Backlog Beatdown: Pegging Pegs with Peggle

The summer holidays were approaching but I still had a week of work to go before I could chill out and ‘relax’ with an 80+ hour RPG. What I needed was another pick-up-and-play game that I could beat. I’ve got Candy Crush Saga on my phone but that’s definitely going in to the long term. And I wanted to give a system that wasn’t the Playstation a go. Enter Peggle on my Xbox 360…

Peggle was released for free a few months ago on Xbox Live Arcade, and I downloaded it straight away knowing that I’d want a light game to play in the future. How very right I was, as I became addicted almost straight away and played the game more or less all the way through in one day. I needed a little more time than that to beat the last few levels but once I’d got there it was a nice sense of accomplishment. I even had a go on the multiplayer mode, beating someone in a duel though I struggle with the party mode (where four of you have to make the best shot on the same map.) It is what it is – light hearted fun. And that’s where I’m enjoying games the most these days.

This level was a pain in the bum. Those bricks at the bottom?
They're moving to give the illusion of a 'road.' Ha ha.

The premise of the game is astonishingly simple: You have a grid of pegs and 10 balls to fire at it from the top. The idea is to clear all the orange pegs or blocks – usually 25 in a level – to beat the level. After that it’s a score attack – you’re looking to get the best possible score by clearing as many pegs as possible. Other than the walls in the play area, everything you hit will give you points to one degree or another, and if you can get the purple peg, that will give you a bonus to your score. Also there’s a bucket running across the bottom of the screen; if your ball ends up in that you get a free ball.

Diversity in the game comes in the form of the ‘Peggle Masters;’ anthropomorphic creatures who have their own ways of breaking the rules of the game. One master, Bjorn Unicorn, shows you the angle at which your ball will bounce, whereas Claude the crab creates a set of pinball-style flippers with which you can control the ball. My favourite is Cat Tut, as his bonus is to create a ‘pyramid’ on the bucket at the bottom that can potentially catch the ball from a much wider angle, bouncing it back in to play or giving you an extra ball. Or some more points. Either is good with me.

I won’t pretend that some of the scores I racked up weren’t more by luck than judgement, but it’s always a nice feeling when you work out an impossible shot, or gain three free balls in one shot. It is what it is – a nice little game that is a lot of fun to play, has about the right amount of skill involved and doesn’t necessarily rely on guns and headshots.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Peggle. This is the kind of game that lost out on 6^th generation consoles (PS2, Xbox etc.) By then, everyone had mobile phones and this is the sort of game you would play on those devices. If one was released for console it would almost certainly be bypassed for another action game, or given the time period, extreme sports. It’s nice to see them make a comeback, of sorts, on tablets and phones, but it’s good to see them on XBLA as well as they really are great games when they’re handled well and are a lot of fun to play. There’s a whole load of achievements I’d suck all the fun out of the game by trying to collect, including some DLC that I may or may not buy in the future. For now, having got to the end of the adventure mode, I will happily say that I’ve beaten this game – the rest of the content is there if I need to kill five minutes at some point. There aren’t enough games like this around these days!

Backlog Beatdown: Plants vs Zombies: A Zombie Game that I Really Liked...

You guessed it; this was another Xbox Live Arcade download. Quite a recent one, as it happens. Plants vs Zombies is a game that managed to get very popular, spawn a number of sequels, a host of clones and is quite well regarded in the world of videogames. And yet, it managed to slip almost completely under my radar. I started playing it at a time where I was playing through the original Baldur’s Gate and wanted something to break up the pace of computer role-playing games; games that you can just pick up and play are valuable things indeed in the wake of all that!

I’ve really enjoyed my time with the game. The premise is simple: Zombies are crossing your lawn and you have to plant various kinds of flora that will stop them. You generate your resources from sunlight and certain kinds of plants. Some plants to direct damage to the zombies, some have other effects such as freezing them or slowing them down for a few moments. Some plants function entirely defensively, blocking zombie attacks from the front or the top. You also have single use plants that take out a number of zombies at a time. The trick is picking the right plant for the right job!

The Zombies have different types as well. There are the regular run-of-the-mill zombies who don’t put up much of a fight, but things get interesting when the different zombies are introduced. Some wear armour (in the form of a traffic cone or a bucket on their head!) and take a lot longer to kill. Some of them have spears, ladders and pogo sticks that can jump over a number of your plants; usually only the first but you need to make sure the pogo zombie dies before he jumps over all of them! Some have slow-moving vehicles, some tunnel under your defences and attack the other way.

Thankfully, this game doesn't take itself too seriously...

But the genius of the game is about how you plan your planting in relation to what you know is coming. Before each level begins, you get a brief view of the level’s zombies and then choose from 6 of your available plants to make available to plant. Generally, it’s good to have a balance of resource generation, firepower and status effects, and the best ones to take are the ones that have been introduced on that level, but you get to know which work well and which don’t. Also, the plants have different costs; some plants do a lot of damage but will cost a lot of sunlight (the game’s principle resource) so you won’t be able to plant many until you have the infrastructure to support them. And there are new mechanics being introduced on almost every level, so there’s always something different to do.

The game is challenging but not insurmountably difficult. If one of the Zombies eats his way past all your defences then you lose, but in most cases there is a ‘lawnmower’ there acting as a last line of defence that kills all the zombies on that line. There are a couple of times when you’ll lose, because of a new zombie type you didn’t know how to deal with, or a huge wave of zombies you weren’t anticipating, but you can always attempt the level again thinking ‘just one more go.’

You’d think this would all get old after a while, and the game is better enjoyed in short bursts, but you’d be surprised how much variety you can put into a game like this. There are ‘conveyer belt’ levels, where instead of picking your plants you get a selection of plants on a conveyer belt and have to build your garden around that. The game ends in a ‘boss’ level that works in this manner. There’s even a bowling stage!

All in all Plants vs Zombies is a very good and well-designed game, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There’s plenty more to do in the game but I really want to get some more games finished so I’ll probably come back to the other game modes at a later date, to bring my achievement points up a little higher!

No Game New Year: Down and Depressed with Deadlight

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

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

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

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

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

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

See what I mean? Bleak.

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

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

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

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

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

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Game New Year: Charlie Murder

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

The band sound as good as they look...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you soon!

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

No Game New Year: Dead Island

Dead Island

Ah, Zombie Games. Of all the gaming tropes that refuse to die, Zombies – quite fittingly – are the most belligerent. Ever since 1995, when the first Resident Evil came out and Zombies became scary again, we’ve had a steadily-increasing horde of Zombie games rising up to consume its own genre – and infect other genres, that previously had nothing to so with the undead, as Zombie add-on packs are released for Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption. Zombie games get yearly releases, new intellectual properties are published that are basically just Zombies, and recently we’ve been seeing the ways to kill them become more and more inventive – just to keep the so-called Horror genre interesting.

You’ll guess from that rather cynical opening that I’m not a huge fan of Zombie Games. I love the first Resident Evil game, and the fourth but I’d hardly class that as a Zombie game. I played Nightmare Creatures for a little while but didn’t get very far. The only other Zombie games I play are the ones where Zombies appear as part of a line up of enemies, in Role Playing Games for example. So how did I come to play this one?

You guessed it: Downloaded it off Xbox Live as part of the Games with Gold package. I wanted to play something I could get through reasonably quickly, and tearing through a horde of Zombies seemed like the ideal game to play. Turns out I, er, wasn’t quite right about that…

Customisation of weapons is always fun...

The game is essentially a first person action RPG that apparently has an emphasis on melee combat. I’ve not heard good things about it from Youtube videos I’ve seen where it’s been commented on, (To be fair, Zero Punctuation is hardly the best place to look for positivity,) but as I don’t play many Zombie games and certainly none of the previous-gen ones, I didn’t have any pre-conceived ideas of what the game would be like. What I got was a peculiar mish-mash of different games rolled in to one. “Hey, it’s Borderlands with Melee Weapons,” I found myself saying at one point. “Hey, it’s Elder Scrolls in a Contemporary Setting,” I thought at another. “Hey, it’s Far Cry with Zombies,” I thought finally, the Skyrim with Guns analogy already having been used by the aforementioned Far Cry. And while Dead Island isn’t really as good as any of the game it references, it’s OK for a while, bashing zombies with Baseball bats, cutting their limbs off with knives and the like. You might even come across a gun or two if you’re lucky. But there are issues in the game that, in retrospect, impede enjoyment of the game quite a lot.

The first thing about the game is this: It is not scary. I know Zombie games are not necessarily scary any more anyway, but here’s the thing: They should be. The first Resident Evil game worked so well because of the combination of fixed camera angles, limited ammo and ambiguous health system. More or less the same goes for the first two Silent Hill games. This did a fine job of building a huge amount of tension as you struggled to solve the puzzles in the game in order to move on to the next bit, all the time pushing your luck with your ammo and your health while you could barely see what was going on. Combine that with the occasional jump scare and the possibility that you could de-rail any chance you had of beating the game through sheer carelessness, and you had a genuinely frightening game. There’s none of that here. The open environment means that with a very small exception, you see the monsters long before they have a chance to react to your presence. The puzzles largely consist of fetch quests, and weapons are easily obtained and maintained. There’s no survival here. There’s just getting from one bit of the game to the next and killing Zombies if they happen to get in your way.

The ‘Quests’ are a good idea, but something of a missed mark in my opinion. For a start they are almost always ‘Fetch’ quests (bring Item A to Location B, then return to Quest Giver C and receive reward D, plus some XP.) Thematically they’re all correct – finding supplies, tools and prized possessions – but its all carrot and no stick. For example, in the first section of the game, the quests you have to do in order to progress the game further is attempt to get supplies from various parts of the island. All the others are side quests – someone asks you to look for a necklace, another asks you to find family member, a third asks for engine parts for a car. The only reason it matters what order you do all this in is the reward you get at the end, which could take the form of money, weapons or supplies. It never seems to occur to the game that, while you’re faffing about looking for a necklace, the missing family member is presumably fighting for their lives against Zombies, and will probably die if you don’t get to them soon. And while you’re doing all these side quests, how are the survivors coping with the supplies you’ve chosen not to look for? Do they revolt? Do some of them go scavenging themselves? Do they snarl at you whenever you’re around for not doing enough to help? No – they just stand around waiting for you to do it. There could have been an excellent ‘decision’ mechanic in there where you have to decide what is important and what isn’t, and come to terms with the fact that you can’t help everyone which would have fit the theme perfectly, but it just doesn’t happen. The other missions I’ve done so far are either ‘kill’ missions, where you have to kill a certain set of enemies – which you’ve been doing all game anyway, so that’s nothing new – or escort missions, and no one likes them no matter what game it’s in. There’s not a lot of variety in a game this long to be honest.

Next criticism – the game is quite stoically bleak. Everybody around you is as miserable as sin and whether you achieve their quests or not, it does little to lighten the mood. Now, I understand that there’s not a lot of room for sunshine and rainbows in a Zombie game, but there really isn’t much personality in any of the NPCs that I’ve met so far. They’re there for the more functional purpose of giving quests, and while there are some exceptions, most people just… talk.

The contrast between what people expected having seen the game trailer and what people eventually got has been well-documented. Having seen a video of a father and a husband (both the same person) fighting ferociously to defend his family, and eventually having to throw his recently-zombiefied daughter out of the window to a huge drop below, what we were expecting was an emotionally charged desperate battle for survival. The problem with this approach is that it only really works with a relatively small cast of characters so that we have time to build up relationships with them and actually care if they get hurt – and even then, they have to be correctly scripted and performed. This doesn’t happen much at all in the game I’ve played up until now, as none of the characters are particularly memorable.

***SPOILER ALERT*** on the one occasion I’ve come across where the NPCs actually contribute some emotional gravity to the story, it is so poorly paced you barely notice. A mechanic has been bitten, he knows he does not have much time left before he becomes a Zombie and promises to upgrade your vehicle before that happens. You have to fight off a Zombie horde while he does this, and when the mission is over, you are rewarded with a cut-scene where he asks you to take his daughter with you. What follows is a teary goodbye between father and daughter, which would have been a darn sight more effective if you hadn’t been introduced to both characters LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES AGO. The ‘scene’ is shot well – but because we have no pre-existing emotional attachment to the characters, we find ourselves caring about them a lot less than we should. This severely blunts the emotional impact we are supposed to have over this. ***SPOILER OVER***

That having been said, I’ve been playing through the game and I have been enjoying it. There have been no standout moments, but also no appalling incompetence on the part of the devs. It is a playable game, make no mistake about that, and I have been having fun with it. I especially like the idea of doing limb damage to enemies in order to prevent them from running or attacking, and crafting weapons is always a satisfying experience – if you have enough room for them in your inventory! Driving over Zombies is always fun, and even though there’s not a massive variety of enemies, you do at least have to come up with new strategies for when a new one is introduced. And the Looter gangs are good as well, as they lend a certain amount of moral ambiguity to the survivors. Finally, some of the sound assets for the Zombies are excellent. One of them genuinely sounds like they’re in pain when you’re staving their brains in with the handle of a hammer.

 I’ve stopped playing it for a little while but I expect I will come back to it eventually and get through the rest of the game. I’m about a third of the way through at the moment, but I decided to move on as I always come back from a weekend away from games wanting to play something else.

That turned out to be Virtua Fighter 2 from the previous blog…