Backlog Beatown: Altering Beasts with Altered Beast

I wasn’t quite ready to get off my Pick-Up-And-Play train, so I had a look at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection, including Altered Beast – Arcade. I’d had a go at the Megadrive port when I played through some of the games during the original No Game New Year, and I didn’t enjoy it all that much at the time. I expected something a little different from the Arcade edition, but it was more or less the same game again.

I actually thought these were two separate pictures...

The premise is that you are a Greek Centurion (and that’s wrong for a start; Centurions were Roman) who is raised from the dead by Zeus to rescue his daughter Athena from the evil Neff (and a quick Google search of Neff Greek Mythology only contains links to the game, so I’m not sure Neff’s even a part of Greek Mythology at all.) Not exactly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but hey, it’s a 1989 arcade game; no one is thinking about the plot too closely.

You punch and kick your way through undead hordes, two-headed wolves, demons and several boss battles, and for the most part, this is actually not very good at all. Your character moves slowly, and attacks even slower. You have to plan your punches around still wanting to punch the enemy half a second later. There is a strategic element to it – punches are quicker but kicks have more reach, and if you duck and kick he’ll attack upwards, – and you become familiar with what attacks are best against certain enemies, but there are so many that it’s a chore to get through the levels.

The conceit of the game is your transformation. When you defeat a certain enemy, (a white two-headed wolf although this is different across different versions of the game,) it drops a power ball; pick this up and you become steadily more muscular and powerful, and if you pick up three, you change into a human/animal hybrid. What you become depends on what level you’re playing. In order, they are: Werewolf, Dragon, Bear, Tiger and Werewolf again. The game comes alive then; your character moves and attacks much faster, having ranged attacks and in some cases an area-of-effect move. I found myself thinking that this should have been the game right from the start. Sega could have developed five different games out of the move set for each creature and it would have been better than Altered Beast.

The Transformation Screen.
Looks like bear-faced cheek to me.

But the main problem with the game is the balance. The enemies attack you in waves that your character just doesn’t have the speed to deal with, and some of the boss battles – the second one in particular – are all but impossible to beat without losing at least a few lives. Playing as the beast is the best part of the game but it takes far too long for this to happen. I understand that it was an arcade game, deliberately designed to be very difficult in order to entice quarters away from the paying public. But on a home console, this increased difficulty is incredibly frustrating. I beat the game, but I’m sure that the only reason that I managed it is that this version of the game has unlimited continues; you can keep going potentially indefinitely.

The tone of this post probably makes it sound like I don’t like this game very much. Well, in fact, I don’t. I know it’s an old game, and they were more difficult than current or previous generation games. The games that have stood the test of time are difficult as well – but not at the expense of fun. Altered Beast is a ferociously hard game; the difficulty in the levels feels cheap, but the unlimited continues remove the challenge from the game. One wonders why the game was in such reverence as to be included on the compilation disc; most likely it is because this game tended to be packed in with the early Sega Megadrives before Sonic the Hedgehog was released a couple of years later. So it has nostalgic value, but as I had no investment in Altered Beast prior to this compilation, this isn’t enough for me.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Mortal Kombat, Killer 7, Shinobi, Zaxxon, Orcs and Elves.

I’ve played quite a few games this week! Firstly, I finally beat Far Cry 2. It’s been a long journey to get to the end of that game and while I don’t see myself coming back to it, I’m glad I’ve played it. It seems to be the core experience of what modern open world games eventually became; the old games may not be able to match the new in terms of content, but it was developed at a time when the idea was new, fresh, and waiting to see what could be done with it.

After beating a long heavy game like Far Cry 2 I needed something light and playable to enjoy, and I left that task to my old sparring partner Streets of Rage 2. I’m getting quite far in to the final level before I lose all of my lives, but the boss rush on the seventh level still tanks most of them. I’m also enjoying playing as Axel more than I did before; as long as you time his moves correctly, he can be devastating.

I'd love to be able to play the BGM on classical guitar...

I went round to a friend’s flat who had a Sega Mega Drive console, and I played a couple of games with them including Columns and the original Mortal Kombat. Columns is as good fun as ever; I lost the game this time through being very tired (it had been a long day) and doing the cardinal sin with puzzle games, which is to try and be clever and look for combos. I’m sure, with more skill, this would be a great tactic. But right now, just trying to match three gems is good enough. Combos tend to happen by themselves. Mortal Kombat was a pleasure to play again. I found myself remembering some of the old moves that Johnny Cage and Scorpion used to do, and took no small amount of pleasure in using them against Kirsty and her friends who didn’t. It took me right back to when I used to play it at home and organise mini-tournaments with my friends; we’d knock each other out and the winner would get a sweet. Great times.

My new game for this week was Killer 7 on the Playstation 2. I bought it at some point last year thinking that this is a game of some reverence from the reknowned developer Suda51, and therefore must be a good game. It certainly succeeded in making me wonder what in the world it’s all about. I just about understand the shooting and I understand why it’s on rails, but I’m not quite getting the significance of the different characters, and why they’re being guided through the game by a guy in a red fetish suit who feels the need to constantly tell me I’m in a tight spot. Maybe I haven’t had enough time with it yet, and if I give it more time the plot might hook me in a little more. We’ll see how it works out but it’s not like I’ve got nothing else to be playing!

Very hard game!

I had a go with a couple of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I tried out Zaxxon, having heard it mentioned several times on Metal Jesus’ Youtube channel. It’s an isometric shooter that has you moving higher or lower, rather than up and down. It was probably phenomenal at the time it was released but I find it very difficult to aim like that; I guess I’ll get used to it if I persevere. Those games were designed to be hard! So too was the original Shinobi, apparently. You can respawn as many times as you like but it doesn’t help if you keep dying in the same place over and over again! But they were what I needed at that point, which was some mindless fun.

Also I played a bit more of Orcs and Elves; I’m enjoying it so far as the difficulty of the game is just about right for me. Also, as is becoming the case, I’m finding a lot more fun in the games where it’s ok to just pick it up and have a play, rather than immersing myself in a simulation.

Backlog Beatdown: Blessing The Rains Down In Africa with Far Cry 2

Yeah, I’ve been waiting nearly a month to make that headline joke...

All quiet at the moment, but there'll be soldiers
waiting behind those buildings...

Far Cry 2, then. It’s an open world First Person Shooter set in Africa, specifically a fictional (but probably based at least remotely on reality!) sub-Saharan country torn apart by civil war. Two factions have laid claim to the country, and your job is to assassinate The Jackal, the notorious arms dealer who armed both sides. On arrival, however, you contract malaria and end up barely conscious and face to face with The Jackal himself, who leaves you with a machete and a sidearm and leaves you to your own devices. After escaping the gun battle currently going on in the town, you’re picked up by one of the two factions, who sets you off working for them. Along the way, you rescue another foreign mercenary who becomes one of your stable of ‘Buddies,’ and make contact with the underground resistance, who are trying to move civilians out of the country and can give you medicine to treat your malaria if you do. After that, you’re on your own, and it’s up to you to find the Jackal and kill him. But as you get more deeply involved with the politics of the warring factions and your buddies, you realise that nothing is as straightforward as it might first appear, and that you potentially have the opportunity to end the conflict entirely. But with your health deteriorating and the chaos and devastation you cause, will there be anything left by the time all this is over? 

I’ve owned this game for a long time, and I had exactly the same problem with it as I had with Assassin’s Creed: I wanted to roleplay it in a stealth style. That meant sneaking through the undergrowth of the vast map, not killing unless I had to, and scout the items or mission objectives. It doesn’t work in this game, since most of the soldiers will attack you on sight, and while you have the option to use silenced weapons and camouflage later, I was having a lot more fun running and gunning the different areas. You’re not graded on the missions, so this is probably one of the only instances I’ve seen where “open-ended mission structure” means exactly that. You’re given various different missions by the factions, buddies, the resistance, arms dealers and even some intercepted telephone calls, and while they are all very similar, (take a thing to a place/blow up a thing/kill someone,) they each take about 20-40 minutes to do and some are actually quite challenging.

Whoever's in that car is in for a nasty surprise...

The Buddies serve a few purposes – you can pick up missions from them, or they will subvert the missions you’re already doing to make them more challenging with a higher reward. Finally, if you lose all your health, they will come to help you, but only once per mission – you have to visit a safe house to reset it. The arms dealers will offer you opportunities to attack convoys of weapons; doing this will unlock more and better weapons. The rest of the game is exploration: Searching for diamonds to buy the weapons, and for audio logs left behind by The Jackal.

I’ve had a good amount of fun with Far Cry 2 and for that reason I found myself more immersed in the story than I might otherwise have been. Some open world games are better paced, have more to do and have a clearer final objective, but the conceit of today’s open world games were very much in development when this was published in 2008, so it showcases the core experience of its genre. There are some glitches; nothing game-breaking but some of the soldiers suddenly appear on top of cars, and when I got to the second main area, the same audio log was coming up each time no matter how many I picked up. I won’t aim for 100% completion; the game took long enough to get to the ending, and most of the achievement points I’m missing are tied up in multiplayer modes with dead servers. But with a little patience, Far Cry 2 became a richer and far more compelling experience than I previously had.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Golden Axe Warrior, Zombie Dice, Hey! That's My Fish, Forbidden Island

This week I’ve been whittling away at Far Cry 2 whenever I get the chance. I’m making slow and steady progress through the game itself, although I did manage to unlock the achievement for unlocking all of the weapons. Part of my mission for the next few times I play will be to buy them all, as well as the manuals, upgrades and ammo packs!

This is where you start...

It wasn’t going to be long before the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection found its way back in to my disc drive, and my new game for this month was Golden Axe Warrior. This is one of the unlockable games, and was previously released on the Sega Master System. It’s a top-down roleplaying game, where you play as a warrior wanting to avenge the death of his parents and destroy the evil giant Death Adder. This being an earlier iteration of an RPG, there’s very little customisation or choice of path; you need to find nine crystals in various dungeons, and the game doesn’t appear too fussy about what order you do them in, but that’s about it. It’s all about the game, wandering around the world, killing enemies, looting money off them and occasionally finding items to improve your damage or armour. There’s a weird shielding mechanic in there as well, where if you’re hit just in the right place your shield will block the shot, but I can’t use it in any dependable way yet.

I actually enjoyed the game for the hour or so that I played it, and defeated the first dungeon. It’s hardly a great-looking game after all this time, and comparisons to the Legend of Zelda are obvious and not entirely welcome (of course Sega were going to try something similar when it realised how successful these kind of games could be!) but it’s good fun and a nice way to play a bare-bones RPG without having to worry about assigning points or morality. However, this style of game was very much in its infancy at that point, and some of the systems were underdeveloped. Not having the manual to it caused me some problems, as did the option to use quest items instead of handing them in. I got a quest from an injured dwarf to bring him the Golden Apple, which is said to heal any wound. I knew perfectly well that this was true, because I’d picked up the apple and, not quite realising what it did, used it about half an hour prior to that. At that point I gave up. I’m not saying I’ll never come back to it but I didn’t want to have to play through the first hour or so of the game to correct it. Maybe another time!

Mind those red dice...

I also played some games around Kirsty’s house again the other night! We played Zombie Dice; a push-your-luck style game in which you play as a Zombie chasing survivors for their brains. You roll three dice, keep the brains, keep the shotgun blasts, and re-roll the feet of the survivors who escape. The aim of the game is to get the most brains, and the game finishes once somebody gets to 13. However, if you take three or more shotguns, you lose all the brains you collected that turn. The mechanic is risk and reward, which sometimes comes off and sometimes doesn’t; Kirsty won that one.

She also beat me at Hey, That’s My Fish, but it was a close game this time and we enjoy playing it a lot!

Finally we had a go at Forbidden Island, a game that preceded Pandemic, and when you start playing that it’s easy to see the familiar mechanics and tense races against time. You play as explorers who go to the titular Forbidden Island to look for the mythical treasure said to be hidden there. Each character has different abilities that will help, but you have limited resources, and only a short amount of time to look before the island floods and you lose. We beat the game in the end through a combination of luck and teamwork, and there’s talk of me using this game in the future as a training tool for communication!

Backlog Beatdown: Solving the Mystery with L.A. Noire

About a month ago I came back to and completed L.A. Noire. I bought it for the Xbox 360 back in 2013, got about half way through then switched to something else, probably XCOM! Here’s what I found out:

I can only hope the previous owner of that
blood hasn't got a use for it...

The game has you playing most of it as Cole Phelps, a detective for the LAPD, as he progresses through different departments of the police force – Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson. There are a few distinct sections in the game: The open world, where you drive around Los Angeles usually to your next location, though there are side mission and unlockables. There are crime scenes, where you hunt for clues around various locations where crimes have been committed. And there is the interrogation scenes, when you’re interviewing witnesses.

The latter is where most of the effort went into the game’s presentation, as they used motion capture to make the character’s faces move in an almost film-realistic way. They did a good job of this, unfortunately it didn’t have the required effect, as character’s clothes and hair remain stiff throughout. Nonetheless, this is by far the most interesting segment of the game, where you ask a witness a question, and watch their faces for their response. If you think they’re telling the truth, you press A, and potentially get some more information out of them. If they look like they’re hiding something, you press X to doubt them. And if you know they’re lying, you press Y to accuse them; you then have to present a piece of evidence that contradicts the lie. And if you’re not sure one way or the other, you can press B to back out and come back the question later.

Apparently the guy never wore a fedora
even once during production.

I missed a trick here: I found out later that if you accuse them of lying first, then you have the option to back out if they’re not. But if they are, they will very often telegraph the piece of evidence you need to contradict the lie. With the other two options, it might seem that Cole is being ill-proportionately aggressive; you wouldn’t think that shouting someone down constitute “Doubt.” But there was a reason for this, too: When the game was in development, the three options were going to be “Coax,” “Force” and “Lie.” At some point, the first two options were changed to “Truth” and “Doubt,” but most of the game’s dialogue had already been recorded and was left in. Remembering this fact makes some of what Cole says make a lot more sense.

The crime scene sections are handled well too. In order to keep you immersed in what is essentially a hidden object sequence, you still control Cole in third person, and whenever he comes across something that is potentially a clue, the controller vibrates. You pick it up, examine it, and the game will add it to the records if it is relevant.

This might sound like a cross between an adventure game and a Bioware RPG, but the game can’t really afford to be de-railed if you get stuck. Your reward for getting all the clues and asking the right questions are not solving the crime – that happens anyway – but finding out the whole truth about what’s going on. That can lead to a certain dissatisfaction, as there’s no sense of influencing the plot, but rather whether you find out some of its finer points. Ultimately it was better that way around, otherwise you’d be wandering around hopelessly lost and confused.

I did enjoy L.A. Noire. It’s a game that promised much, and due to the limitations of its media, fell just short of delivery. I won’t be aiming for 100% completion, as aiming for a 5-star rating on each case (I didn’t manage this on the first one even after three goes) would suck all the fun out of it, and a lot of the achievement points are tied up in DLC that I have no intention of buying. But with a lot of focus-tested military shooters out at the time, and rinse-and-repeat open world games taking up a lot of triple-A games today, I’m glad I tried the one that tried to do things a little bit differently.

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2 and Hey, That's My Fish!

Apparently in Africa everyone has the same car...

This week, my video gaming consisted entirely of playing Far Cry 2. There’s not much more to say about that game that I haven’t mentioned in previous blogs, except that I’ve got to the second act now. As I understand it, the game is based on The Heart of Darkness; the book by Joseph Conrad that eventually became the movie Apocalypse Now. The central themes running through both of them are dehumanisation, and while a video game is necessarily removed from realistic violence, the theme is picked up here quite substantially. You’re sent to Africa to kill one man – The Jackal – but I’ve killed hundreds of people so far to get close to him, for money, information or weapons. Is the reward for killing this man worth this much death and destruction? I don’t know how the game ends, but I suspect not. From what I understand about the Far Cry games, this is a running theme: When you’ve killed enough people to escape and return home, will you be the same person you were, or will the experience have changed you entirely?

When I resolved to play a new game every week, I didn’t factor in time management, and presumed I’d have some time over the weekend that I didn’t really have as my calendar filled up. So I was set to break my New Year’s Resolution after less than one week; there just wasn’t the time! Thankfully, my girlfriend Kirsty saved it by playing a board game with me. No one said it had to be a video game!

The game we played was Fantasy Flight’s “Hey, That’s My Fish!” I wanted to collect the game and that’s the reason I own it, though I definitely had Kirsty in mind when I bought it as well. The game is about penguins stealing fish off each other, and Kirsty loves penguins. This was always going to be a winner.

"Have you ever seen
A penguin come to tea?
Take a look at me,
A penguin you will see..."

How you play: The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, arranged in lines of 7/8 to make a rough square. You place on the board your team of 2-4 penguins depending on how many people are playing. The tiles either have one, two or three fish on them, and on your turn you choose a penguin to move in a straight line towards the tile you want. After the penguin moves, you get to keep the tile you just left. You keep doing this until the penguins can’t move anymore, and whoever has the most fish at the end of the game is the winner. Kirsty and I played three games, I won the first two, but Kirsty got the hang of it after that and won the third.

This sounds like a fairly light-hearted game, but dig a little deeper and there’s a clever strategic element as well. The penguins can’t change direction during a move, nor can they move through other penguins (including their own team) or empty spaces. That means it’s entirely possible to plan moves around blocking other player’s penguins in, effectively taking them out of the game. It might seem like an unfair thing to do, but it lends a competitive element to the game, and the games rarely last long enough for one player to be eliminated entirely for more than a few minutes.

The best board games meld together their theme and mechanics well. At its core, Hey, That’s My Fish is a competitive Solitaire-like game, and as an abstract concept the game would function just as well. Slap on the theme of Penguins fighting for fish, however, and suddenly there’s a lot more at stake. It’s more fun to picture a penguin stuck on the ice, eliminated with but a single fish to eat, and the devious penguins from the other team sauntering off with armfuls of fish! Kirsty, in particular, had a good time naming the penguins Speedy, Greedy, Angry and Drunk. It’s not perfect – collecting the tiles without messing up the board can be difficult if you’re not careful, and mechanics designed around eliminating players is always a risky move – but we had a lot of fun with it and I’m looking forward to playing it with more players. 

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Orcs and Elves, Dungeons and Dragons

Happy New Year, people! I make the usual resolutions every year – eat more healthily, practice my music more, write more songs etc – and I very rarely see them through to the end. However, as this blog series is doing reasonably well (roughly 100 views every week, which isn’t much but it is consistent!) I thought I’d try a new resolution in to it for 2018, and that is: Play a new game every week.

This might sound expensive, but I’ve also got a massive backlog of games, many of which I’ve owned for years and never played. I’m missing out on quite a bit in my collection of games without having to buy necessarily buy any more of them! So I’ll try to find time to play a new one every week. It will be tough, not least because many of them are long-form games that need weeks or even months of play to beat, but I’m up for the challenge and I’ll give it a go!

Funnily enough, sniping's not really
my thing any more...

For the Christmas Holiday week I’ve mostly been playing Far Cry 2. As I mentioned last week, this is a game I’ve owned for years and I’ve got really now! Maybe I’m enjoying games at a different level these days. For example, I like the fact that the separate missions take roughly 20-40 minutes to beat; you can do them in small chunks and feel like you’re making progress. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with hunting for the diamonds. I like the shooting, and the certain sense of vulnerability you get from not quite being able to see due to the haze. I’m enjoying the Buddy system as well, where they give you alternative ways to complete missions, give you more missions and rescue you if you get hurt. Indeed, I was actually quite sad when Josip, one of the buddies who’d been with me most of the game, died because he’d got in to trouble and was too badly injured by the time I’d got to him to help. I find the campaign is moving very slowly, as there’s a lot of faffing about with side missions – but as there’s almost always a valuable reward for these, it doesn’t feel like filler. Open world games have arguably lost their way over the last few years, as there was only so far this could go without becoming bloated, but Far Cry 2 managed to create a compelling world with just enough to do that it keeps me coming back. Whether it’s enough for me to see the game through to the end is a bit of a, er, Far Cry, especially since I’m back at work tomorrow and won’t have as much time for games like this, but we’ll see how we get on. I’d like to see it through to the end after all this time.

The wand talks to you. Yeah,

I also got Orcs and Elves for the Nintendo DS for Christmas and I’ve been playing that when I’ve got a spare few minutes. This is a roleplaying game somewhere between Legend of Grimrock and Fatal Labyrinth; you play as the son of an Elf adventurer and you’re on a quest to find out what happened to the Dwarven King. It’s a roleplaying experience with, from what I can tell, all the fat chewed off: There’s no assigning points to level up, or min-maxing stats, or customisation that I can see. It’s all about dungeon bashing, and collecting loot. And I’m fine with that; it’s a simple enough experience and one that I think works very well on the DS. I’ve not played many games that meld pick-up-and-play with a compelling plot and good gameplay mechanics so well!



I might talk about the orange cover
if it's a slow week...

Finally, I’ve volunteered to run a Dungeons and Dragons game at the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I’ll be running Palace of the Silver Princess, a 1^st edition module converted in to 5^th edition for the purpose. This is a bit of a risky move for me given that I don’t have a lot of time to prepare and run sessions these days, but it’s a simple-enough adventure and I’m hoping to do a lot of the legwork in the run up to Thursday when I run the first session.