Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat (last time, I promise!) Dobble, Disney's Villainous

I’ve been banging on about the original Mortal Kombat game for a few weeks now. I’m sure there are some people who never want to see me talk about Mortal Kombat again, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; this has gone on for a while! But the whole point of this blog is to offer my opinions and experiences in video games and others, and I came to the end of my journey last Sunday night when I finally beat the game with all seven characters, so yes, I’m going to talk about that! I’ve put up a review which will be released next Friday, but those reviews tend to be sweeping overviews of the game as a whole, whereas in the blog I cover the specific details of my experience if I can spare the room.

Here's Daniel Pesina doing the motion capture for Scorpion...

The thing is with Mortal Kombat, I’ve had a great time with the game, but I’ve rated it quite low. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it as a stand-alone game when later iterations have done what it does far better. But that detracts from the huge amount of fun I’ve had with it, working out the best attack patterns, playing each character’s special moves (or at least, those I could do!) to my advantage, and feeling like an absolute champ every time I beat Shang Tsung at the end. Why is that?

Funnily enough, only Sonya has any substantial
difference to her colours in a mirror match...

I think Mortal Kombat’s flaws make the game, to be honest. The plot of a centennial fighting tournament safeguarding Earthrealm from invasion is ludicrous, and the developers know it – but at least there was something at stake, both generally and for the characters. The move set was almost identical between the seven characters, apart from their special moves – but that made you appreciate the very subtle differences between their speed and reach.  Digitized fighting games wouldn’t look good if we tried it now, and if we’re being honest they didn’t at the time of release either – but we’d never have known until we tried, and as I said in my review, if we weren’t pushing the boundaries, we’d never know where the boundaries are! Arguably, Mortal Kombat’s biggest contribution to gaming was the formation of the ESRB to regulate age-appropriate games; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it was, but it’s brought to the table a list of controversies bigger than anything Mortal Kombat has been blamed for!

Ever the villain...

It’s also worth noting that I played this game quite a lot when I was younger on the Sega Megadrive, and I spent quite a lot of time with the DOS version I’ve been playing noticing the differences between them. Presumably due to memory constraints, there was a lot more variation in the voices you hear during the fights; I certainly don’t remember the nonsense coming out of Raiden’s mouth when he does his Torpedo move! The final endurance fight takes place in Goro’s lair, and he arrives straight after you win – but in the DOS version, the screen shakes and you hear roars as he stops and screams off camera, which was a nice touch. Kano’s ending was different as well – presumably the text was the same, I can’t remember, but the picture in the second part depicts Kano holding a machine gun, which apparently was too much for home consoles!

Noticing those differences and adapting to the clunky but enjoyable game mechanics created an enjoyable experience for me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending the game expecting anyone else to find the same.

Elsewhere, Kirsty received some games for her birthday, and we’ve been having a fine old time trying them out. Dobble is a great game; a more elaborate version of Snap but we have a lot of fun playing it and can even engage Jessie with it to a certain extent, though we need to be careful on how quickly we’re moving through the game. Also, we’ve been playing Disney’s Villainous, which took a few goes to understand but once we did, we had a great time trying to outwit each other between Ursula from the Little Mermaid, and Prince John from Robin Hood! We’re looking forward to trying both games with more players.

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Might and Magic X, Syndicate

This has been a busy week for me with birthday arrangements, so I’ve not found much time to play many games – and the one I managed was another pick-up-and-play job.

How many of you have wondered what
Goro is packing down there?

I speak of course of Mortal Kombat, where after trying for weeks to beat the game with Scorpion, I finally managed to do it with Johnny Cage. It’s been an interesting journey for me since I have been recognising a lot more of the technical aspect of the game, rather than just brutalising the opponents, fun though that is. In Cage’s case, what won it for me was his special moves – for their additional effects as much as their damage. As with most of the characters, using them is not without risk, as they don’t return to their ready positions for a second or two, which makes them vulnerable to reprisals. With Cage, the Shadow Kick gives a great knockback effect, but if your opponent blocks it, they can very easily follow through with additional attacks. The Force Ball, however, won the game for me, because it stuns your opponent for a precious moment for you to either get your bearings or launch a follow-up attack. I never even did the split punch, as the command for it is fiddlier than the version that appeared on the Sega Megadrive and it was rarely useful.

As usual, the end of the game came down to the last credit (I wouldn’t have it any other way!) and a lot of it depends on what Shang Tsung morphs in to on the final level, but I managed to come through and beat the game. Cage’s ending, while not canon, nonetheless is representative of the direction his character made in the later editions of the game – in spirit, if not in activity!

The Naga Temple. Might need to grind some XP before
I tackle that bit again.

About a week ago I had a go with Might and Magic X on my laptop. Might and Magic sounds right up my alley in terms of game theme, but I’d never really played one before because the reviews I’d seen on the game were coming up at the bottom end of average at best. However, the games in the series were on sale, I bought it, and the other week I played it. I quite liked it, as well. It’s a role-playing game that basically works on a grid; even though it is a first-person game, the game works by moving your characters to certain squares on the grid and filling in the map from your line of sight as they go. On the one hand this is unrealistic, on the other hand, I quite like games that remember they’re only games, so I ran with it and was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having. The nearest game I’ve played to this so far has been the Legend of Grimrock, but the difference here is that the game progresses when you act, so whatever you can see will only move when you move. This works well for me as it gives me time to figure out what to do, as opposed to dealing with Grimrock’s horribly clunky interface in real time. Whether I’ll see it through to the end or not, I don’t know – it’s actually quite rare for me to do that with RPGs, as regular readers of the blog will know – but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

I played Syndicate at some point as well and managed to get through the level where you must make your way through the Downzone. This is interesting as you can no longer rely on your hacking powers to kill your enemies, as the better ones are shut down. It also ended in a boss battle where the enemy uses stealth, which took a few goes, mainly because he explodes when he dies, and because I didn’t realise this, he killed me too the first few times. It took the story in a direction where, as I’m sure is quite common in Cyberpunk games, the lines between good and evil are blurred, and you don’t know who to trust – a familiar trope, but it works well for these games.

Last Week's Games: The Ultimate Doom, Syndicate

This week I’ve spent most of my time playing the Ultimate Doom. I reached the end of the Inferno episode a week or so ago, and I’m now trying to play through the levels of the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed. I’d tried this before and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult these levels were, I don’t think I ever got past the first level when I played Doom before on the Xbox – and that’s when I was playing it on standard difficulty; I’m at Ultra Violence now! I ended up watching a video on YouTube to show me how to get past it, and while it helped me on the first level and shown me what to do on the second, I haven’t got the accuracy to pull it off yet. Hopefully I’ll do it in the future!

I've used this picture before, somewhere...

Now I’m aware that these levels are designed to be very difficult; indeed, the first two levels are supposed to be the hardest levels in the entire Doom franchise. I’ve also sung the praises of Id Software’s level design in the past, celebrating what they managed to achieve with very limited resources. So, are the levels on Thy Flesh Consumed well-designed? I reckon they are. They’re tough, no doubt about that, but they include some quite unique puzzles of deciding what to do and in what order, knowing where the weapons are, and what is appropriate to use and when. For example, before last week I’d never even have considered wasting ammo for the plasma gun on shotgunners. These days, I’ve developed an instinct for making sure all the hitscan-wielding enemies die very quickly, as they’re arguably more deadly than even the toughest demons.

If you don’t know, hitscan weapons are guns in early video games that don’t faff about with things like bullet velocity or trajectory – you point at the thing, press fire, and the shot instantly connects. In Doom, this is how the Pistol, Shotgun and Chain gun work, and why the Shotgun is pretty much the most commonly used weapon. If enemies have such weapons, which a number of early ones do in Doom, there’s usually a delay between the monster seeing you and shooting you to give you time to react – but if they get a shot off, you have no way of dodging it. This is different from the fireballs launched by the Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, as those enemies shoot projectiles you can see coming and can dodge. It’s also why the Spider Demon is the final boss of the game, rather than the Cyber Demon which guards the end of the second episode. Even though the latter has the stronger gun, its shots are easily seen coming, whereas the Spider Demon has a hitscan chain gun and you don’t get as much of a chance to dodge. (It’s still quite easy to beat if you don’t kill the other demons, as it will be distracted by them.)

So, defeating these levels will be a learning process, but I’m happy to accept the challenge!

Looks like quite a nice day, actually!

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Syndicate on the Xbox 360. I mentioned this last week and having played through a little more of it I can say that this is probably going to be another average game. It’s got some good ideas, like hacking the enemy chips to force them to break cover or shoot their allies. But in fight after fight, their use becomes quite routine, and the occasions where their use is obvious don’t contribute to the challenge of the game. I’d also probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t played the first two Bioshock games to their endings, as what they do to develop the idea of single player shooters added a lot more to the experience. Some critics have said Syndicate was rubbish, and I’m not disagreeing with them; most of them will have played better games than this. It’s not as bad as all that, and I’m having a decent amount of fun with it, but I doubt I’ll feel the need to come back to it once I reach the end.

Let’s see if I can beat a game before the end of the month…

Last Week's Painting: Space Hulk, Terminators and Genestealers

This is the first in a new, hopefully monthly blog series I’ll be doing called Last Week’s Painting, where I’ll document what I’ve been painting over the last month. They’ll mostly be Games Workshop models; it’s extremely rare for me to paint anything else but I’m open suggestions! I’ll initially try to get these out on the first Thursday of every month but I’m already late for the first one, so let’s just say I’ll try to get it out at some point in the first week!

My painting for this month has focussed on the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set. I’ve owned this set for over a decade and even managed to play the game a few times as detailed in some very early editions of this blog, but I’d never quite got around to painting them. There were a lot of reasons for that but the main one was that there was no expectation that I had to. I acquired the set when I was a member of Games Workshop’s staff; they’ve released a few board game-style games over the last several years but rarely support them post-launch in favour of their core games. And in the shop, there was an expectation that if you were going to use your models in the shop, you had to paint them – or at least show that there had been some progress on them. So, when painting, I prioritised models from those games at the time, and as my backlog of models I need to paint has only grown since then, the Games Workshop boxed games haven’t been painted.

But when lockdown hit, I’d run out of models to paint for the Chaos Space Marine army I was working on, so I proceeded with the Space Hulk models I’ve been putting off for over a decade. I started with six of the Terminator models and tried as much as I could to paint to the reference on the back of the Mission book. For the most part it worked reasonably well, although I might try to mix the red a little thicker next time because it was a faff painting multiple thin layers on a black undercoat. (I’d never have known until I tried, and I’d like to do Blood Angels at some point so it’s well worth remembering!) Where I deviated from the reference was the Power Sword, which I’ve never been good at doing, and the gems, which I had idea how to do. With the sword, I painted it a deep blue to begin with and then tried a lightning pattern freehand across the sword. I don’t think I did a particularly good job of it, but by that point I hadn’t painted for over a month and wanted to finish them off without getting bogged down. The gems, under the advice of Steve from Warlords and Wizards, were painted silver initially then coated in the purple paint that I think is supposed to go in an airbrush. It seemed to work!

Here we see the Genestealers I’ve been working on in the last week or so. This has been an interesting challenge because I’m definitely not used to painting Tyranids; I tried it many years ago when I was still in school, and I think once when I was staff I painted a model for the shop, but I’ve never collected a whole army of them. I think that’s largely because their complete lack of humanity made them very difficult to relate to, so I wasn’t tempted to try. These days, of course, I know that’s the whole point of Tyranids – to create an unstoppable force of alien creatures to scare the life out of anybody unfortunate enough to have to face them; and the human element is the one they create – not the one they have. I’m following the guides available on Warhammer TV and painting them the classic Genestealer colours. The one at the front is the one where I’ve attempted to do the highlighting on the flesh; I ran out of time to do any more, but it worked relatively well and will probably take up a bigger portion of my time next week!

Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.

Last Week's Games: Speculations, Sine Mora, Warhammer Battlemarch, Anno 1602

It’s been a while since the last blog, sorry about that. The main reason, and one of the main problems I have with working from home,[1] is that I find it very difficult to justify doing any of my own things until I’ve done all my work. This amounts to filming a few videos, and uploading them, but until I’ve done that, I find it very hard to justify writing blogs or even doing my own music videos that some of you may have seen.

On top of that, I’ve been giving some serious consideration as to where this blog is going to go in the future. I came to within one post of stopping this blog altogether and moving it to Wordpress because I thought I’d overextended the picture limit on Blogger; this turned out not to be the case, but I have some other things to think about as well. Obviously, I talk about video games nearly every week, but I find myself with a lot more things to say about hobby games as well, especially now I’m at the point in my life where I can play more of them – if in a slightly different way to how I’ve done it in the past! I’ve been playing a lot more games with my daughter, for example, and talking about that is usually on a very different level to talking about games I’ve been playing by myself on a console or computer.

So, I might do some less-regular blogs regarding certain other aspects of playing games. With the hobby games, I rarely find myself with enough to say in one week to justify doing a new blog, but maybe after a month I could find some things to say. Painting is another one, I go through batches of not painting anything at all but if I could get something done every month it might be the spur I need to proceed – and with the new 40K due in a few weeks, I’m going to need to get a move on with my painting! And I’m still hopeful that I might be able to do an entire campaigns worth of blogs on certain of my board games, though that’s still in the pipeline for now.

A beautiful but deadly game...

So, what I have I been playing lately?

Quite a few new games, actually. I downloaded Sine Mora on the Xbox 360 a week ago and I’ve had a go on it; it’s been a long time since I’ve played an honest-to-goodness shoot-em-up and I really enjoyed the opportunity to play it. It seems to have an interesting story as well, though it is also ferociously difficult after the first couple of levels. The time-based mechanics are interesting, and the shooting and boss battles are fun, so I’ll keep coming back to it whenever I need to let my brain unwind from the day!



My painting isn't as good as that!

I’ve also had a go with Warhammer Battlemarch, the Warhammer strategy game released on the Xbox 360. This game is probably the closest a relatively modern release got to Shadow of the Horned Rat, which I absolutely loved back in the day and still dip in to every now and then. You have an option to play through an Empire, Orc and Chaos campaign, and for now I favour the Empire (that was my army when I played Warhammer!) The interface is a massive faff, but I get used to it, and I’ve been using a rather slow-paced shooting strategy where I get close enough to the enemy for them to see me and approach, shoot them as much as I can and if there’s anything left when they get close enough, finish them off in close combat.

"In 1602, we sail the open seas..."

Finally, I’ve been playing Anno 1602 on the PC. I played a demo of this years ago, I think even before the millennium, and even though I hadn’t played it since I never forgot it and wanted to give it another go. It’s a great colonisation strategy game; it looks gentle, but it isn’t afraid to let you fail if you’re not careful!

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[1] I’m not going to complain too much about that though, at least I’m working; some people aren’t so fortunate!

Backlog Beatdown: Being some sort of James Bond figure in Alpha Protocol

I’d been aware of Alpha Protocol through several Youtube videos I’ve watched, but the influencer who said it was good to the point of being worth buying was Metal Jesus. I’ve been playing it over the last couple of weeks and managed to reach the end:

Alpha Protocol is an action-RPG, with a greater emphasis on the action than we might expect from an RPG. You play as Michael Thorton, an agent recruited into Alpha Protocol, a clandestine United States Agency. You are sent to a mission in Saudi Arabia to assassinate a terrorist leader; when transpires that all is not what it seems, you go on the run as a rogue agent, working your way across Asia and Central Europe to piece together the evidence you need to clear your name. Along the way, you’ll make friends, enemies, and uncover a conspiracy to cause structural and economic disaster on a huge scale…

The game has two main elements. The first is the action sequences, where you run, gun and stealth your way through a series of field missions. The second is the dialogue sequences, where you have conversations with people, developing your relationship with them depending on what approach you take. How you handle these missions is up to you but for every choice, there is a consequence…

I'm having some faff uploading pictures
so I'm recycling my old ones...

Many games boast that latter point, but in Alpha Protocol it is true. There are three main campaign areas, and countries you visit later make references to the events that happen in the previous ones. How you treat various characters makes a difference to what extent they will support you later. And some people like certain styles of attitude better than others – people rarely respond positively to aggression, but some characters like the professional dialogue, whereas others prefer the confident and suave talking.

All of this promises much, but sadly falls just short of delivering. The action sequences work, but the shooting is a little off. The viewpoint is over-the-shoulder third person shooting, which is great for short-to-mid-range combat, and not much use for anything else. You can create a build that focuses on melee combat, for example, but melee combat in Alpha Protocol is not fluid enough for this to be a consistently good option. Thankfully I’d decided from the beginning that I was going to focus on pistols and assault rifles –the two most standard weapons in the game but the ones that gave me the most flexibility and strategy. Also, the interface is very clunky; even in 7^th generation games it should never take more than one button press to access your map and switching between weapons is a lottery, gambling on which of the directional buttons brings up which menu.

The dialogue sequences work OK as well, although given the huge number of variables involved with making this, there were some slips – talking about in-game situations before I’d found out about them, repeating lines of dialogue from previous conversations, that sort of thing. I’ve managed one playthrough so far so I don’t know how much difference taking different options makes; it would be good if it was substantial, but I’m not hopeful. Nonetheless, it’s voice-acted very well, the graphics look good for their time and the sound is fine, with the Brayko boss battle being particularly memorable!

But it's well worth showing this bit again!

With all that having been said, I’ve really enjoyed Alpha Protocol. I could have used a roadmap to unlock more achievement points by aiming for certain results, but I found it oddly liberating just to play through the game, pick the dialogue options and courses of action that made the most sense at the time, and seeing what happened as a result. I was content to let my mistakes be mistakes, for example one NPC that I had a lot of investment in died near the end of the game because I went the wrong way to try to rescue her. It’s by no means a perfect game, but it’s an experience that relatively few people have had, and one I was very pleased to get to the end of. I’d recommend giving it a go if you fancy doing something a little bit different with shooting and role-playing games.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.