each with their own shapes, sizes and personalities – which are never heard, only narrated, in a manner similar to a children’s TV show circa 1980s/90s – and they have to use their various shapes and capabilities to help each other through the world. It takes what could have been an abstract and not-very-interesting concept and breathes life into a gaming world which at the time (2010-2012) was sorely missing some colour and wit. And it works. The music offers a sense of peace and calm, and you can’t help but be invested in the story of Thomas and his friends, as it continues to unfold in a manner which leaves just the right amount open to imagination. The game does have a rather convoluted plot, but it’s not pretending to be sensible – and you’re far more interested in the relationships between each of the characters anyway.

Easy to figure out what needs to happen here -
but how do you get them all up there?

With all the gushing people tend to do over the production, it would be easy enough to assume the score and narration carry the whole game. Thankfully, this is not the case: Thomas Was Alone is a very competently-designed game which has a good learning curve that gently introduces the player to the various different mechanics, and moves on when it is ready. The puzzles are rarely complicated, and require but a moment or two of thought. Some of the more challenging levels require some precision over their execution, but this is nothing a little patience doesn’t solve and there is a sense of achievement in completing them.  Sadly the controls weren’t quite as responsive as they needed to be, I don’t know whether that was to do with the Wii U or the game’s design but it hindered me few times.

The game isn’t very long, but it doesn’t need to be: If you blitz through it as a speed run it’ll take no more than a couple of hours, and even though I took my time I don’t think it took me more than four. I was happy just to pick this one up and have a play from time to time; it was a refreshing change to be able to do a bit at a time without having to level up, or follow a contrived plot, or even take it remotely seriously. It knows what it is – a game about moving coloured blocks – and even though the score and narration do a lot to keep the player engaged, the game is not so long that it outstays its welcome. When it ends, you feel it could conceivably keep going for another few levels, and any game that leaves you wanting more is a great game by any stretch of the imagination.

There is longevity there if you look for it. You can time-attack the levels and there is an online ranking system. The Wii U version – and presumably whatever platform you now buy the game on – comes with an option to play the game with a DVD-style commentary; I haven’t looked in to that yet but it’s great that Bithell managed to squeeze even more life out of such a game. I might look into his other game, Volume, in the future. Until then, we’ll see what comes next…

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?