Backlog Beatdown: MORTAL KOMBAT!!!

As a franchise, Mortal Kombat needs very little introduction. It is one of the principle beat-em-up games that became popular in the 1990s, one of the few franchises to survive the decade. The version I’m playing is the 2011 re-boot. I’ve had it for a while, and I’ve always had a lot of fun with it. Here’s why:

The game design is brilliant. Usually when a game developer talks about taking a game franchise ‘back to its roots,’ it means they’ve completely lost the plot and are trying to make a dying series work to keep feeding their cash cow. The difference is that with Mortal Kombat, it actually worked. It bought back the 2D fighting system but improved the graphics. It acknowledges the contrived storyline developed over seven games, but brought a new and well-done story into the re-boot. It’s done away with the multiple fighting styles and weapons, and made an excellent job of utilising what was left. It’s done away with most of the characters we didn’t care about (basically any that were introduced after MKIII) and filled its roster with characters from Mortal Kombat I-III. Finally, it brings the gameplay back to what Mortal Kombat was all about, which, quoting one of the developers, is: “I’m going to kick the shit out of you and rip your head off.”

There’s been a lot of debate over the years as to which fighting game franchise is better, with Street Fighter being its obvious rival. Having enjoyed both games, and others besides, I’m not going to get caught up in that. I will, though, say what I enjoy about Mortal Kombat in general and this iteration in particular:

Of all the fighting games, I think Mortal Kombat has always had the richest lore. Even though the plot is ridiculous, it works. For one thing, there actually appears to be a reason for this particular fighting tournament: It is the safeguard against the invasion of Earthrealm by the sinister Outworld. There are multiple factions playing each other off for power, wealth and supremacy: The Shaolin Monks, the Lin Kuei, the Black Dragon, the Tarkartans, the Shokans, the Special Forces, and then there are the people who are fighting for their own reasons and agendas. The characters have unsteady alliances, bitter rivalries, and tragic back-stories, but this time there seems to have been something of a sense of humour in them. It’s like the writers said to themselves “Yeah, we know this is camp and cheesy, let’s play that up as much as we can.” The end result is that, for the brief time you spend with each character, you know what they’re fighting for – and you enjoy it.

EVERYONE loves Scorpion...

The fighting is pretty good as well. The controls are designed with the controller in mind, as opposed to Street Fighter which is very much still designed for the Arcade. The game does a good job of giving you a basic move/combo set, but leaves it up to you to discover how to spam the combos and special moves to become unstoppable. Balancing is an issue, though. The basic ‘Ladder’ mode has ten fights. You’ll do the first six without trying, even on Hard mode (my preferred difficulty.) After that, there’s a massive difficulty spike as the AI suddenly becomes competent one moment, and spams all the boss character’s special moves the next. Shao Khan in particular, the game’s final boss, takes a long time to beat if you don’t know what you’re doing, and even then, it’s a lot of luck rather than judgement. That’s always been the case with Mortal Kombat for as long as I can remember, and isn’t news to anybody.

There’s a few different modes I’m going through at the moment, and I always enjoy playing it online, but now that I’ve beaten the game with all the characters that start off unlocked, I might put Mortal Kombat to bed for a while. That’s the kind of game this is – you can enjoy it for a while, then come back to it months or even years later and have just as much fun, if not more. I can always look forward to coming back to it!

Backlog Beatdown: Kicking Ass with One Finger Death Punch

Free from the constraints of No Game New Year, on New Years Day I downloaded One Finger Death Punch from Xbox Live. You may remember early last year, this was one of the games that tempted me away from NGNY. I didn’t go for it at the time, but I was reminded of it when I had a look at TotalBiscuit’s Top 10 games for 2014. He mentions this game in his top 10, and I remembered his WTF is video and wanting to try the game out for myself. Well, why not?

Most people reading this probably know the score, but if not, here’s how the game works: Enemies come running at you. When they get close enough, you press the X button to attack to the left and the A button to attack to the right. There’s absolutely nothing else to it. No movement, no special moves, nothing that involves anything other than pressing X to attack to the left, and A to attack to the right.

Simple? Yes, definitely. But it is so much fun.

Two buttons. This game is brilliant.

There’s a lot to be said for a game that only does one thing but does it very well. Mechanically, it’s

fantastic. As the attack animations happen instantly, timing is essential but there’s no faffing about waiting for a move to wind up. However, if you miss, you’re left vulnerable to attack for about a quarter of a second, which for a game of this speed is a very long time. The player character and enemies are stick men; an odd decision, but it fits the light-hearted nature of the game and keeps the attention where it needs to be: On the action.

Variety is provided by the different ways in which the levels and enemies are organised. Most levels are ‘Mob Levels,’ which simply require you to kill all the enemies. But there are some that require you to do it in a certain amount of time, smash a certain number of items, or do the level in black and white so that you can’t distinguish different enemies and there are even some levels that give you a Light Sword or Knunchaku. Some enemies require more than one hit – from potentially more than one direction – to take down, and others, called ‘Brawlers,’ cuts away from the main stage and requires you to press X and A multiple times in a sequence to beat them. Your character can pick up weapons, which increases your reach or gives you a ranged attack. Outside the levels there is a ‘map’ screen where you can choose what levels you play and activate the skills you acquire in certain levels. These ‘power-ups’ usually involve either being able to use weapons multiple times, or slowing the enemies down in some way. All this content from a game that uses two buttons.

But doesn’t it get old? Well, the whole game takes around 4-5 hours to complete, and you’re probably not going to get through it all in one sitting unless you’re determined to do so. But that’s not the point of this game. It would work very well on a Mobile device because it’s absolutely fine just to pick it up and play. There’s no exposition, no plot, no reason for you to be doing anything other than the fact that you are. The levels are generally over in about a minute, so you can do as much as you like depending on how much time you have. Finally, your score for the level depends on how many times you missed – the fewer, the better – and whether or not you took any damage yourself. You can always replay the levels and aim for a better score, if you’re interested in tackling the game this way.

As for me, I’ve got to the end of the game on the easiest difficulty. While I’ll probably come back to it at some point if I need something to fill half an hour, I will mark this game off as beaten. But if you’ve got £2 to spare, I recommend you check this game out. We could all do with some more games that don’t take themselves too seriously!

No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year: Collecting stuff in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a game I downloaded a couple of years ago for no reason other than I wanted the achievement points for it. This seems pathetic now; I already owned Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox. I played through the first few bits a year or so ago and had barely touched it since; it’s just been sitting on my Xbox 360 gathering E-dust. Until now…

The Lego series is a bit of a funny one. There are those who say that they’re not true games because they don’t have a fail state, or they’re too easy, or they’re just for “casual players.” Well, it’s true that you don’t fail for dying too many times. For that reason, it’s not usually hard to beat the ‘Campaign’ mode.[1] Such violence as appears in the game is in context and not graphic at all; the worst thing that happens in the game is that Lego pieces fall apart. And it’s also almost the only series of games I’ve played with my girlfriend (although we play Lego Harry Potter, rather than Star Wars,) so it’s absolutely true that the game appeals to casual players.

Well, I’ve got two answers to that:

Zooming through Mos Eisley with Jango Fett?
Don't mind if I do...

The first one is that the challenge in the Lego games is whatever you make of it, pun not intended. If you embrace the collect-em-up nature of the game – which, at their heart, is what the Lego games are – and find all the collectables, characters, gold and red bricks etc, the game is quite challenging, if only because it will take you ages. In my case, this is pretty much the only game I’ve got where I’ve got a hope of 100% completing it and seeing all the content, so that is what I am aiming for. Now, I know you can use Minikit detectors and Power Bricks to help you, but even then, you’ve still got to move your characters into the right places and use the right powers in the right order, etc. There is challenge here – if you can look past beating the story.

The second one is that none of those supposed criticisms are a bad thing. Today’s markets are not patient enough to sit through a whole game where they might have to start all over again if they die three times – I rarely find a campaign mode in a modern action game that would punish you for anything other than forgetting to save.

As for appealing to the casual market, well, why not? For some people – especially younger children – games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Space Marine are just not for them. Either they find the violence in such games objectionable, or they’re not mature enough to appreciate it. Take Gears of War, for example. One of the principle actions you can take is to instantly kill an enemy by attacking it with the chainsaw attached to your gun. Most people are capable of making the distinction between this graphic violence in a video game and real life, but my girlfriend doesn’t find it even the slightest bit entertaining, and a younger person would not necessarily appreciate the spectacle – the enemy is dead, either way.

And it’s not just the violence. Graphically, the games are great, if only because of the art style. They looked great in 2005 and are still looking great nearly 10 years later. Does the first Medal of Honor game still look as good as its last iteration? I think not. Also I follow someone’s Youtube channel who has a sister who is disabled. About a year and a half ago she made a video and blog post about how easy modes and casual games can open doors for more players, including her sister. Here’s the blog post: http://icklenellierose.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/accessible-gaming-gaming-with-disability.html

As it is, I’m actually quite enjoying Lego Star Wars right now because it’s one of the few games I’ve bought where it’s OK to just pick it up and have a play, rather than devoting hours to the story or campaign. I’m having a good amount of fun collecting everything, I’m about 60% of the way there now and I’m looking on course to get all the achievements in a game for the first time ever!

I’ll probably still be at it next week, so I’ll talk some more about it then…

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[1] A generic term probably mis-applied to Lego games.

No Game New Year: Down and Depressed with Deadlight

Deadlight is another Xbox Live Games with Gold download. Zombie Apocalypse games are nothing new, but I hadn’t played one in a 2D side-scrolling platform game before and I thought it would be interesting to see this take on it.

I set myself a different challenge this time: Get through the game without looking at any of the achievement trophies. This is because I’ve ruined games before by playing them and looking for the achievement points; they’re nice to get, and I won’t usually get rid of a game until I’ve got all that are possible, but they take away some enjoyment of the game if you’re too pedantic about it.

This is the title screen; even the music that
accompanies this is bleak and tragic...

The game puts you in control of Randall Wayne, who’s teamed up with a group of survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse in search of his missing family. At the start of the game you’re separated from the group, and you have to run, jump and fight your way through the horde of Zombies – in this game called Shadows – to reunite with your team and your family. That is, of course, if any have survived…

For those of us who remember the 80s and the 90s, side-scrolling platform games were the standard back then. They lost touch once 3d gaming came in; platforming was quite difficult to pull off accurately in 3d environments and not many games managed it. But they never went away either. In the early 00’s we had emulation. In the mid/late 00’s we had retro-gaming. And in the previous/current generation, they seem to be… not making a comeback; there has been a definite shift in what is considered to be mainstream, but they have a strong presence in the sub-triple-A market.

With this new surge of platform games, some elements have stayed the same across the generations, others have changed. What has remained is art style, in that every platform game worth its code has its own distinctive look and feel to it. And Deadlight is BLEAK. The backgrounds look worn down and hopeless, the character models are barely more than silhouettes and the soundtrack evokes misery and despair. The cut-scenes are graphic novel-style drawings and subtitles that remind me, more than anything else, of Watchmen. It makes you feel that, even if you do get to the end of the game, surviving is as good as it is going to get for your character and anybody fortunate enough last to the end.

See what I mean? Bleak.

What has changed from the old platform games is combat. The combat mechanics of platform games have never been complicated, but in new games, the emphasis seems to be taken away from the combat and put on the exploration and platforming. That works well for Deadlight, which boasts a very small number of enemy types; munching your way through zombie hordes gets old at the best of times and is presumably incredibly dull if you can only do it in two dimensions. In Deadlight, you have an axe, a pistol and a shotgun at the very most, and very limited ammunition for the latter two. You avoid combat as much as possible; aiming is quite tricky and you don’t swing the axe very fast. You can’t take many hits before you die, and you’ll find yourself blaming the clunky controls for the occasional plummet, or a missed shot that costs you the game. It creates a challenge where you have to think about what you’re doing in order to proceed; more satisfying than ‘kill everything in the room then go on to the next bit.’

Yet for all that, I can’t decide whether I enjoyed the game. It’s a great game, no doubt about that. It’s a well presented; if not entirely fresh take on an idea that’s becoming stale now. The art style carries it for the most part, and telling a single story that’s over in a few hours is a refreshing change of pace. But my word, it is depressing. Any sense of achievement you gain from completing the levels and objectives is subsequently crushed by the heavy atmosphere and the feeling that no matter what you do, you’re only delaying the inevitable…

I might go back to this later to look for all the achievement points, but for now I’ll move on to something more cheery.

No Game New Year: What Next?

So Norm posted on the NGNY Facebook page the other day about what’s going to happen when the next year starts. His post read: “As the year winds down, we prepare for another instance of No Game New Year! For those in this group, what are some rules you would like to see changed / modified / added?”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m looking on course to beat the challenge, and I think for those of us who didn’t, another go at it would be more than welcome. However, I don’t think I’ll be doing No Game New Year again for 2015.

Several of us have said that it’s changed the way we think about and play games, and while that’s absolutely true in my case, it’s not something I particularly want to keep up. Part of the appeal of NGNY for me is that it is not forever; it is a way to challenge myself on the way I spend my money and acquire new games. I’ve learned a lot from NGNY and it is certainly going to have an affect on how I handle it in the future, but I don’t want another year of not buying games.

For one thing, I’ve been quite interested in the Wii U. It looks like this is where all the consistently good console games are, and seems to be operating below the radar of the Triple-A market. It looks like good fun as well; far too many games take themselves too seriously and I’ve enjoyed games the most this year when they’ve actually been fun, not the gritty realism often mistaken for fun and tragically mis-applied in many cases.

There are a couple of Xbox 360 titles I could pick up as well, and now that I view enough youtube channels to be able to make an informed decision on what Steam games are good or not, I might branch out into PC, assuming my computer supports it. The likelihood is, then, that if NGNY continues into next year, I won’t participate in the challenge.

How Ever…

... but what will happen next year?

One of the major things that I’ve… realized from participating in No Game New Year is just how many of my games I’ve never beaten or even played. This is what many people call the Backlog. I’ve got backlogs in almost all my hobbies; songs I never learned on guitar, models from Games Workshop I’ve never built, board games I’ve never played, the list goes on. So the major challenge for me when playing games this year was getting through as many of them as I could, so that I can say that at least I’ve seen the story mode through to the end. Getting what I can out of the game, then moving on to another – with the option to come back to it, of course, if I’m in the mood.

This was made all the more special by the fact that I got to share that information on my blog with the NGNY guys, and while I think it’s only those guys who read them judging by my view count, it is great to know that people actually care what I’m putting out online!

So I might make that my challenge for next year. I’ll call it…

BACKLOG BEATDOWN.

The idea behind the challenge will be to beat as many of my games as I can, while still allowing for the possibility of new ones. I’ve seen some good ideas from some of the NGNY guys that might help with this; Andi for example suggested that you could only buy a game if you’ve beaten one previously. And if I can get enough people to do it, (All the NGNY guys are welcome!) it would create… a support network of gamers who comment on what they’ve cleared, ask for help if they need it (or if they’re playing Dark Souls, which basically amounts to the same thing,) and generally making getting through the ever-growing pile of games a lot easier.

I’ll have to think carefully about how I’m going to do this, but I’m definitely up for the challenge.

Who’s with me?

No Game New Year: Kicking More Ass with Dynasty Warriors 7

Dynasty Warriors is a series I’ve enjoyed since 2001. I’ve played several of the games and always enjoyed the power fantasy of having a huge unstoppable hero ploughing his/her way through countless enemies. The series has received criticism for being the same game seven times[1] and while it is absolutely true that the series iterates rather than innovates, Dynasty Warriors trades on doing a small number of things very well.

Lu Bu. He's really hard. Except when he isn't.

The game play is classic Dynasty Warriors: Slash your way through hordes of soldiers who haven’t got a hope of beating you, and then kill the enemy commanders whose prospects aren’t much better. This involves much hammering of the X button. Similarly, the plot is the story KOEI have been telling since the 80s, based around The Romance of the Three Kingdoms – rich, but nothing new. The background music, while pleasing to hear in a generation where it is not that common, is the same shreddy techno-metal with familiar themes that has always accompanied the franchise.

The main difference from the previous iterations[2] is in the way the Story mode works. In the past, you would pick a character, play through a number of battles while the plot unfolded around them and that would be it. You’d get endings, but as they weren’t substantially different from the cut-scenes between battles, it wasn’t much of a reward.

In Dynasty Warriors 7, you pick one of the Factions: Wei, Wu, Shu and later Jin, and play through the story using characters from that faction. You play as the character most relevant to that part of the story. In my play-through, I’m playing as Shu, and started as Guan Yu. I later got to play Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei. I didn’t get to play Zhao Yun – the poster boy for the series – until much later. The plot is filled by explanations over a map of China and the usual cut-scenes. This sounds like there is less content overall, but given that all the characters function similarly with only minor differences between them, it makes for a more streamlined game. You no longer have to play the game through twenty times to unlock all the characters and cut-scenes!

The character design is more camp, hammy and androgynous than ever before, but the only other difference is the way the characters develop. You increase your stats by defeating an officer then taking the items they drop, and you also get skill points for taking out officers. You then spend them on upgrades: extra hits to the combo, extra Musou attacks, extra speed etc. You also upgrade your weapons bought with gold.

Now, I’m not one to complain about similar game play across the different editions. As any Call of Duty player would say, if you’re going to buy a game that’s functionally identical to its previous iteration, you can’t complain that it’s functionally identical to its previous iteration. But, joyous experience though the power-fantasy-style game play is; it is starting to show its age now. The different characters and weapons differentiate things for a while, but you can still win most battles by hammering X. The strategy of the game was never comprehensive, but they’ve almost completely removed it from story mode; you travel from one place to another as directed, take everybody out and repeat until you beat the level. The fire, water and catapult attacks that you at least felt you had a hand in instigating in Dynasty Warriors 5 are set pieces in this game. You don’t affect it, you watch as it happens around you. You can’t avoid the set pieces in order to beat the level, as you could before. It feels like a game of Simon Says,[3] and as you rarely have an objective beyond ‘kill everything in sight,’ it makes the repetitive game play monotonous.

Oh, and turret sections? Really, KOEI? That’s how you were going to vary the game play? They function and are thankfully rare, but even for Dynasty Warriors are anachronistic and rubbish. I doubt anybody in third century China had access to a Ballista that could fire at a rate of most modern machine guns.

The game also has a Conquest mode. I haven’t tried this yet but I think it’s going to work like a light version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a game I’ve enjoyed on the PS2. I’ll give this a go eventually but I’m looking to finish story mode first.

I can’t be far from finishing the game now; the next battle is Wu Zhang Plains which approaches the end of the story. While there are still three other factions and an entirely different mode to beat, for the purpose of NGNY, I’ll probably put Dynasty Warriors 7 to bed when I beat the game with Shu.

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[1] At the time of writing we’re up to Dynasty Warriors 8, not counting the spinoffs and handheld games, and the first one doesn’t count because as I understand it it’s essentially a fighting game.

[2] I missed out on the 3^rd and 6^th games so I’m not entirely sure where these changes occurred.

[3] And I haven’t forgotten I levelled a similar criticism about Grand Theft Auto Five months ago.