Last Week's Games: Painting a Dark Apostle and Uncharted

I’ll start this week by talking about something I should have mentioned in the previous one: I’ve finished painting my Dark Apostle for my Chaos Space Marine Word Bearers army.

This one was a massive faff to keep it held together. This being a Finecast model, it wasn’t terribly well cut and there are some rather wobbly joins holding it together. The result is a model that would very likely fall apart if somebody breathes on it too hard, (even as I write this the star on the top of his weapon has broken off again,) and a lot of the time I wanted to spend painting it was spent repairing the thing.

Not the best picture but
the best I could do at the time.

I was a little puzzled at first as to what colour I should be painting him. Dark Apostles are, of course, the Chaos Space Marine equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, and they always wear black armour no matter what chapter they are attached to. I wondered if the same applied to Chaos Space Marines and whether I would necessarily have to paint it in that dull rusty colour that appears on his box art. After a little research I couldn’t find a definitive answer, so I opted to paint him the usual Word Bearers colours of red and silver, making a neat job of the trimmings but not with the level of detail one might expect from a character model such as this. I’m pleased with the result nonetheless, and I look forward to putting him on the gaming table at some point.

This concludes the 500 points block of Chaos Space Marines I was painting in the Word Bearers colours, including a Chaos Space Marine squad, two squads of Cultists, a Chaos Lord and the Dark Apostle. Nothing particularly hard-hitting there, but those of you familiar with the most recent edition of Warhammer 400000 will recognise that this brings them into the Battalion force organisation chart, which means I have 6 strategy points to work with for a 500 point army. I don’t know how well it’s going to work but I’m hoping to find out soon.

I own more models for the army than this – I’ve got another squad of Chaos Space Marines and a Helbrute – but as I’ve not used any of them yet, I’m hesitant to get into a battle that’s too big, as I invariably end up slowing the game to a crawl by having to check the rules for the different units every few minutes. Far better, I think, to play a few games with what I’ve got, find out what works and what doesn’t, and add to it after I’ve got used to the rules for the models I’m currently using.

The next project is a Raptor squad that I intend to paint in Black Legion colours, inspired by the Horus Heresy: Legions game I’ve been playing on my phone. I’ll write more about that once I start to progress!

Pretty good, but not much motivation to play it again...

In other news, I reached the end of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and wrote a review for it which is scheduled to come out on Friday. From the tone of the review it seems quite negative, so I just want to clarify that it really is a good game. It was more a case of… you know when you’ve really enjoyed a game and you get to the end of it wishing there were more of it so you can keep playing? With Uncharted, I was quite ready for it to be over when the end credits rolled. The fact that it was 3am probably contributed to that.

Also, there are some new cards out for Horus Heresy: Legions; the Word Bearers are now a faction and a tough one at that. They seem to work around summoning Daemons, which fits the lore, and while they take a while to get going, once those Daemons start to arrive, they can take you down very quickly. I’ve not had a go with them yet, (I tend to keep to the loyalists in the events,) but I’ve got one of their Warlords so I might have a go with them in the future. It would be fitting, since that’s my 40K army!

Last Week's Games: Pokemon Leaf Grean, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Space Marines

What might lurk in the grass? Rattata probably.

So I had a request to play a game! I’d never got one before and I was quite excited to do it. Katie, someone I know from the open mic circuit, asked me to cover a Pokémon game, and I remembered I had Leaf Green on my Game Boy Advance so I was happy to oblige! I hadn’t played it or any Pokémon game for a long time, though I remembered it being basically being the same game as the original Pokémon games released in 1999. (I don’t remember anybody talking about it before then – and people talked about it a lot at school!) I enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far; I named my player character Katie after the girl who asked me to cover it, and the rival Boris because he keeps appearing to mess everything up, rather like our current Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson. I didn’t get very far because I started with Charmander, which is all but useless for the first two Pokémon gyms so I had to do some grinding with my other Pokémon to beat Brock. I’m currently at Moon Mountain, and I intend to keep playing! But I’m not going to go for 100% completion. Even if I could be bothered, the chances that I’ll find someone with a GBA and a copy of Fire Red to trade the necessary Pokémon with are slim indeed. 
 

Ezio before he becomes an assassin...

My new game for this week was Assassin’s Creed 2. You’ll remember from my previous blogs I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed when I played it last year, and I found I was missing large open worlds with things to discover and do so I gave the next one a go. It’s a good game; I haven’t noticed much difference between it and the first game yet in terms of how it plays but the Assassin’s Creed 2 seems a lot more invested in its own plot than the previous game was, which is making for a far more compelling experience. I’m a couple of hours in to the game and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next!

And my new game for last week – I did play one, but I forgot to put it on the blog – was Dynamite Heddy from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. This is an oddball platformer typical of the time, where you controlled a little puppet that could attack by throwing its head in different directions. It’s competently-designed, and fun enough, but I don’t have much interest in coming back to it simply because I’m not all that invested. If it had been a game I’d been playing since I was nine, it would be another matter, but having just picked up the game at thirty-two, I couldn’t honestly say it held my interest.

They grow ever more numerous...

Finally, in the space of about a week, I built and painted five Chaos Space Marines in Word Bearers colours. I was tidying around in my room in preparation for having new windows installed, and found a box of Chaos Space Marines I’d had for years but hadn’t built (it was my original intention to build them as Thousand Sons.) I enjoyed painting them, and the vast majority of that was done in Warlords and Wizards in Netherton where I had some great company as well! I’ll never be allowed to use them in a tournament because the bases are the wrong size (the rank and file of the current edition of 40K uses slightly bigger bases than previously, and unlike Age of Sigmar, 40K measures from the base rather than the model,) but I’m not bothered by that. I’m no tournament player, and I’d rather they were built and used than never touched again because someone was being funny about their base sizes!

I’ve built and sprayed some more models that I’m hoping to paint next week. I’ve also re-found the fun in micro-managing army lists, and I’ve found that I can fit two squads of Chaos Cultists into a 500pt army, so that’s where I’m going next. I’ve got an old box of cultists that I never touched, so I’ve built them now and I’ll try paint scheme that fits in with the Word Bearers!

Last Weeks Games: Painting Word Bears, Building Project Pandora and Beating ZombiU.

This week’s was interesting. I beat ZombiU, and while I will talk about that later, much of what I want to say about it was covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. So for this week, I’ll be talking a bit more about my hobby projects:

Had a fine old time
painting this one!

The first and most important thing to examine is the Warhammer 40K Start Collecting! Chaos Space Marine boxed set that I finally finished on Sunday. I bought it back in April/May, and having finished painting the Chaos Space Marine Terminator Lord, I’ve now painted everything in the box. I’m not a very fast painter; it can be months between painting sessions, however over the last few weeks I’ve managed to find some time to go in to Warlords 'n' Wizards in Netherton and spend an hour or so painting. Doing little bits and pieces at a time when it’s convenient yields many more results than painting on those few hours I have to very deliberately set aside when I’m at home! Who knew?

This is my fifth Chaos Space Marine army – I love Chaos in 40K – and for this one I used the Word Bearers colour scheme. My mate Dave started a collection of Ultramarines at about the same time, so I painted them up as their sworn enemies, hence the Terminator Lord having an Ultramarine helmet on display and – from the advice from Steve from Warlords – the head of a Tyranid of Hive Fleet Behemoth. Dave’s taken a break from war games for a while, so I won’t be playing against him any time soon, but I’ve now got some Word Bearers to show for it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of doing a force full of religious nut-jobs, so I ran with the Word Bearers legion and I hope to add to them in the future.

The whole boxed set was a joy to paint.

I’d like to give a shout out to the videos I used as a guide to painting the miniatures; I’m not a strong intuitive painter, and having a guide is pretty much the only way I learn. So thanks to The War Gamer for the vast majority of the help I received with the painting, and to Warhammer TV for the fiddly but crucial parts.

Elsewhere, I opened my Project Pandora: Grim Cargo boxed set and built all the Corporation models. I bought this game a couple of months ago. If you don’t know, it’s a dungeon crawler set in futuristic space, published by Mantic Games. It’s concerned with the battle between the Veer-min, rat-like creatures stealing secret cargo, and the Corporation soldiers defending it. I haven’t played the game yet since the models require some assembly, and unfortunately there’s no assembly guide included in the game. The Corporation models weren’t exactly challenging to build, but it was fiddly when it came to attaching the arms. The fit of some of my models suggests a certain set of guns are supposed to fit a certain set of left arms, however the game gives no indication of what arm goes with what guns, and the parts look identical. So some of my corporation guys look very odd indeed! Also, the models are plastic resin rather than full plastic, and required the use of super glue rather than the usual poly-cement.

Yeah. It got me.

Now, ZombiU… Some of my previous blogs may have given the impression that I wasn’t enjoying the game, but I actually had a decent time with it once the story got going. There were several parts where I got careless and rushed into an area full of zombies, woefully under-prepared, and one or two well-paced jump scares that managed to startle me. Very few times when I’m playing games these days do I find myself thinking: “Yeah, you got me. Well played.” ZombiU managed it, so well done! As I mentioned in my review, I beat the game but got the bad ending, as I didn’t manage to reach the helicopter before dying, but I checked the good ending on Youtube and it’s not much better, so I doubt I’ll be rushing through the game again in order to get it. I might play the Survivor mode at some point though.