Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2, Vectorman 2, Bioshock Infinite, Star Wars: X Wing and Final Fantasy II

I’ve picked up and played quite a few games over the course of this week. Let’s see what they all are: 

Some cosmetic differences to the
characters in the game, funnily enough...

First game I had a go with was my favourite game of all time, Streets of Rage 2. I’ve waxed lyrical about this game many times before, and I still get it out every now and then because I’ve only got one thing left to do with it now: try to beat the game on the hardest difficulty without cheating. I tend to use Max for my play through, which might seem like an odd decision because of his speed, or lack thereof. However, at 20,000, 50,000, and every 100,000 points thereafter, you get an extra life, and this happens far more quickly with Max than with the other characters because you score more points for his high-impact grapple moves, and I can make up for his lack of manoeuvrability with his sliding tackle. I can therefore rack up a huge amount of extra lives in the early game, which generally keeps me going until the 6^th – or if I’m very lucky, the 7^th stage.

I didn’t manage it this time; I fell down on the one part I always manage to mess up on – the elevator on the 7^th stage, where there’s a huge ‘minor boss’ rush section and barely any room to move. Max isn’t great at manoeuvring and against the high-speed ninjas, it’s a struggle. It tanks most of my lives, with barely any left for stage 8 if I’m fortunate enough to get there. On this occasion I did, and I got as far as the boss rush in the elevator and finally died to Z.Kusano. Next time…

The other game I had a go with on the same disc is Vectorman 2. I’m after the achievement points for this one, and to get them I simply have to get to Scene 11. The problem with this is that the game is boss-hard and I can’t get past scene 5. It’s a throwback to old-school gaming where you have to study a level to find all the secret areas and power-ups. I wish I could wrap this up a little more quickly but this game was designed at a time where the longevity of the game could be increased by its difficulty!

That's the bit I've just done, if you're wondering...

I played Bioshock Infinite as well; I’m slowly going through it. For me, with the Bioshock games, the story takes a long time to get going. I’ve played all of them up to this one (not the DLC though,) and found myself having a standard experience for the first few hours of the game, before the story and the stakes ramp up in the second half. I’ll keep going at it; one of the better qualities of the game is that it is divided in to sections that you can play through for roughly an hour or so at a time – it’s not necessary to sit down and beat the whole thing in one go.

I played Star Wars: X Wing on my laptop as well. I had this game in several iterations in my youth, and enjoyed it immensely at the time. It harks back to an era of flight simulators where potentially any key on the keyboard does something, and while the control schemes can feel a little contrived sometimes, it’s probably closer to the experience of being a fighter pilot than an arcade shooter! I’m trying to get through all the Y-Wing training and historical missions; while the latter are easy enough, the proving ground was very tricky, as the lack of speed meant I needed to be on it with my targeting!

I continued the game of Civ IV I mentioned last week but I found I was getting stuck in a rut, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep that.

Finally, when I was necessarily restricted to a handheld, I was playing Final Fantasy II on my old Gamebody Advance. I tend to play this one very small bit at a time, in this case the rescue of Princess Hilda from the Palamecia Coliseum.

Am I going to play as many games next week? We shall see…

Last Week's Games: Civ 4, Eberron and Shinobi 3

I thought I’d start trying to do a regular blog on the games I’ve been playing in the week. I normally only do it when I’ve beaten one, but in many cases that takes ages and I rarely play a game to completion these days. That significantly reduced the output of blogs, and while I don’t intend to write so much that it becomes more work than fun, I thought I’d make an effort to describe the games I’ve been playing in what little of my free time remains available to me!

Haven't quite achieved this level of grandeur yet...

First up, earlier on in the week I had a go at Civilization IV on my laptop. I bought it as it was at the top of the list of Rock Paper Shotgun’s 50 Greatest Strategy Games. Now, 4x strategy games haven’t always agreed with me; I find the lack of personal involvement in what I’m doing takes my head out of the story of the game somewhat. But I have recently been enjoying turn-based games a lot more and this certainly gives me the time and space to think about what I’m doing. I’m playing as the Americans at the moment and I’ve put an hour or so into the game on the second-to-bottom difficulty. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so; it’s an enjoyable enough game and arguably the best in the series (not that I’d know, having not played another Civilization game since the first. There was a version on the Nintendo DS at some point that I finished in a single evening but I’m not sure that counts!) 

In the Roleplaying group we continued the Dungeons and Dragons Eberron campaign in which I’m playing a Halfling Monk called Corrin. I’ve never played a Monk before and it’s an odd experience; they’re great at combat and rubbish at everything else. That takes me out of the game on those occasions where we’re not in combat, but at the same time I really like being good at it! Combining the multi-attack damage output of the monk with the mobility of the Halfing means that I can very easily set up flanking moves (yes, they are a thing in 5e!) and potentially inflict the most damage of the party so far!

The adventure our GM is running, Murder in the Dark, was clearly designed as an introductory adventure to the Eberron setting and I’m not sure I’m enjoying the way it’s designed. Without wishing to spoil, it was quite obviously written for certain aspects of the adventure to work out in a certain way, and it does grate somewhat when you were always going to lose the macguffin item in order to advance the plot – I can see why it has to be done, but it doesn’t feel very organic! But then again, it’s on the players and the GM to make a good roleplaying experience and I have been enjoying the game, on the whole. I just wish it wasn’t at the end of a full and very long day at work; then I wouldn’t be so tired while I was doing it!

This bit is cool. I want one of those boards!

Also I had a go on Shinobi III on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on the Xbox360. This is a game I owned during the time I owned a Megadrive, so I’ve been playing it for a long time indeed, and I still find it enjoyable even to this very day. I’m not quite as good at it now as I was back then – I can no longer beat the game on the hardest difficulty – but I can take a certain amount of pride in knowing how to do all the special attacks. The dive kick, for example, makes the game a lot easier to play, as does knowing the functionality of the Ninjitsu techniques. I got to the fifth stage this time, but got frustrated when I died due to falling down a hole – a silly mistake, and one I knew would cost me later on – so I gave up and went for a shower.

I might have a bit more time next week, so we’ll see what that brings. See you soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Double Dragon. No single dragon nonsense.

Double Dragon Trilogy was a game I bought months ago from GOG having had an email from them promoting the game. I remembered enjoying it when I played it on my mate Adam’s NES years ago, bought it on a whim and it’s taken me until now to give it a go. I dug my old controller out, booted up the game, remembered how hard it was and hoped that this time I’d be able to beat it. You should be aware that these notes refer to this updated version of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re one of a pair of twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and you’re on a quest to fight through a street gang called the Black Warriors to save Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. The game is one of the earlier efforts of what later became known as the Brawler genre, with your character able to move around the floor section of the screen, kicking, punching and special-moving your way through the levels and the enemies. The game was originally released in 1987 and the genre was very popular in the arcades at the time, but is it still any good today?

That’s a loaded question if you’re asking me, because I will always compare a game like this to the standards of Streets of Rage 2, which is the best game of all time and everyone should play it. But as a game released roughly five years before that, Double Dragon does OK. It’s a standard brawler with some new features (for the time) and satisfying game mechanics, let down at the end by a horribly cheap final level, (we’ll get to that.) You have a button to punch, a button to kick and one to jump as well. You can also to a jump kick, but I got through the game without doing this because Billy kept kicking backwards. I didn’t find out until later that you’re supposed to press the punch button to make him kick forwards!

Batter him...

The enemies usually go down after one or two attack combos, and there are some colourful characters and bosses to liven things up. Double Dragon was also the first game of its kind to allow the use of weapons, which added an extra layer of depth as you have to balance range, speed and timing. The whip, for example, was a fast weapon but didn’t have a lot of range, whereas the baseball bat was slower but had more reach. Both required good timing. The knife was a throwing weapon, which would one-shot kill most of the lower-level enemies and help a lot with a boss. You could also throw boulders, boxes and barrels.

Aside from being able to select the difficulty (I went with easy; games like this often require you to know them inside out to be able to handle the harder difficulties,) the Trilogy version comes with two modes – Arcade and Story. It took me a couple of goes to work out the difference: In Arcade mode you play through the game, you have three lives and can continue when you’ve lost them all. In Story mode, you can select any of the game’s four levels once unlocked, starting the game with four lives and no continues. I beat the game on Arcade mode. I did try the story mode but found it very difficult, and here’s why:

Remember that horribly cheap final level a couple of paragraphs ago? This purports to be the gang’s hideout in some kind of temple. The first half of the level is trapped with sliding blocks and spear statues that drain a lot of your energy, and with the blocks in particular there seems to be nothing you can do about it. They appear in a random pattern as soon as you get close to them, and will kill you after two hits. There’s no skill involved with this, just luck, and you’ll lose a lot of your lives navigating it. Then there is the game’s final boss, Willy, whose weapon is a gun that will one-shot kill you the moment it hits you and will never be dropped. It is possible to beat him, but without the option to continue the game once you’ve lost your lives, it presents a far greater challenge than is fun.

Once you’ve beaten the game, Billy rescues his girlfriend and the credits roll. Apparently if you play in multiplayer mode you then have to fight Jimmy for her affections, but as I played this game on my laptop, I doubt I’ll ever see this! All in all, it’s not a bad little game, I had some fun with it, despite the last level. Give it a go – but don’t spend any substantial amount of money on it!

Backlog Beatdown: Fantasizing about Sweets in Sweet Fantasy. No, really.

Right…

I was actually wondering whether I should bother to blog this one, given the potentially embarrassing subject matter and the fact that it is barely even a game, but if this online tracker of my journey to beat all my games is going to mean anything, I need to be showing the worst of this as well as the best. So yeah. I played, beat and yes, completed Sweet Fantasy. 

This was the first thing to come up on
Google Image Search...

This visual novel was brought to my attention by the Co-Optional Podcast hosted by TotalBiscuit, Dodger and Jesse Cox in the release section they do at the end. I enjoy the show and it is how I hear about a lot of games, and having heard a brief description of Sweet Fantasy I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never had a visual novel game before, so I don’t know if this one was a good one to get started on. It’s about a dryad called Pumpkin, who is hopelessly in love with her mistress, Ms Amethyst, and she’s trying to make a love potion in order to get Amethyst to sleep with her.

So the question is: Is it any good? And the answer is no. The idea is puerile, but it allows an unashamed exploration into a lesbian relationship between a dryad and an elf (I’m assuming Amethyst is an elf; her ears are pointed,) and had potential. But the characters are shallower than a petri dish and it’s not very interesting at all. Pumpkin is dozy and silly, Amethyst is stuck up and arrogant, and this doesn’t vary at all through the ‘plot.’ There are other characters in it, a snail and a mermaid, but they’re all ‘One-shots’ (only appearing in their scene) and don’t contribute much more. The plot is a mixture of a short journey and confused ramblings: you either find what you’re looking for to make the potion or you don’t; it doesn’t go anywhere else. Also the localisation wasn’t very as good; the text could have used an extra pair of eyes to check spellings and grammar. I know that sounds like a minor gripe but if you’re trading on the idea of being a visual novel, we could at least expect some competency in the text!

Your first task is to find these mushrooms...

As for the so-called gameplay, that comes down to a couple of decisions you have to make with regard to how to handle certain plot points. This reminds me more than anything else of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, and I guess fits in with the idea of a visual novel. But there’s no skill involved; no indication of what you’re supposed to be doing, or which choice is the right one. It is guesswork, nothing more; you either get it right or you don’t. The small amount of challenge comes from remembering what the wrong choice was, re-loading the game and choosing the other option. Any game needs to have an enjoyable process and a satisfying outcome, and unless you really like soft porn slideshows, this doesn’t have much of either.

So is there anything good about the game at all? Well, the art is very well drawn, I’ll give it that. Obviously an anime style, but it works. It’s clear that this is where most of the effort went in to development, perhaps to over-compensate for a lack of writing talent. There’s no game-breaking crashes or bugs that I could see, and it was designed competently enough to at least include a ‘skip’ button for parts of the dialogue that you’ve seen before. Very useful when re-playing sections for the better ending! And at least it’s not very long; I’d seen the whole game in roughly 40 minutes.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Matt,” you’re thinking, “what did you expect? It should have been obvious what this was; an over-sexualised piece of fan service. How could you have possibly thought this was going to be any good?” Well, in fact, I didn’t. It was a dip into a genre of game that I hadn’t looked at before, and I’d never have known until I tried it. Now that I have, I feel no need to do so again.

Backlog Beatdown: Fortune and Glory with Lego Indiana Jones

I find myself playing a lot of the Lego games these days, and a lot of the points I make about them are covered in the review I did of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga a while back. Given my preference to play games in order, and having beaten Lego Star Wars, the next step was Lego Indiana Jones, and I’ve been playing this game quite a lot over the last couple of weeks!

He doesn't always have that gun...

The premise of the Lego games are simple enough: Play through the plot of whatever property they’re based on using Lego characters, in this case the original Indiana Jones trilogy. They are competently designed, easily accessible and provide a challenge in puzzles and collectables. The puzzles are largely based around deciding which characters and their abilities to use for each level, either to progress through the story or unlock all the extras later. One slight criticism is that it doesn’t work quite as well in multiplayer as some of the other games, as this one was designed before they started splitting the screen to accommodate both players, but as this was very much a single-player run-through, this didn’t affect me.  

I wondered how Telltale Games would make it work with Indiana Jones, as at first glance there didn’t seem to be a wide-enough range of characters to make it work, but I soon found an understanding of what everyone was supposed to be doing. Indy has his whip to swing across certain gaps and disarm opponents, archaeologists have shovels and can dig for treasure, mechanics fix things, scholars can open hieroglyphic doors, Nazis can open certain doors restricted to them and blow things up with grenades and rocket launchers. The ladies in the game have certain skills that apply to their characters. They can all jump slightly higher than the men and that is as good as it gets with Marion, Elsa also has the scholar ability, and brilliantly, Willie has a scream that can shatter glass and later destroy certain enemies. I also liked how certain characters have phobias: Indy clams up when he’s near snakes, and so does Willie when she’s around bugs.

I found Lego Indiana Jones more challenging than Lego Star Wars, if nowhere near as long having only three films to cover rather than six. The enemies are harder to take down as in most cases they have to be taken out in close quarters, and will take three or four hits to drop. Guns will destroy most enemies straight away but very few of the characters have guns by default; you need to pick up guns dropped by the enemies. While this rarely gets in the way of progressing through the game, it can make certain of the collectables hard to find if you’re not careful.

Funny how this scene is so iconic with Indiana Jones,
given that it only happens for moments in the film!

This being a game about archaeology, there are a lot more traps and puzzles to get around which provide an even greater threat. It’s not insurmountable though, and there’s a nice sense of achievement when you figure out how to open a door, or disable a trap. It’s a good way to vary up the pace and fits the theme of the game perfectly.

But of course, this being a Lego game, the heart of it is all about the collectables, and this is why it took me a relatively long amount of time to play through a somewhat short and easy game – I was aiming for 100% completion. To do this, I had to do the following:

·        Beat the Story Mode: This is easy enough, you need to get from one end of the game to the other, although I did get stuck on one of the bosses at some point. It was the boxer from Raiders of the Lost Ark; I didn’t realise that the plane had guns you were supposed to be firing!

·        Post all the Mail: This was a bit of a funny one. At some point on each level there is a parcel you have to find and put in a red post box. You almost always have to do this in Free Play mode, as you need different characters to access the locations they’re in. You’re rewarded when you do by optional ‘Cheats’ you can buy – anything from faster digging to multiplying the number of studs you pick up.

·        Collect all the Artefacts: There are ten treasure chests in each level, and collecting all ten forms an artefact; an ancient relic of some description that may or may not have featured in the films. Collecting all of these opens some of the bonus areas. This provided a challenge to begin with, but it got much easier once I’d unlocked the Artefact Detector in the previous section. Some of the things you have to do to make the chest appear are a little contrived, though, and on these occasions I found myself using a guide to find the last few chests. By this time I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down.

·        Achieve ‘True Adventurer’ on all the levels: This is a feature common to all the Lego games where you have to collect a certain number of Lego studs along the level to achieve the reward. This only becomes a problem when you keep dying, because you lose all your studs. Funnily enough this happened to me because I couldn’t work out some of the puzzles and traps far more often than getting killed by enemies. It became much easier to do this once I’d unlocked the score multipliers!

·        Beat the Young Indy, Ancient City and Warehouse stages: This is the best kind of Post-Game content; things that you don’t have to do in order to see the story through to the end but provide some fun nonetheless. The Young Indy stage takes you through the opening scenes of The Last Crusade, but there are no collectables this time; you only need to beat the level. The Ancient City is an interesting one; you have to destroy some scenery and build some other bits of scenery to get one million studs. It was challenging because there’s no guidance on it this time. It’s not a case of getting from one end of the level to the other; you have to work out what to do with everything in it and the solution isn’t always obvious. The Warehouse has the same goal, and I thought I was going to have to faff about making tracks, as that was what some of the Lego blocks were insinuating. In actual fact, if you head over to the right side of the level there is a target there which cannot be destroyed and releases studs every time you hit it; I just did this to beat the level.

Once I had done all that the game was completed to 100%, and I just had to unlock a few achievement points to get 100% of those as well. This is one of the few games I own on the Xbox 360 where I have a hope of managing it, because in this case none of the achievement points are tied up in online multiplayer. Most of them unlock as you’re playing through the game, some you have to do by destroying one specific character with another; they were easy enough. I had a bit of bother with the one where you need to kill five enemies with one explosion, but after looking at some community advice, I chucked a grenade onto a group of spiders that rush you in one of the Temple of Doom levels and the problem was solved. The ones that were hard were the ones that require you to perform same action multiple times, such as using Willie’s scream to shatter 50 glass panels, or using the Nazis to unlock their restricted areas 50 times. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a faff! I found myself restarting the City of Danger level several times, as there is an opportunity to do both right near the start of the level.

All this took me about two or three weeks; it’s nice to have a game that can be fully completed in that time! I’ve really enjoyed my time with Lego Indiana Jones, and while it will be a while before I come back to it, it’s there should I ever want to give it another go!

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!