Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel and Necromunda

Regular readers will note that I very often complain about not having enough time to play as many games as I would like, and this week has been no exception, though for different reasons than usual. I got caught up in a family emergency of the kind not terribly considerate of the average number of hours in a day, and while that’s been mostly sorted now, a lot of the spare time I was expecting to have this week has been taken up in dealing with it. Sometimes life gets in the way, and this week there were other places I needed to be!

See what I mean? It couldn't look
more XBLA if it tried!

On those days where I had an hour or two to spare, however, I found myself playing Sacred Citadel. One pattern that regularly occurs when I’m playing games is that after I’ve finished a big, heavy game like Assassin’s Creed, I’m more likely to play a couple of light or retro games that I don’t have to think too hard about in order to have a pretty decent time. Sacred Citadel is a fantasy-themed hack-and-slash brawler with RPG elements, similar in gameplay to the old arcade brawler machines that were the staple of the arcades in the early 90s, but with a look I that can only describe as Xbox Live Arcade. I didn’t realise until I was doing the research for this blog that it’s actually a part of the Sacred franchise, which isn’t a series of games I’m familiar with so I had no pre-conceptions about the content of the game. Honestly, at this point I just wanted to hit something.

You choose from one of four characters; the Warrior, the Ranger, the Mage and the Shaman. They have different abilities depending on who you choose; I went for the Mage because it’s a refreshing change to be able to fireball something to death without having to commit to a 40+ hour roleplaying game. The game is divided into four acts each with a number of levels in there; it starts out easily enough with the game showing you the different mechanics in the first few levels and taking the training wheels off for the rest of the game. You have access to a range of attack combos and can also upgrade your weapons. The more recent brawlers I’ve played have mechanics like this and they’re not awful, but it’s an illusion of depth as your weapon upgrades etc increase in power as the game increases in difficulty, as the enemies you face can take more damage as you’re going along.

Where the game truly becomes like an RPG is in its levelling-up system, where once your character gets a certain amount of XP they level up and you have to distribute points into their characteristics. This should also be an illusion of depth, and it would be if the game didn’t have a massive difficulty spike halfway through the second act and force you to go back and grind for XP to have a hope of beating the boss. There are some challenges to make this more interesting – complete a level without dying, or in a certain amount of time, or score a certain amount of points – but it’s brought the pace of the game right down to a standstill for me. I’ll keep going at it from time to time though, as I’m not expecting to have much time this week either and I’m not quite ready to get off my casual gaming horse just yet!

Looking forward to opening this!

I also bought Games Workshop’s new release, Necromunda Underhive. Necromunda is a game that was available when I first got into the hobby but had been and gone by the time I’d considered getting in to it. Games Workshop’s smaller skirmish games have a lot of good character development rules, though, and I remember Mordheim very fondly, so I’d love to see how it works in the futuristic gang war setting. I haven’t even had time to get the box out yet, and I suspect it will be a while before I do as I want to make sure I do a reasonable job with the painting this time, but we’ll see what happens with it.

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies and Assassin's Creed.

Doing this blog has opened a lot of doors for me in terms of the games I’ve been playing over the last couple of months. Most games require days, weeks or even a couple of months of my time to complete – and that’s if I play it for roughly a few hours a day whenever I can spare that time – and I have to keep my blog interesting by playing a mix of games during the week. I actually managed to beat Assassin’s Creed earlier today and had to put some time in to that to make it happen, but if that had been all I’d done all week I’d end up replacing the title of “Last Week’s Games” to “Last Week’s Blog.” Against anything I would consider my better judgement, people do actually read this; roughly 100 or so people a week depending on how many games I played. While they’re probably not all retained readers, I think I owe it to the few people who do read what I have to say week in week out to not repeat myself all the time. And it’s not like I haven’t got a tonne of games I haven’t played… 

Does this look 8-bit to you? Thought not.

To this end I found myself alone with my laptop for a few hours and played a game I downloaded quite recently: 8-Bit Armies. This is an isometric Real-Time Strategy game that purports to have 8-bit graphics, although that’s more to do with the design aesthetic because anybody who’s ever played an 8-bit game would know they don’t look even remotely this polished. I was aware of it because TotalBiscuit did some coverage on it a while ago; at the time he said something along the lines of while the mechanics of the game were solid enough, it was difficult to recommend because out of the proposed six factions, there were only two in the game at that point and they functioned more or less identically. I was reluctant to buy it straight away for that reason, but when it came up in a Steam sale a few weeks ago, I bought it and its two sequels, which is where I expect the four remaining factions ended up: 8-Bit Hordes (medieval combat) and 8-Bit Invaders (Sci-fi combat.)

I really enjoyed playing it for the relatively short amount of time I had. It controls well, and I’m mature enough now to know when the game is teaching me its mechanics of its various component parts as we progress – letting me see the purpose and function of the lower-tech units before letting me loose with the big stuff. So far it hasn’t challenge me in any massive way, but there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in executing a plan. An early mission has you destroying the enemy’s motor pools in each of the three bases in the area, and it was good fun to send my armoured cars in their first to scout the area, establish where the traps are and plan the best attack route before attacking with a horde of rocket launchers and infantry. This isn’t a set piece; the game doesn’t hold your hand. You have to work that out for yourself, and it’s all the better for that. It’s not perfect; with an isometric viewpoint some of the things in the game are blocked from view and there’s no way to rotate the map that I’ve found yet. But it’s a solid game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it.

Lots of people to save. Kind of contradicts
the point of an assassin, honestly...

And, I beat Assassin’s Creed. I’m not going to say too much about that as it’s going to get its own blog in the next few days, but I will say this: I might play the other games in the series at some point, and with each effort to innovate, the original Assassin’s Creed has become more obsolete to the point where many people now find it unplayable. I know I have an almost-obsessive compulsion to play all the games in order and that rarely does me many favours, but in this case, I’m glad I had the chance to be the game that forms the core experience of Assassin’s Creed –before all the innovations came in.

Last Week's Games: Assassin's Creed, Pathfinder

I decided when I came home late on Monday Evening to give Streets of Rage 2 one last hurrah, but I found that I wasn’t concentrating properly and making too many silly mistakes. So instead, I had a look at some of the bonus games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection: Space Harrier, Alien Syndrome and Tip Top. They are all very difficult early arcade games, and I didn’t really give them a lot of time engage me; it was just a way of winding down after a long and not very easy day. Realising I was getting nowhere, I moved on the following evening.

You can't see me...

I started playing Assassin’s Creed, of all things! I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this game. The series itself has come under fire in recent years for releasing the same game over and over again with naught but a token effort to innovate, but having only ever played the first one, I haven’t really noticed that. The game is decent enough, and follows a core loop of the Master Assassin, Altair, researching and investigating a target for assassination in the Holy Land, before planning your attack and delivering the killing blow. It’s good at what it does but the gameplay is very repetitive, and not in a way that I find particularly enjoyable, so I play a bit at a time and then not touch it again for months, sometimes even years. Thankfully, this isn’t a game I feel the need to return to the start of for the sake of the plot, or we’d be here for a very long time.

During the last time I played, I manage to get the achievement points for surviving one hundred fights without dying. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing; once your health bar gets to a certain point the fights are generally over before you take any significant amount of damage. So this would normally be of little significance but I came very close to messing it up! I started off in the city of Acre, and had forgotten that you’re supposed to blend in with the scholars in order to leave as most of the guards in the game will attack me unless I’m hiding. So I ran right through the guards, who promptly attacked. I tried to fight back, but I’d forgotten the controls too and it was taking me a while to get an attack pattern going, by which time I was surrounded by six or seven guards that I knew I hadn’t got a hope of beating. I ran off to avoid being killed, managed it, and got the achievement about half an hour later. I realised that the bulk of the work I’d put in for that would have been done years ago, and that if I got killed I’d have had to start all over again, so I was very grateful I’d had the sense to run from that fight!

Those kind of stories are what make the experience for me, but on a broader scale the game has a lot going for it. Graphically it’s gorgeous, and the level design is on point for a game of this size. I’ve progressed about half way through the game and I’m actually finding it a lot more enjoyable now that I’ve realised I am supposed to be killing the guards as well. When I played the game previously I was trying to do what an assassin would do, which is try to kill his intended target with as little collateral damage as possible. Then I read the achievement list and realised I was actually supposed to be assassinating the guards. I find the game a lot more fun having discovered this!

I also continued running Pathfinder for my friends Dave, Victor, Shane and Ian. I’ve been running Rise of the Runelords for them monthly for a year and I’m really enjoying how the campaign and the characters are setting up – particularly Victor, who’s played through the vast majority of the campaign before with a different system but is enjoying the different approach this group is taking. We should get another session in next month.

Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2 and Hydro Thunder Hurricane, plus buildng Warriors of Khorne

It’s been a bit quiet on the gaming front this week, due to being extremely busy for most of it and asleep for the rest. Here’s what I’ve had going on:

For a while I’ve been meaning to start a new game on my Xbox360. Which one? I don’t know yet. I’ve got quite a few single-player narrative-driven games to play, many of which I’ve never even touched despite having owned for years, and I’d like to get down to playing some of them. However, because I’m out most evenings, and because I’m very tired when I come home, I put on my Xbox, try to work out what I’m going to play (Current frontrunners are Blue Dragon, Shadow of Mordor, Of Orcs and Men and Enslaved) and invariably go “Never mind, I’ll have another bash at Streets of Rage.”

I can cheese that big fat guy on the right -
but only if I face him alone...

So that’s the principle game I’ve been playing this week, and I find myself using Axel more than Max for my play through these days, perhaps as way of keeping the game fresh for me! Interestingly I got as far as the fifth stage and found that I wasn’t concentrating anywhere near as much as I should have been; for this reason I lost the game on the elevator boss rush on the seventh stage. I don’t usually get much further than that but I could barely keep my eyes open!

It's big, it's dumb, it's fun. I love it!

I’ve also been playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane; I’ve been really enjoying going for the gold score on every level. I don’t play many racing games; there’s fun in learning tracks and optimal customisation options, but it is a long-winded process which gets tedious after a while. With Hydro Thunder, you pick the right boat for the track and away you go; any customisations are purely cosmetic – so I know if I’m going wrong it’s because I don’t know the track very well, not because I don’t know how to set up my vehicle and am therefore knackered from the start. It’s the kind of arcade racer I used to play when I was younger, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than I might for not taking itself too seriously.

In my quest to tackle my ever-growing backlog of hobby models, I had some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards on Sunday and put together some of the Warriors of Khorne from the Age of Sigmar boxed set that came out – and I bought – over two years ago. I built and painted most of the Stormcast Eternals, and some of them appeared in my previous blog, but it was so long ago that I can’t actually remember how I painted them. (Yes, I know they’re blue. I can’t remember what I did to get the highlights etc. I don’t want half my army looking different from the rest!) This is a problem I never even considered I would run in to before, but with many, many paints in the Citadel range, I’ve started keeping track of my paint schemes a little better now. I build all of the character models and monsters, and five of the Blood Reavers; I’ll do the rest at some point but that should keep me going for now.

If I have a large number of models from the same army I like to alternate painting the “rank and file” models in blocks of five, and then paint something else. That keeps it as fresh as it’s going to get and I get more done for not having to paint the same model over and over again, or take ages to see any progress for painting too many models at a time. I like to do a good job – or as good as I can manage – but I fall foul of many of the fallacies that plague many amateur painters: Rushing the last few parts, trying to get as much as I could do in the time and not taking breaks when I need to. I try not to paint to a deadline anymore, as this puts pressure on me to do something I’ll never manage and I get disillusioned.

Went on a bit about the paint there, but I’ve not got much else this week!

Last Week's Games: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Lock's Quest, Shinobi III, Streets of Rage II, Vectorman 2 and The Story of Thor

With a well-received week off one of my two jobs, I found myself with a bit more time to play games this week, including some important finishers. Let’s see what they were:

I recently downloaded Hydro Thunder Hurricane for free from Xbox Live Gold, and inspired by Youtube’s MetalJesusRocks, who likes games like this, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a speedboat racing game, and is good fun; it has a good selection of modes and there’s plenty to unlock. I probably won’t ever complete it, as some of the achievements rely on local multiplayer of all things; I currently only have one controller. But I’ll dip in to it now and then to see what it’s got to offer.

Also I had another look at a game I’d been meaning to finish for roughly five years and have now got round to coming back to: Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. I started the campaign again as I’d forgotten most of the plot and the mechanics, but I found it coming back to me quickly enough, even if I had forgotten how hard the game is! I’ll try and get to the end of it this time, when it’s convenient for me to be playing a handheld system.

But the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection is still in my Xbox360 and is not leaving any time soon. I can’t think of any other Xbox360 game other than XCOM: Enemy Unknown that I’ve got more mileage from during the time I’ve had the console. I gave Shinobi III another go, and very nearly got to the end. I lost on the last stage; the fighting is easy enough but at one point you come into a section of the final level where most of the floors and walls are electrified, and you need some precision platforming in order to survive; I just don’t have the right set of skills! Also, during a quiet night at work, I transcribed the tune “Whirlwind” from the game’s soundtrack into Guitar Pro. One of my hobbies is listening to old video game music and transcribing them; it’s a great way to train my musical ear!

I attacked Streets of Rage II as well, because why wouldn’t I. Once again I fell down on the last boss rush, however I’ve been varying my runs by playing as Axel every so often. Normally I would play Max, but Axel has his own charm. His Grand Upper attack does a huge amount of damage, and spamming it is a great approach to most of the bosses, but I find other aspects of his style a little hard to deal with – he’s nowhere near as good with the heavy weapons as Max.

I played, and to my surprise beat, Vectorman 2. After being stuck on the fifth level for goodness knows how long, I took a more methodical approach to playing the game, and got to the eleventh level with a good amount of lives in reserve. Feeling that I had a good chance of beating the game, I ploughed ahead to the end and did just that. You can read my full review here.

Finally, I played the oddly-titled The Story of Thor. Oddly-titled because in North America and Europe it’s actually called Beyond Oasis, which makes more sense in the context of the game, and also the story has nothing to do with any iteration of the character Thor that I am aware of. It was called The Story of Thor in Japan. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty good Zelda-like RPG, designed for the Mega Drive’s 6-button controller and with surprisingly good graphics and sound. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I’ve only got as far as I needed to unlock the Water shrine, which is what I needed to do to get the achievement points.

This brings my quest to get all the achievement points for the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection to an end, and it’s been quite a journey! There’s still mileage out of some of the games and I don’t think I’ll ever say goodbye to Streets of Rage 2 again, but it’s still a milestone for me.

Backlog Beatdown: Taking Out the Trash with Vectorman 2

I’ve been stuck on the fifth level of Vectorman 2 for a year now, and I occasionally play it when the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection is in my Xbox 360 to try to get to the eleventh stage, which was what I needed to get the available achievement points. Imagine my surprise when, not only did I manage to win the achievement, but I beat the game as well…

Vectorman 2 is a 16bit platforming game that was released on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis back in 1996. You control Vectorman, an “Orbot” – a robot made entirely out of orbs – as you run and gun your way through a nasty collection of insect-like enemies over twenty-two levels, aiming to find out who shot your ship out of the sky.

This is only the second level, and it's brutally hard.
Mainly because you can't see.

In the 90s, platforming games were one of the main styles of game available on consoles, and the better ones had their own gimmicks and mechanics that set them apart. Vectorman’s most obvious shtick was to morph into different things like tanks, space-ships, and some shapes based on his tougher enemies like scorpions and stag beetles. But the quality of the game comes from doing a lot with a very solid base of game mechanics. The controls were great and responsive, for most of the game there were two buttons (jump and fire,) the power-ups were meaningful, the graphics were of the highest quality the Megadrive could manage, and it was a lot of fun.

It was also very hard. Where I was going wrong was that I wasn’t exploring the levels enough. The game’s power-ups come in Power Sacs, bulbous green eggs hanging from various points that you have to shoot several times to break open and grab what’s inside. They’re dotted in various locations around the levels. Their contents range from health, to photons (the game’s equivalent of coins, which contribute to your score,) to temporary weapon upgrades, to access to the bonus levels and multipliers. It is on the latter power-up that the genius of the game’s design comes through. In most games, most multipliers multiply your score; decent, but it doesn’t really help you progress. In Vectorman 2, it also multiplies your power-ups. For example, a health orb would normally restore one hit point. If you have a 3* multiplier and you grab one, it restores three hit points. The same applies to extra lives, and while the game is competently-enough designed that it doesn’t put extra lives in easy reach of a 10* multiplier, it’s possible to create a good amount of extra lives beyond your starting three.

I did a bit better this time because I explored the levels and bonus stages enough to find the power-ups that increased your hit points beyond your starting four. This was crucial, as I could take enough damage in the later levels to not lose sight of what I was supposed to be doing. When I reached the eleventh level, and found I was half way through with nine hit points and thirteen lives, I found myself thinking ‘Wow, I could actually beat this today!’ and saw the game through to the end.

A lot of the levels had little puns like this.
I like it!

The four boss battles work well. Vectorman can morph into different things and upgrade his weapons – but not on the boss battles. Apart from increasing your hit points, you can’t stack the odds in your favour and rely on upgrades to beat the bosses. You have to do the same thing you always have to do in older games: Analyse their attack patterns, learn their weaknesses and exploit them to your advantage. I admit I had to check a Youtube video to find out how to beat the last boss; after having come so far I didn’t want to lose due to ignorance, but I still had to beat it!

Vectorman 2 is not perfect; the difficulty curve is harsh, and the tank section has fiddly controls. And it’s not a game I grew up with, nor has it engaged me on such a level that I could see myself returning to it. But it is a competently-designed and very fun platformer. If you have it on a collection, or own a Sega Megadrive/Genesis, it’s worth playing.

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

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

Had a fine old time
painting this one!

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

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

The whole boxed set was a joy to paint.

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

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

Yeah. It got me.

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