Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month! 

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!

Batman Begins (Xbox version)

I've had this game on the Xbox for some time. I gave it another run through last week since Amy has re-kindled my interest in Batman, and here's what I think of the game:

For a bit of context, I've got all the Batman films since the Tim Burton movie back in the 80s, and I've enjoyed all of them up to a point. However, the Batman Begins film really did put some extra strength into the franchise. The acting was (generally) far stronger; Christian Bale makes a far more believable character out of Bruce Wayne for not having to be nice to absolutely everybody, and for having character flaws that don't necessarily involve his alter-ego. Michael Caine was wonderful as Alfred for his sense of humour and also for the fact that he's not as passive as the versions of him I've seen in the past. The villains were beyond excellent; not much masks and make-up going on in favour of more intricate, urbanised bad guys in the shape of the Ra's Al Ghul and Carmine Falcone. An idea that the film explores briefly at the end is that people like The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin and Catwoman came about less as an intentional antagonist to The Batman, but rather as a reaction to a vigilante in a costume. Scarecrow is, of course, a law unto himself: He creates his costume and persona for his own reasons. But the overall theme of the film was dark, gritty - and the added element of Batman causing fear came far closer, in my opinion, to what Batman was supposed to be. He might be athletic, but so is Spiderman, any of the X-Men, Green Lantern or anyone you care to mention. He might have gadgets but so does James Bond. But rather than fearing his enemies, he gives his enemies something to fear, and that's what makes Batman unique.

This was going to have to play a huge part in the game in order to pull it off, and as a system, it works quite well. Try rushing in to a fight and you are reminded that Batman is, after all, just a man, as you get your proverbials handed to you by five very angry thugs, probably with guns. Take the time to look around the area, however, and you'll soon come up with different ways of tipping the odds in your favour; dodgy scaffolding you can collapse with a batarang, a pipe you can hang from to pick off your enemies without them knowing, or setting off some explosive barrels. Once they're suitably terrified, drop a Flashbang on them, and you can take the vast majority of the enemies out without having to resort to fighting. It's satisfying to do, especially if you like things with a little more depth than 'Let's find something and kill it,' but don't want such a challenge that it is hard to work out what to do. It is a little simplistic, and the auto-target tool means it will rarely take you long to work out what to do, but you have to remember that the only game before this that came even close to having fear as its main mechanic was The Thing. It was a brave move, and really did push the PS2 version of the game to the limits of it's machine.

Get up from that one and you're a braver man than me...

The game has sometimes been criticised for its length (it's not long by comparison of some other games,) but actually it's as long as it needs to be. The 'Fear' mechanic would probably get old if the game were to last any longer; it's just about the right length so that you can do pretty much everything there is to do in the game without getting bored before you reach the end. And there is a lot of fun to be had from what the game gets you to do; it's never taxing to work out what you have to do to beat the level, but the look on the bad guy's faces when they know you're there but can't see you is worth it. When the time finally comes where you have to have a straight fight and kick ass, there are combos for the avid gamers, but button-mashing works just as well. The targeting system is a bit clunky - you'll be tearing one guy a new one, and suddenly start running across to his mate on the other side of the room, and you won't be able to help but blame it for some untimely deaths.

The graphics and settings are brilliant and compliment the film setting; it has the dirty, gritty vibe that makes Gotham City so special and it is suitably bleak; far from Adam West running around in broad daylight carrying bombs. The music is tied in with the film and works well, and the voice acting is for the most part good. One very careless blunder of using the same sound patch for different types of enemy spoiled it a little - Ninjas from the League of Shadows have their own voices, but scaring them with a dropped scaffolding triggers the same fear reaction you heard from Dr Crane's thugs earlier on in the game. But for the most part, the game is presented very well indeed; exactly the level of detail you'd expect from a film tie-in.

So, a game that looks and feels great, if not executed terribly well. It's worth a look though, and 5 years after buying the game I still went back for another go, so it's not without staying power.

I'm a bit busy for games at the moment but I've had a go with Buffy the Vampire Slayer so you might be hearing from that quite soon...