Last Week's Games: Mount and Blade, and musing on videos...

I thought I’d talk about something a bit different this week…

Over the weekend I played a game that I’d had for a while but hadn’t gotten around to playing, called Mount and Blade. It was on my radar largely because TotalBiscuit had talked it up at one point, and it was a Role Playing Game so I was willing to give it a bit of time, but I hadn’t played it up until now because I was aware that it was a game that had no real end-game to speak of. Some games work very well like this – the Sims games thrive on it – but I like there to be a goal, something I can aim for. If a game doesn’t have that, I find it hard to justify the time I put in to it at the expense of games that do!

Because he doesn't look like Aragorn at all...

Nonetheless, I had a go with it and was pleasantly surprised to find an open-world RPG where the idea is to build your… prestige, I suppose, and become a part of a saga of warring nations, eventually becoming a key player in it yourself. It reminds me of somewhere between Romance of the Three Kingdoms and A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed my time with it but again, with there being no apparent endgame, I did wonder how long it would keep me engaged for.

I put that thought out on Twitter, including the remark about A Game of Thrones, and it wasn’t long before my Dad came back with “8 seasons?” by way of a reply.

That gave me an idea…

What if I recorded gameplay videos in episodes and uploaded them to Youtube, creating a “series” of videos that would document my progress through the open-ended game? I have a few games I could do this with, Mount and Blade being one of them but also Cities: Skylines, and it would be an interesting take on showcasing those games. I could aim for a series of 12 videos, and put it to bed after that, knowing that I could draw a line under the time I’d spent in the game and the progress I’d made up to then.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’d had the idea of recording gameplay footage, and I tried it a while ago with DXTory. Paid £60 for the licence, and everything. Unfortunately it didn’t go very well, for a couple of reasons that come down to one fact: I play most of my PC games on a laptop.

The problem that this runs into is framerates. My graphics card was one of the top end models at the time I bought it and should be able to run most games at 60fps (frames per second) without even trying. But you still need a pretty fast hard drive to write that data to, and the hard drive on a laptop isn’t that fast. It’s understandable; unless it’s specifically been built for gaming, laptops aren’t really designed for speed. They’re designed for long battery life and high storage, neither of which needs the hard drive to run very fast. The most I can get out of the framerate for most games I have is 30fps, or just under. Since most of the games I play on my laptop are turn-based strategy games, this isn’t usually a problem for me but I wouldn’t expect a warm welcome on Youtube if I can’t run high framerates!

The other issue is the file size. They’re huge. When a video is made in DXTory, the file is made up of what’s on the screen and everything the graphics card is processing. What this means is that even a 15 minute video takes roughly 100 gigabytes. I don’t have that kind of storage space!

However, last week I tried streaming Horus Heresy: Legions off my laptop for a while. It seemed to work; I only had two veiwers and I’m pretty sure they were both me, but I did it using XSplit Gamecaster. It’s just possible I might be able to do it off that, so this week I’ll give it a go, and see what happens. I might just end up on Youtube!

Backlog Beatdown: Catherine. The game to play if you want to spend long portions of your evening going 'What was that all about?'

This is one of the weirdest, yet most enjoyable full-price games I’ve played on the Xbox 360 so far. Given that I own a LOT of games, that’s saying something.

I was inspired to pick up this game from Youtube’s The Completionist. I’d been aware of the game before now on the Xbox Live marketplace, but even though I thought it looked interesting, it was priced at a higher mark than I wanted to spend on a blind buy. Watching Jirard review the game changed that as I had a much better idea of what I was getting myself into, and when I could find a cheap-enough copy on Amazon (it’s not for sale in any of the game shops I usually attend,) I bought it quickly before anybody else did. Finding a physical copy of this game is not easy!

I actually had to click 'gameplay' to get an image off
Google that wasn't fan-art, Cosplay girls, or various
other people called Catherine including Zeta Jones.

The gameplay is divided into two sections, the main one being the Nightmare levels where you have to guide the lead character Vincent through a set of block-shifting wall puzzles to beat the level. It sounds simple, but the genius of this game kicks in when it starts adding variety to the blocks. Regular blocks can be moved and stood on. It’s when the game starts adding blocks that can’t be moved, or trapped blocks that will kill you if you don’t get off them straight away, or ice blocks that you can’t stop on, that things get really interesting. You have to plan your moves or you will box yourself in – but as the floor is always collapsing from underneath you, you can’t take too long about this or you will lose the level by falling off the wall.

I say this a lot but there’s something satisfyingly ‘old-school’ about games like this. Puzzle-action games[1] aren’t common in the triple-A market and you’d only buy a game like this if you knew what you were looking for; as such they’ve had something of a decline in popularity over the last decade. But it is a rare time with the Xbox 360 that I’ve had a genuine sense of satisfaction from finishing a level, as it is down to your skill as a player that you manage it. The game is hard, but not insurmountably so and while you’re essentially doing the same thing all the way through it, there’s always new mechanics to the blocks being introduced.

The other section of the game takes place in a bar, where Vincent hangs out with his friends. This, along with cut-scenes that would give Metal Gear Solid a run for its money in terms of length, is where the story unfolds: Unsure of whether to commit to his long-term girlfriend Katherine, Vincent accidentally cheats on her with a young sexy woman called Catherine. This is a part of the cause of the nightmares, where everybody appears to each other as sheep, and if they fall from the blocks they die in real life. Vincent’s anguish over having cheated on his girlfriend, his deteriorating mental state as he repeatedly gets drunk and loses sleep, and his gradual realisation that some of the people he speaks to in the bar are also having the strange dreams[2] is played out remarkably well. How you speak to and respond to people in the bar, and also text you keep getting from both girls, affects the ending of the game, of which there are a total of nine.

Yes... an Arse monster. Funnily enough not the
freakiest thing in the game...

In all cases, the game does not outstay its welcome. Even with the added block mechanics, solving wall puzzles does get old – but the game ends before that happens. The conversations in the bar happen on a timed basis, so you can’t talk to everyone because at some point, some of them will leave, forcing you to continue with the game. The cut-scenes do an excellent job of moving the story forward; the whole game is paced really well.

I’d more than recommend giving this one a go. I’ve got a lot more to unlock than anyone will manage on one play-through, but like most games, now that I’ve completed it I’m going to put it to bed until I feel like coming back to it.

---

[1] The game is often referred to as a Puzzle Platformer, but as that kind of game almost always includes a jump function and Catherine doesn’t, I’ll call it what I want.

[2] Oh it’s not a spoiler, you’d have figured it out straight away.

Backlog Beatdown: Shooting Many Robots with, er, Shoot Many Robots.

After beating both One Finger Death Punch and Mortal Kombat, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to get off my ‘Pick It Up And Have A Play’ horse yet, and played an arcade game I downloaded sometime in 2013: Shoot Many Robots.

This game reminds me of Metal Slug, and with good reason – it is a classic action platformer. You run, gun and jump your way to victory, using power-ups and upgrades to your weapons. Your enemies are robots, but curiously enough for a video game, most of them seem to have been designed look like they were built for function, not combat. They’re dangerous enough, but it’s a refreshing change to fight something that doesn’t look like it was deliberately designed to kill you.

Side-Scrolling BadAssery. What's not to love?

Make no mistake, this game is good fun. There’s a reason this was so popular in the 80s and 90s: The format worked so well. You run through a Post Industrial environment shooting anything that moves, and picking up anything that doesn’t move. The design of the characters and music put you in the shoes of beer-swilling rednecks who’d love to be doing nothing better, which adds to the light-hearted yet determined nature of the game. And as with the old games, Shoot Many Robots will let you get through the first few levels without trying, before forcing you to think for a moment about what you’re doing and how you’re going to beat the next level. There are obligatory boss battles, and even though some of them have a kind of ‘recycled’ feel to them, this is nothing new for this kind of game either.

But as this game is on the Xbox 360, the developers had to make some token effort to innovate, and they do this by putting in an economy with which to buy new weapons and equipment, a ‘level-up’ system similar to Charlie Murder. As far as I know, all the latter does is unlock some of the game’s later gear. Your characters can carry two weapons: A primary gun with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon which is usually more powerful but with limited ammo. But it’s the helmet, armour and trousers where it starts to get interesting, as they affect the way the character moves. Some gear speeds you up; others have more damage resistance but slow you down and can lock some actions like slides. Certain upgrades allow jumps to resist gravity, and you can even acquire a jetpack to keep you in the air for a few seconds. This is more useful in some situations than others. At times you’ll love floating over your enemies bringing death from above; at others you’ll miss the tightness of the controls of the regular gear.

The game also has some multiplayer modes including up to 4-player co-op. I didn’t bother with this, as I don’t usually play games with people these days. I would imagine it would be somewhere between having a laugh with a few friends, and a frustrating pain in the bum as you have to wait for each other to upgrade your gear before you can actually play the game. I think it would have to be played in the right spirit, and with the right people, but if you can find both of those things you should have a good night in at least.

Having been watching YouTube’s The Completionist, I’m developing an appreciation for the kind of gamer who wants to power through games and unlock everything. It’s not my style – I prefer to go get to the end of the game once then come back to it if I really want to – but I can see why some people make that their hobby. Shoot Many Robots is a game that caters for both demographics; getting through the game on Normal difficulty was fine for me, but the individual levels give you a star rating out of 5 and maxing out all the stars on a higher difficulty level will probably give the game a lot more mileage for the completionists among us.

So, quite a good game. Not the best, but far from the worst, and it’s done it’s job for me.

Roleplaying Games: Which Edition? Which Game?

It's a little bit funny that for all the things I really ought to be doing today, I choose at 11.55am to do the thing that's probably the least useful to me out of all of them and write a blog. Probably me at my most typical, if I'm perfectly honest.

It's so hard to get a game in; who cares what edition it is when you do?

OK this somewhat follows on from the Bitter Veterans post I made last week, and was inspired by a YouTube video from a Youtuber I've been following called Andrew, AKA DawnForgedCast. He's done a lot of really interesting posts about Dungeons and Dragons style roleplaying games over the past year and it's always a pleasure to watch. This particular time he was talking about the question of what edition of what game you're supposed to be playing, given the hostility some gamers have towards editions of the game other than the one they actually play.

Here's the video: http://youtu.be/zKcYXMJ8tVs

But if you can't be bothered to click the link, here are his main points, paraphrased according to my interpretation of them. His comments refer to North America rather than the rest of the world, but apart from the religious fanatics which doesn't appear to happen on the same level, I can't imagine the situation is that much different here in the UK, obviously relative to the size of the countries:

• There is a lot of divide and hostility towards different games, and different editions of games. Many people will settle on one game or one edition and refuse to play or even try any others.
• Out of all the people in America, only a very small percantage of them - some 2 million people - actually play tabletop roleplaying games. (He's gone on sales figures here so the number of people who actually play might have been a bit higher than he suggests, but not much.)
• Out of those 2 million people, 1 third of them play Pathfinder, 1 third play Dungeons and Dragons and 1 third play other games, e.g. Shadowrun.
• Out of the third that play Dungeons and Dragons, about half of them stick to 4th edition and the others stick to other editions.
• Given that Andrew plays Pathfinder, this gives him approximately 650,000 people in America to play with.
• He then goes on to explain that given his own limitations, the number of people he could actually play with are quite small.
• Given all this, why are the very small number of people who actually play games like this spending so much time and energy arguing over what to play, or what edition of the game to play? Surely it's hard enough to get a game together in the first place without it falling apart over disagreements to editions...
• As an afterthought, he then adds that about 30-40% of the people who don't play are actually against such games exisiting at all for religious reasons. So when more people are against it than actually play, why are the people who do play bickering about edtions etc?

By Andrew's own admission the actual data is innaccurate and could have been a little better researched, but he was doing this to make a point, not give an accurate view on the gaming world today.

Which is good, because I think he actually makes a really good point there. I don't find it easy to get a game of Dungeons and Dragons or anything like that going, and a lot of it is to do with conceptions of what game I should and shouldn't be playing.

So, to turn this in to my point, here's a list of preferences that I would like to see when I'm playing Role Playing Games:

• I'd like it to either be Pathfinder or D&D 4th.
• I'd like the players to be in Dudley or the surrounding areas.
• I don't want to play with anybody under the age of 18
• I'd like to have a full compliment of players (4 or 5 people.) I'd also like some continuity - mid/long term adventures and campaigns.
• I can't usually make Thursday Nights, and I can't do weekends either.

If I stick rigidly to this, then out of the very small percentage of people who play in the UK, I've written off:

• Everybody who doesn't play D&D 4th or Pathfinder,
• Everybody who doesn't live in Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Walsall or West Birmingham,
• Everybody under the age of 18
• Small/solo adventures.
• 4 out of the 7 days in the week.

Now there are reasons for all of these limitations I've imposed upon myself:

• I have the rules for Pathfinder and D&D 4th, and they are still being supported by their respective designers and publishers. I'm not all that willing to spend even more money than I already have on another game that I've only got a small chance of ever being able to play!
• I do a lot of miles in my car already and it's not exactly eco friendly. That and journeys take time that I don't necessarily have. I don't think I should have to trave for miles and miles to get an experience that I ought to be able to get far more locally.
• Because I teach guitar for Dudley Performing Arts, I have to be very careful about social contact with people under the age of 18. I'd have to be absolutely crystal clear about who they are, how they know me, whether their parents know where they are and what they're doing, do they have consent etc. It sounds brutal, but the fact is that even the most innocent of intentions can turn into an allegation if interpreted incorrectly, and if that happens, it will come up on any future CRB check even if it is disproved. Which would pretty much destroy any hope I've got of getting a job.
• Not being funny but part of the reason the games are so good is when you use the combined abilities of the group to achieve something that can't be done alone. Plus when you're trying to come up with solo adventures you're severely restricted to what you can put in there in terms of challenges; anything but the most basic monsters and traps will result in TPK (Total Party Kill) before the adventure's even got started, so I'd prefer more players rather than less.
• Thursdays I go to Black Country Role Playing Society in Blackheath, and every other weekend I see my girlfriend, who isn't interested in Roleplaying and also lives 90 miles away so it's very impractical to get anything going on a weekend.

However, the practical upshot of all this is that after nearly a year of trying to organise a game, all I've managed to do for any length of time is have Dave around for a solo adventure; we've both run games for each other. Not that we haven't tried to get a larger group together, but:

• Most of my friends would rather eat broken glass coated with cyanide than get involved with wargaming/roleplaying, (seriously, I'm embarrased even to ask them,)
• The majority of people I know who do play tabletop RPGs are either dead against D&D 4th, meet on days I can't do, or both,
• Out of the two exceptions to this, one came for a little while and then flaked out after a couple of weeks due to other commitments,
• The other is Dave.

Dave's been trying to get some people involved in it as well, and he knows enough people to do it but they all manage to come up with reasons why they can't make it that night or whatever.

Now, I mentionted BCRPS that I've been going to for about a year and a half now. This is basically ways I've got of making it happen, and in fact was the first roleplaying group I got involved with. They're not shy of new members, but because it's a group of 20-30 people, they do have to organise it accordingly to make sure everybody can play. The games run on an 8-week rotational basis and different games with different players/settings/GMs are organised each rotation, so that people are not stuck indefinitely in 1 game. It's a good way of getting games in that you're not used to. So far I've tried Pathfinder, Leagues of Adventure (based on Ubiquity,) Traveller, Star Wars, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds and Call of Cuthulu. Some I've enjoyed more than others but I've never not enjoyed it. However it does mean that it's almost impossible to get any kind of continuity with the games or play at higher levels than 1 to about 3; they're all either seperate adventures or if they are part of a campaign, it's not easy to get the campaign going beyond the first adventure because even if you do run it later, most of your players will be comitted to other games by then.

Well, that's just the way it works with those guys, and between that and not playing, I know which I would rather have. So simply by getting rid of 2 of those limitations I mentioned earlier (the choice of games and the continuity) I can ensure that I'll usually play at least something every week. And since most people I know think this sort of thing is a complete waste of time anyway, or if they don't they certainly have no interest in being involved with it, that's got to count for something.

Now I understand that certain games may be better for some demographics than others. If you've been roleplaying for a while then I get why you'd probably like Pathfinder or Cuthulu better than the current edition of D&D, and that's fine. I wouldn't necessarily unleash a complete beginner on either game, and in fact I'm in the early stages of coming up with some D&D adventures that beginners can play and enjoy without getting bogged down by too many rules, another blog for another time. But people who say things like 'I only play 3.5,' or 'D&D 4th is crap,' are only further dividing what is a very small hobby. From what I've seen of the various different games, a lot of the enjoyment comes from your approach to it as players/Game Masters anyway.

This applies to Wargaming as well by the way - I've been with Games Workshop for 13 years but I would be open to trying something a little bit different in the right spirit.

So - you know who you are - try something a bit different! Try and enjoy it instead of looking for reasons why you won't. You might be surprised.