Last Month's Painting: Space Hulk Genestealers, Chaos Space Marine Raptors, Haarken Worldclaimer

Gribble Gribble Gribble...

If you caught last month’s blog, you’ll remember that in June I’d begun painting some Space Hulk Genestealers. Here they are all finished; it’s not a great quality picture but you should be able to see I’d put on the top highlight of the carapace, the teeth, the tongues, the claws and the base. I doubt it’s the best you’ll ever see it done – I’ve not done Tyranids a great many times before this – but they’re good enough to do the job!

Let's see how these get on
in the game...

After that, I bought one more box of Chaos Space Marine Raptors to add to my 500pt Black Legion force. I’ve been banging these out since late last year and got into a kind of rhythm in painting them. I’ve quite enjoyed painting black Chaos Space Marines again; it means that the undercoat is generally all you need to do for the armour with just a bit of Abbadon Black to tidy up any splodges afterwards – I use dry brushing to do the top highlight on the gold trimmings, which is an effective but imprecise technique. I made a careless blunder the first time I painted a squad of these Raptors – I didn’t realise what the tops of the jump packs were supposed to match the armour and painted them silver. But I don’t like going back to correct models once I’ve finished them; I have far too many of the things to justify over-correcting my work! So, I just ran with it, and now the whole army looks like that. If it looks like you meant it, you’ll generally get away with it.

This time, I wasn’t quite as pleased with the special effects painting as I normally am. You can make out the plasma gun in the picture; I usually paint it neater than that. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the Power Sword either; I try to build this up from layers of green and light grey and then white at the top. It works, but not well, and even for this pretty tough technique, I didn’t make a very good job of it. Also, the Champion has the helmet of a Space Marine beneath his feet. Whenever I get this (and it’s happened five times so far!) I try to paint them as a different Space Marine chapter, to bring the idea across that the Black Legion have been battling Space Marines for millennia and have fought them all. You can’t really tell from the picture but that was supposed to be a Dark Angels helmet.

Death to the Iron Hands!

To complete the army I painted Haarken Worldclaimer (and incidentally, when saying that name I put a glottal stop in between the two “A”s and until someone tells me what that extra A is supposed to add to the pronunciation I’m going to keep doing it no matter how annoying it gets.) This was painted similarly to the rest of the army, with a couple of exceptions: The two weapons had an extra top-highlight of Runefang Steel and a bit of Stormhost Silver – I don’t usually do this with Black Legion as I want the Gold to be the brightest colour. The odd purple skull at the back was Screamer Purple with a highlight of Sigmarite, and the bright runes on the Helspear were build up from red to orange in the same way I would normally do the eyes. The blur on the photo makes it look a lot better than it is! I decided to paint the dead Space Marine from the Iron Hands chapter – partly because I haven’t forgotten being brutalised by them in the summer of 2014 and I want revenge, and partly because as the Raven Guard use black helmets as well, I needed something else to distinguish them. As the dead Space Marine has his hands, I decided to paint the Iron Hand’s Iron Hands, er, Iron.

That’s where I’m going to leave that army for now; until I know how the update to the rules of Warhammer 40K is going to affect the points values I won’t be adding anything new. But I’ve still got plenty to paint, and I should be finished with some more Space Hulk Terminators by next month!

Last Week's Games: Speculating on the merits of luck vs skill in tabletop games.

I found myself thinking about luck vs skill when it comes to hobby games, in the light of some of the things that have been happening in my house and in the wider gaming community. The argument is as old as games themselves but for those of you who might not know: In almost every game you play, there is an element of luck. Traditionally this is done through dice or cards, and lately certain games have mobile apps that can handle a lot of the random number generation those items provide. The games that are reliant on luck – Snakes and Ladders, for example – are usually easy enough to play, but they’re often less engaging in the long term (or even to the end of the game!) because the players never really feel like they’re in control of what’s going on. On the other hand, games that rely entirely on skill – Chess is probably the most obvious example – are potentially more engaging but as the player base is highly skilled, it also has a higher barrier for entry which makes the game hard to access in any enjoyable way. 

This came up in the news this week where I noticed that SteamForged games are bringing their support of their game Guild Ball to an end – a game that’s been going for six years that I meant 

Apparently these two are called
Ox and Shark. I never knew.

to try at some point but never got around to giving it a go. Since I never played the game, I’m going mainly on what they’ve said in their blog that covers it, but a lot of the problem was that Guild Ball relies almost entirely on the skill of their players to play the game. To echo the article, this created a situation where you would win your first game – the ones that the developers showed you how to play – and lose your next hundred, as you faced off against player after player who had been playing the game a lot longer than you, knew exactly what they were doing and what they needed to do to win. There was nothing in between; no lower class of players that would happily have a casual game you could just enjoy. You learned to play, and then you were in with the big boys who would show no mercy. A high barrier to… not necessarily entry, but to play on any level that might be engaging or fun, doesn’t create a sustainable business model, and sadly now it’s reached the point where the creators of Guild Ball are calling it a day on what was otherwise an excellent game. 

The most obvious basis for comparison is Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl – a game far more reliant on luck, but with a loyal fanbase, if not necessarily indefinite support. But I’ve never played the tabletop version of it either. 

Presumably some forest, or other. One that's Enchanted.

The game I’ve been playing is The Enchanted Forest with Jessie and Kirsty. This game relies almost entirely on luck and won Game of the Year in 1982, though from what I understand that wasn’t a great year for board games. As I said last week, it’s not a particularly well-designed game, we can’t really play it to the conclusion written into the rules as Jessie gets fed up with it before then once the initial novelty has worn off. But it’s easy for her to play, she’s even getting the hang of moving pieces on their movement squares, and understands what she needs to do to win – even if she hasn’t quite worked out that you’re not supposed to share that information with the rest of us. This game is nearly 40 years old and still being printed to this day, not many games can say that, and the ones that can is mainly due to the fact that their barrier for entry is far more broad than those games that rely on skill.

Backlog Beatdown: Being Arcane with Arcania

First, let me say that these notes refer to the PlayStation 4 version of Arcania. If you’re considering playing this game on a different platform, you may have a different experience to me, which is just as well really, because my experience of this game wasn’t great.

This is quite early on in the game when you're fighting
your enemies off with a... what is that? A stick?

Arcania is part of a series of games called Gothic, a collection of fantasy-themed Roleplaying games with perhaps a darker tone in terms of its design than the usual affair. You play as a nameless hero, who after having his village destroyed by a horde of enemies, vows to take revenge. This takes him on a quest across the lands to find the truth behind the attack, and the malevolent forces controlling it all. Nothing, of course, that we haven’t seen before.

One thing unique to this version of Arcania I certainly haven’t seen in any RPG since the 5^th generation of consoles is a game with no cutscenes. I thought this was deliberate at first, and quite liked it – a game that drops you straight into the action without faffing about with exposition, in medias res, and what appeared to be a nightmare sequence, no less? That was a great way to get into the game, and I was looking forward to seeing where it was going. Alarm bells started to ring, however, when I’d got past the first area of the game (basically a 1-2 hour tutorial,) to find the hero in a different area entirely with some hints that his home had been destroyed with nothing in between. I finished the set of caves that formed the dungeon and found the hero on a different island altogether. Nothing set this up; nothing explained what exactly happened and why. I surmised that there probably were cutscenes in the game at some point but for some reason hadn’t got as far as the PS4 port. A quick glance on Youtube confirmed my theory – I have an incomplete game here.

These wasp-like creatures are a
pain in the bum...

Nonetheless, I kept going, wanting to at least get to the end of the game and finish what I started. The game is… OK. It’s a pretty standard role-playing game that reminded me of a grim-dark version of Fable more than anything else. You can develop your character in fighting, ranged combat and magic, and while there is some overlap in how your invested skill points develop your character’s attributes, you’ll have to stick to one build or another if you want to maximise your stats; spreading them out across the board makes for a balanced but less-than-spectacular character! The quests are one fetch quest after another, or kill a certain monster, or number of monsters. The combat is functional at best but not at the standard you might expect for a 7^th generation game; there’s very little feedback so you don’t always know you’ve been hit until your health bar is ticking down, the enemies barely react to being hit either, and the game has an odd habit of glitching enemies behind you – presumably as an error macro to being caught in the scenery. It’s the jankiest game I think I’ve ever played.

The set-up to this quest is absolutely ridiculous,
but the beast provides an interesting challenge.

I did enjoy some of what Arcania had to offer – the game is quite linear, so there was no wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused, and while the combat was a bit wonky in places, at least the challenge of the game was at the right level. The graphics are OK, if a little, er, “Bioware” in terms of the faces, and some of the monsters were fresh designs on a western RPG setting that can get quite stale. The sound was alright, even if the nameless hero sounded like an absolute wazzock and the voice acting for the rest of the cast is only marginally better than PS1-era games. The music score was suitably epic, and one of the better parts of the game’s presentation.

Ultimately though, I played Arcania to its story conclusion and found very little to recommend. If you like RPGs there are far better ones than this, and if you don’t, then this certainly won’t change your mind – even overlooking all the faff that comes with the PS4 version. A very poor game.

Final Score: 1/5. Nah.

Last Week's Games: Not Tonight and Enchanted Forest

This week I’ve played a new game on my Switch: Not Tonight. I’ve been playing it for a while now; it’s left me with a few things to say, and be warned: some are political…

Here we manage a guest list
and a regular line...

It’s a difficult game to describe, but if you could imagine a point between Papers Please and Brexit: The Game, that’s about where we are. In a version of the UK that had left the EU by 2018, a second-generation European immigrant has been confined to poor living conditions and has been forced to take a job as a bouncer in order to raise the £2500 per month needed to prevent him from being deported. You take jobs from some venues in the local area (beginning in the South West of England,) and the aim of the game is to manage the queue to get in to allow a certain number of people into the venue in roughly four hours of game time. You’ll be checking people’s ID – against their age to begin with, but the game soon escalates with guestlists, fake IDs, prejudice against people from certain countries, and the pressing need to keep on top of your own finances. This results in you having to micro-manage two queues and dealing with a horribly short time limit to get everything done – but get it done you must, or you will lose the game.

Even the title screen is sneering at Brexit...

Not Tonight is an odd game. The mechanics work well enough and make for an interesting and engaging experience. But beyond that, it seems to have a lot to say as an art form – or at least, how the developers thought a post-Brexit Britain might look like. As a British-born European on the edge of being deported, you’re treated with the upmost contempt from higher authorities than you, regular contempt from your bosses who are relying on you to make their night work (even the more friendly ones can’t resist a bit of Euro-baiting condescension,) a certain amount of grudging respect from people who are waiting in line to get in to their chosen venue, and the only people who treat you as equals are the other European people who are in a similar situation. It’s not without a sense of humour: even if Britain had left the EU as soon as the referendum result came in, the earliest it could have done so would have been roughly half-way through 2018, not at the beginning of it when the game starts, and even the most capricious racist is unlikely to be as open about it as the game suggests, so it’s obviously not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem for me is that as I sit on the pro-EU side of this situation, and I’m genuinely concerned for what Brexit is going to mean for my future for reasons I’m not going to go in to now,[1] some of the intended humour was lost on me. In a way, playing Not Tonight was a bleaker experience than Papers Please, as at least I’m a long way from the political situation the latter was purporting to represent. But ultimately, it is an uncommon experience that I’m glad I’ve had. Let’s hope I can see it through to the end!

The treasure is under the trees - who will find it first?

Beyond that, I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick – mainly because I’ve started a new painting section to the blog that I run alongside this, and I wanted to be able to say I’d painted something in the month of July! (Here’s the first edition, erroneously titled Last Week’s Painting.) For that reason, I spent a lot of my free time last week painting rather than playing games, but I did have a go with Enchanted Forest, a game about hunting for fairy-tale treasures in the titular forest. It’s OK – it appeals to my daughter because she likes fairy tales and treasure hunting, but the mechanics aren’t particularly well-designed, and it can get very one-sided towards the end of the game. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it while it lasts and will probably play it again.

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[1] Mainly because trying to explain my concerns to people who voted leave has the same general effect as trying to headbutt a rhinoceros to death.

Backlog Beatdown: Revisiting MORTAL KOMBAT!!! with MORTAL KOMBAT!!!

I bought Mortal Kombat on a whim at some point earlier in the year, as part of a package that contained the first three games in the series. I’ve been playing it on and off, as it is one of the few games I play on my laptop that doesn’t require the use of a controller or a mouse (I’d have preferred to use a controller, but I couldn’t get either of the ones I own to work!) so I can definitely pick it up and have a play. And after a few months, I finally beat the game with all seven characters.

"GET OVER HERE!!!"

Mortal Kombat is a fighting game set in a fictional universe where a centennial fighting tournament safeguards Earthrealm from invasion from the other realms, including the mysterious Outworld. The first three games of the series used digitized fighters; real people photographed in combat poses became the player avatars. There was blood, gore, and the opportunity to finish off your opponent once you had won the match. There was an obvious rivalry to Street Fighter back in the day, but while the latter has always produced a sufficiently solid fighting game, Mortal Kombat pushed a lot of boundaries – if only to discover where the boundaries were.

Cage takes revenge for his $500 sunglasses...

In the game, you choose one of the seven fighters and take them up the ranks of the tournament to become the Grand Master. Your first six fights are relatively straightforward, taking down each of the other fighters. The seventh fight is a mirror match – a fight between you and your own avatar. The following three fights are endurance matches, between you and two other opponents – the second one enters where the first one falls, and these matches are the bulk of the game’s challenge, as they are extremely difficult to beat. After that, you take on the reigning champion Goro, a four-armed half human / dragon, who has lots of power but presents a very large target. Finally, you take on the sinister Shang Tsung, a soul-wielding sorcerer who can take the form of any of the other fighters. Beat him, and you win the game, and are rewarded with an ending for your chosen character.

Yeah, and don't you forget it...

The most prominent question to ask of any fighting game is: Is the fighting good? And here’s where the quality of Mortal Kombat starts varying wildly. There were seven characters, but apart from their special moves and some very subtle differences with their reach, the move set for each character was identical. There was no real combo system, though it was possible to set up a combo by doing your attacks in a certain order. It inadvertently managed to invent juggling – a combination of attacks to keep the opponent in the air. The endurance matches were a huge difficulty spike; the only way I found to beat them is to spam your flying kick and I’m in no way surprised that this was the only Mortal Kombat game where these occurred. And the controls had a clunk to them that never really got fixed in any iteration of the game that I’ve played.

The presentation of Mortal Kombat was beyond excellent for the time; digitised avatars were a new development and for the first time there seemed to be some stakes involved in the fighting tournament. I played the DOS version, which is probably as close to the original arcade version as you can get in a home copy; the graphics aren’t quite up to their original polish but are still a good version of the game. The sound is as clear as it needs to be; the voices are implemented a little too often, but they work, and the music is thematic and sinister. The controls are a little wonky, since fighting games don’t lend themselves well to keyboard controls, but with practice you can make them work.

With all that having been said, I’ve had a tonne of fun playing through this. Very few other games make me feel like punching the air in triumph when I finally beat them! But many aspects of the game were improved upon in later iterations, making Mortal Kombat very difficult to recommend as a stand-alone game.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Final Fantasy XV, Mortal Kombat 2, Patrician

Due to a family member being in hospital, (not for COVID-19, don’t worry!) my time for playing games has been restricted mainly to the middle of the night.

And what a middle of the night it’s been! I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XV over the last few nights and I’m really enjoying it. I had a bit of a faff getting it started – even to this day I still have to remember that playing a new game on the PS4 is contingent on still wanting to play it in the hours it takes for the download, and the first time I tried it, it turned out that I’d overextended the memory limit on the hard drive so I had to delete some games off it (games that, as far as I know, we don’t even own, so I’m not missing anything!) It really puts it into perspective how big games are now; I’d tanked the memory on my Xbox 360 as well but that was from putting roughly 60 games on there; not about 10!

Seriously, this could be a shot of the first arrivals
at a rock festival...

But once I’d got going, I played through the tutorial that I suspect has told me roughly half of what I need to know, and then started through the main campaign. You play as Prince Noctis and his entourage of… I don’t know what to call them. Bodyguards? They’re called the Crown Guard, but they all seem far too friendly with Noctis for their relationship to be entirely professional. The effect is to make it seem like you’re playing an adventure game about four lads on a camping trip, (indeed, that’s initially what it is!) and that is what’s making the game for me currently.

That might sound odd, but I play a lot of role-playing games, and when there is a party of characters, they’ve usually acquired each other along their journey. There’s rarely a pre-existing relationship between the characters at the start of the game, and if there is, it’s rarely developed upon. Whereas with Final Fantasy XV, Noctis, Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto look, sound and act like they’ve all been friends for years. That one detail has put a fresh spin on the idea of them all taking a journey together and it’s a really nice way of presenting the game.

One of the many side-quest "hunts."

As for the actual gameplay, well, it’s good. SquareEnix couldn’t quite break free from the shackles of turn-based combat for this iteration of Final Fantasy, as there’s a mechanic that stops time for a limited time when you’re not moving – you can turn this off, but it is necessary to keep it on initially, as this is the mode in which you can analyse your enemies and find out what kind of weapons and spells they might be weak to. Other than that, the combat works well; the characters have a broad array of situational weapons and Noctis has an ability to phase in and out of different locations by throwing his weapon there; a nice touch! One issue I have run into is that as all the characters are dressed in black and so are most of the monsters, it can be a little difficult on a busy screen to see your contribution the cluster bomb unfolding before you. I’ve also manged to get caught up in all the side-questing and treasure hunting, as though I’m terrified that I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t! So it’s going to take me a while to get through this, as it always does with RPGs – let us hope that the rest of the game is as engaging as the first bit!

That's the pits...

I had a go with a couple of games on the PC as well: Mortal Kombat 2, which is great fun up to a point but there’s an absolutely horrible difficulty spike when you get to Kintaro, and I haven’t managed to get to Shao Khan yet, and the Patrician, where you trade goods around a medieval Europe. This comes from a bygone era of gaming that didn’t necessarily feel the need to tell you what to do, and while some autonomy is nice, I’ve currently got no idea what I’m supposed to be doing!

Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles, requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to play a relatively short game!

Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system
that goes across your field of view.

Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.

Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations, asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent, an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1] Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with games like this, nothing is as it seems…

Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.” There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of “haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.

No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the
blood splatter effects on the screen.

As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well; we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it, rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK. What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well. Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely, but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a unique if unsettling experience.

Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

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[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!