#858 Pure

Posted: 7th February 2013 by Mulholland in Games
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1

215th played so far

Genre: Racing
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Black Rock Studio
Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios

I am conflicted. On one hand I love Disney. They have provided me with a bucketful of childhood memories from their films and theme parks. I will hold my hands up and say that I have a Donald in a wizard hat sitting on my desk. On the other hand Disney do things like acquire a studio that makes acclaimed racing computer games only to shut them down five years later. I get that there were business reasons, that they wanted to focus on other content… but since when did Disney make off-road racing games? Like never! It’s a move that puzzles and annoys me even more after playing Pure.

Our Thoughts

Cards on the table; I love Pure. It’s a game that I have been itching to play for a long time, ever since watching a demo of it for the PS3, because it looked like a lot of fun. I was pretty much hooked on this game the moment I played it since it reminded me of one of my favourite games of all time; SSX Tricky. This is a comparison I made before reading exactly the same in the book (pipped me to the post again book!) and in many way Pure really is its spiritual sequel. SSX 3 was too realistic and the SSX reboot just… well it never set the world alight. Then there is Pure an off-road, all-terrain racing video game that marries realistic all-terrain racing and the crazy world of cartoon physics. It’s actually interesting here that while there are cartoonish elements to the game, most of it is fairly realistic. The physics are fairly normal and the environment are actually quite realistic. It (mostly) doesn’t share the cartoonishness and implausible environments SSX Tricky brings to the table.

Before we get to the world of the crazy jumping some due care and attention needs to be paid to the graphics because they are simply beautiful. It’s really hard to appreciate the wow-factor of the graphics when you are racing because you are just so desperate to not fall off of your ATV (all-terrain vehicle). The intro video talks about them searching for the most breathtaking locations and by gum were they not playing around. They were great for 2008 and just have so many layers in terms of the backgrounds to the point where during jumps you really can see for miles and miles. Not all are as picturesque as the Italian and Thai courses (with one taking place at a mill in the US desert) but the care and attention that was made… well I just envy those ATV drivers since I would love to be hiking around there.

Another way they have been able to cleverly marry the gameplay with the graphics is how they used the mud. Hands up, I have no idea about mud physics apart from the fact that Minecraft is as unrealistic as you can get. On this though you have to praise them for making the amount of mud and the patterns it makes on your clothes dependent on the course you are racing on, the way that you are racing and how you have constructed your AGV. Just as worthy noting here are the tracks you leave on the ground as you race around and how the game doesn’t shy away from using the mud – it really makes you feel like you’re driving around an improvised track normally only used by hikers.

One way that this game has been able to improve on SSX Tricky is by the inclusion of an amazingly detailed vehicle customisation reminiscent of the Gran Turismo franchise. You get to build your vehicle from the ground up including frames, spoilers, sprockets and other such mechanical things I have no clue about. The fun in this is that you will begin to amass a vast garage of vehicles so that you are able to customise vehicles to best suit the three modes (racing, sprint and freestyle) so we ended up having specialised racing and trick bikes with the sprint events really being a toss-up between the two bikes with crazy names like the Jerobile and Trick Wasp. Usually vehicle customisation bores me utterly but here, because we are talking about crazy vehicles where you can do handstands on the handlebars, I was riveted.

The great thing about this game is that the idea of doing a handstand on the handlebars becomes rather humdrum after some of the ridiculous tricks worthy of the physics of Roadrunner and Wile. E. Coyote. Just like the trick bar in SSX Tricky (sorry about how much this game is being mentioned… but the links are numerous) you need to do a certain number of unique tricks to fill the ‘boost bar’ where you unlock harder tricks which ends up with your riders uber trick  signature move such as playing an air guitar solo whilst standing on the back of this rapidly falling vehicle. It’s nuts but it’s the good kind of nuts… like cashew rather than brazil.

With all of this, it’s interesting how this game is still as ‘pick up and go’ as it is. While not as straightforward as the Mario Kart series, the tutorial for the game consists of four actions, with the remainder of the controls explained as you play along. The former is simple – accelerate and break, steer and tricks. A few more elements are added on – a few race types and more special tricks – but none of these are complicated or even vital to know. It’s very close to turn up and go, almost like Burnout 2‘s crash mode – jump in, see what happens and enjoy it. Because it’s so forgiving, it doesn’t feel like much of a penalty to try again, and as it’s an easy learning curve, you can improve rapidly enough to move forward. It doesn’t (initially) demand perfection, just good play, and that makes it a better experience.

Final Thoughts

I doubt there’s many people who realise there’s such a thing as ATV racing, but what this showed is that it’s not only out there, it’s a far more interesting thing than it looks. Closer to BMX than normal road cycling, Pure makes for a compelling and beautiful game. While it has a surprising amount of depth – with so many ways to play the game, I still wonder what the best balance between racing and tricks is – it’s easy to pick up and something you can quickly get into. The way you want racing games – and so many others, really – to be.

#739 Rayman Raving Rabbids

Posted: 3rd February 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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0

214th played so far

Genre: Party
Platform: Wii
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft

When we started, we figured we’d play the three party games as they’re supposed to be played – several people gathered around the TV, playing together, going against each other and having fun that way. That is, after all, how we played Buzz Quiz TV, a game that’s since become a standard for when friends visit.

Rayman Raving Rabbids seems as good for it. A nice amount of mini games featuring Rayman and his apparently new antagonists, the insane, evil and yet adorable Rabbids. That should allow for some fun, right?

Not really. When we tried to cover it a few weeks ago, having a friend over, we discovered the game actually requires you to unlock mini games in story mode before you can really use them. So it got delayed. And that’s where we are now. Yahtzee covered how much of a dickish move this is when he reviewed the time it takes to unlock Sonic and Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros Brawl… this annoyance goes triple here.

Our Thoughts

You know what? I don’t think we’ll bring this out at that point, when we bring out the other party games. While it is a multiplayer game, that’s basically just to assist you in score attacking the game.  With all the other control issues and so on, it just isn’t as easy to break out as, say, Mario Kart Wii or the Super Smash Bros series.

But then, the game wasn’t just marketed as that, instead using funny viral marketing videos that emphasized, well, dancing bunnies. Like many people my first exposure to the world of the rabbids were through these amazing adverts which perfectly summed up what the rabbids were… cute but utterly psychotic.

So it’s a mini-game game, rather than a party game as we understand it. Multiplayer wasn’t the focus. Surely that means we have great mini games? Simple, well controlled, relying on different skills. Straightforward, with each of them easy to jump into. Few games are able to get the balance right in a mini-game game, something we will really address when we cover the WarioWare titles.

Sort of a fail here too. A number of the mini games are fairly straightforward and easy to pick up – for example, cutting out items for a hungry bunny to eat, which comes down to proper Wiimote control and is fairly easy to beat. There’s a recurring rhythm game (featuring the bunnies. That. Can. Dance) that involves you shaking the Wiimote or nunchuk at the right time – fun and good to play. But then there’s the disasters.

You unlock the mini games in groups of four – they’re days of battling in the arena Rayman has to go through. These, however, don’t seem to follow much of a progression and we, like apparently many others, got stuck on day two. Yes, day two is apparently seen as the most difficult to beat, out of 15 in total… Not a good introduction. Most of this comes down to controls, in particular in Bunnies Can’t Close Doors (which after a brief Google search appears to be rather infamous) – you need to close toilet cubicle doors that the bunnies don’t look, so they keep swinging open. This needs to be done through pointing at it and doing a closing motion with the nunchuk. Should be easy, but because the areas you need to point at are not only small, but also in places you don’t expect, it took us over an hour to beat it. Not great for a mini-game game – you want to keep moving. The frustration that this mini-game caused resulted in the contents of a fruit bowl to be thrown across the garden in a rage…

There’s more issues like that, such as a ball rolling game (you know, guide it through a maze, don’t have it fall in the holes) that has a difficult time limit mostly because of the unresponsiveness of these controls. It just reacts so sluggishly, it works too much against you to be fun.

The unlocking story – you need to beat these challenges to be released by the bunnies – is a nice excuse, though it feels a bit unnecessary, with its restrictions getting in the way (as mentioned above).

Once the game gets it right, though, it really gets going. The bunnies are ridiculous and act so over the top, you just can’t help but smile. It’s brilliant to see what their next antic is, and especially the shooter levels have so many touches and smaller designs that it’s lovely and great fun, making it a star game for that alone. The mini games are mostly quite creative, making good use of the many options of control offered by the Wiimote (you will want to avoid the PS2 version for this reason). The sounds and visuals are brilliant. It’s just a shame you have to go through so much of the difficult games before you can.

The graphics themselves are a bit middling at time, though. While they work well in most of the mini games, the arena fly by has very obvious Rabbid sprites that look blurry and just a bit too wrong, making for a bit of a disappointment when you first see it. You get the feeling they ignored this semi-hub a bit too much, and while they focus the story on it, it would actually have been better if they’d used a simple menu here – it’d be less disappointing, would make it more clear what you’re doing and pull you out of the game less. Here you can really notice both that this game was designed with the previous generation of consoles in mind as well as the implication this has on the capabilities of this then-new console. In later games things are improved somewhat in terms of graphics whilst the gimic remains pretty much the same.

It sounds like later games improved these issues, while featuring lesser mini games, but overall, from the anticipation we built up (both in looks and gameplay) it’s been a bit of a disappointment. It’s mostly fun enough with the mini games (if you can resist getting too upset at the remaining ones), but don’t expect to have another game for your at-home multiplayer fun.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes great fun and sometimes remarkably gruesome Raving Rabbids is by no means a game that everyone will enjoy. It’s utterly ridiculous and the quality of the mini-games varies from amazing to utterly useless. Still, for a bunch of mates it can be a lot of fun… just remember to unlock them all first!

#248 Plok

Posted: 30th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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0

213th played so far

Genre: Platform
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1993
Developer: Software Creations
Publisher: Activision/Tradewest/Nintendo

Just as nice as the new games we say we find sometimes, are the blasts of the past we get by playing games we haven’t played in decades. Plok is one of these.

I never owned it – we didn’t have SNES when I was younger – but friends did. This was one of the games they owned. While it was never a big one in the list, I do remember playing it as a fun game with interesting mechanics and it just being funny (to the point that I understood what was going on at the time).

At the same time, this game seems to have captured Peter’s imagination, and he’s been wanting to play it for a while as well… interesting how things work out.

Our Thoughts

Often, playing a game like this brings back more memories of how it works and how much you like it. While I remembered the basic mechanics – jumping and hitting things with your limbs, I had forgotten the story behind it.

That introduction, however, that leads to you going out in the first place and initially drives the plot, is different enough that it’s close to genius. You see, one morning you wake up and, walking outside, you discover that you’ve lost your flag – one you inherited from your grandfather. (For some reason, the flag was hanging from a giant needle – the scale of things in this game is slightly weird, with giant safety pins holding up bridges.) Down the line, this leads to further adventures as part of this turns out to be a diversion, but the start is weird enough it’s notable.

In his anger while chasing his flag, Plok (our hero) moves from flagpole to flagpole (a flagpole needle signifying the end of a level), raising the flag at each to see whether it’s his – and be disappointed each time. These flags are nice touches – you raise everything suitable and unsuitable, in the first levels finding boxer shorts, scarves and (somehow) a 5.25″ floppy disk. At times nonsensical, but certainly quite nice.

As mentioned, these design elements carry over into level designs, which features walking bags with blue hair as early enemies, has evil flower spit at you, but does it all in such a colourful setting that a lot of it will make you feel good. It’s a happy and bright game, with many things to make you smile.

At the same time, this game will make you curse like a sailor. The game’s platforming isn’t as tricky as a number of games like that we’ve seen recently, such as NewZealand Story, but more than makes up with that with enemy placement. The aforementioned sentient bags are fairly simple, but often placed to mess with your strategies on other enemies. The earliest annoyance is the falling logs. They are simple rolling logs, but thanks to your jumping can be hard to avoid in certain places. Your first true challenge come from the heads with signposts on them (they hide until you’re close) that pop up and fire bullets at you at a rapid pace. It takes a while to figure out how to take them out, even longer to perfect that strategy. Once you figure out the timing, however, they become a piece of cake… it’s a whole other story if you are not on a level surface though. Then there’s flying flowers, just out of reach, that keep firing bullets at you.

And then there’s the level design… most evil early on probably being a lift that flies you to land right on some spikes, which means you need to jump out at the right time. There is, of course, no indication on this, which means you’ll lose at least one life there on your first go. Evil, very evil.

And then there’s our hero. A rather unique design, he’s mostly a yellow body with a red hood on top (reminding me of an executioner’s hood (I saw a KKK uniform in Spanish colours), to make it a bit darker). His four limbs – arms and feet – fly loosely next to him, in true cartoon (or, I suppose, Rayman) fashion. That also allows for his main attacks – throwing his arms and feet at the enemy. This (obviously) means he’s got only four projectiles flying around, while he hops around when he is without enough of them or slides down slopes if he is just a torso stump. It’s a fun mechanism, a lot friendlier than bullets, and boomerang effects always seem a bit more useful. Another nice touch are the two different jump effects – one a controlled lower jump that allows you to fire your limbs, another higher, but where you can only jump. It makes for some rapid switching – and quite a few failed jumps in my case.

The last brilliant touch are the outfits. Sure, we know about pickups giving you other powers from other games, but they’re executed slightly nicer here.For example, one turns you into a hunter and allows you to fire bullets. A useful feature, but it’s made even better by the graphics, which create a fun character that’s neat to see walking around. It’s a lovely touch that makes finding them even more fun.

Final Thoughts

Ugh I hate it when Jeroen takes absolutely everything that can be said about a game! Apart from a side mention to the music which is cheery in a Saturday morning cartoon sort of way this is a nice challenging platormer that has been almost forgotten about. Then again, so many great titles have been which makes you wonder about gaming immortality. So many great games (like Zack & Wiki) can just fall off of the radar never to return and that really is a shame. Sure the landscape is populated by blockbusters like Halo and Super Mario 64 but fior every game like that there are 20-30 games that are original, innovative and downright fantastic that are never heard of 5 years after their release. Sad, I really loved Kessen II.

#194 Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon

Posted: 26th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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1

212th played so far

Genre: Management Simulation
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 1990
Developer: MicroProse
Publisher: MicroProse

A disadvantage of looking at statistics when determining games to play is that there are genres where we have to wait a long time before we feel (statistically) able to play them. Due to a missed connection over Flight Control‘s genre it took us even longer for us to be able to play another management simulator (and now, because of the theme of games 201-250, it is going to be even longer before we can think of playing Theme Park).

Okay, so I don’t agree that Flight Control counts as management sim but The Movies sure is. It may not be completely the right time to play this… but I have wanted to play this for ages.

Our Thoughts

Like most young boys I had a train set. It wasn’t a particularly complex one, in fact it was a wooden one like you would find in the Early Learning Centre, but it was enough to help me create a imaginary world with bridges and interchanges where everything can slot into place.

If you are going into Railroad Tycoon with the idea that you are going to be able to replicate the experience you had as a child then you really have another thing coming. For one thing this game really does take the tycoon element seriously and that is not a bad thing at all. As is the fact with all railway companies the chief concern is money, this will also become your main concern since it is rather easy to run out of money and find yourself in the red. It is all too easy to find yourself in the red and things become rather repetitive because of it.

Then again, if you start small and manage your money through upgrades you are less likely to have this problem. However, your coffers are still filled or emptied at the will of your stockowners. If there is (randomly generated) bad news then you will find yourself out thirty grand and unable to purchase that section of track required to make use of a rubber plantation. It probably is not that realistic to be honest but at times it really feels like it and that it really what matters in computer games.

What doesn’t help here is that you don’t really have a chance to make small upgrades – at least not early on in the game. Railways are relatively expensive to build and the various types of stations are even more so – and those lines are useless without them. Which means, in extreme cases, that your line is expensive and when you reach the end, you don’t have the money to build it – and hence make use of that expensive line. Getting the money for it can take a lot of time, and all that time there’s nothing you can do…

One thing that detracts from that realism is the interface and the graphics which are basic when compared to games like John Madden Football which came out in the same year. Still, the graphics are excusable but the interface is abominable. It took a lot of Google and trial and error to figure out how to play the game properly and even then some things (like how to branch out rails) were only figured out due to guesswork. There are also problems when you decide to speed up time since suddenly you find yourself unable to read your yearly financial report as pieces of paper go flying at an annoying speed.

Not helped is the fiddliness of some of these controls – our final session ended due to Peter’s annoyance at accidentally destroying a station. Simply because it happened to be the top option in the menu, and the game didn’t realise we wanted to scroll down. It felt unnecessary.

Still, despite these difficulties this is an incredibly immersive game in the same way that Civilization has that “one more turn” ethic that makes it utterly irresistible. Many an hour has been lost to this timesink and many more will be.

Final Thoughts

I’ll be honest – the third part of the series is on the list, which will almost certainly be our preferred version when we play it. The main issues with this are graphics (excusable) and interface (less so, although this might be PC speed as well) and I expect both of those to be fixed in the later installments.

Longer term… I’ll withhold my final judgement until them.

#17 MUD

Posted: 22nd January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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5

211th played so far

Genre: Adventure
Platform: Internet
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Roy Trubshaw, Richard Bartle

Now here’s a game, despite not ever having played it (being for pay at the time while I didn’t have the means to) indirectly had a major effect on my life. As mentioned , I’m a developer, and initially I was self taught, learning C by reading the source code of projects I could get my hand on. One of the major ones here was CircleMUD, that I somehow managed to compile in my Windows environment and messed around with. My first C programs grews from what I learned there, and after that I went to making that my profession. A telling path.

And now, full circle, 12 years later I’m sitting here, having a chance to play the original and give my verdict. It feels like a monumental step somewhere.

(The other main ‘teacher’ was Nethack, a game we’ll cover at some point in the future.)

Our Thoughts

Wow. The overwhelming emotion when playing this game was one of sadness. Knowing that this game was playing by hundreds of people in the past, interacting, killing each other (or, I hope, helping each other), interacting and role playing – not in the sense we see it, but in the sense of taking on a part and acting things out together – it feels like it must have been imposing and interesting.

But not while we were playing. A quick check confirmed that we were the only people online. We wandered through empty landscapes, trying to figure out what was going on. You could tell there was the storyline, people working together on that. Figuring out the game and route together. Now it was nearly dead, which is a shame for a game that inspired so many – Everquest and Ultima Online were the MUD spirit with actual graphics and ongoing professional support and any multiplayer game can trace its idea back to this game.

The game, then, is as simple as it is potentially enticing. A lot of it does come down to adventure elements – find stuff, put them elsewhere, with limited interaction with the environment. Zork, really, with a multiplayer component (and a bit less of a story…and not pants). A nice bit of exploration with some more killing. It needs the multiplayer to really draw you in, but if the experience wasn’t as sad, we probably would have been drawn in enough to play for a bit longer – things just felt a bit too convoluted for now.

Being a console gamer born at the extreme tail-end of the 1980s this is a game I had neither heard of or really had the opportunity to come across. Upon trying this out for myself I really can see how this was the macdaddy of them all. I really enjoyed Guild Wars but the influence of MUD really is there.

As a piece of history, this is something to be experienced. As a game, it’s a fun diversion. But damn, try to get a few friends in.

Final Thoughts

I really echoed Jeroen’s sadness at how unpopulated this game is. It really is a wonder that it is even online anymore in a neglected corner of the internet.

In a way it is hard to really recommend this game for consumption because it would be like playing Scrabble by yourself. If the writers of The Big Bang Theory can hear my thoughts; reference this in an episode!

#994 VVVVVV

Posted: 18th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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1

210th played so far

Genre: Puzzle/Platform
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2010
Developer: Terry Cavanagh

Regardless of your thoughts of the Humble Indie Bundles they have been an absolute godsend for this blog. By being generous (oh we love to give) we have been able to grab a lot of games off of the 1001 list for us to peruse later. So far we have only written up one of the games that we have purchased this way (the steam-punk influenced puzzler Cogs) and we have a number of them waiting in the wings for us to tangle with at a later date (such as Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe and Machinarium).

Our Thoughts

In the future I believe that how a person pronounces the title of VVVVVV will be a part of pop-culture alongside the whole “glass half-full/half-empty” issue. Under your breath say the title out loud. Did you just call it 6 Vs? How about Vs? Or did you go though VVVVVV and then wonder if you only said five or even said one too many or realise partway through you should’ve gone for a different option? I am not even going to attempt to psychoanalyse this since I am not entirely qualified and I don’t want to be told about an aspect of my psychological profile that could make my life difficult.

Whether or not you have an opinion on how to pronounce the title you can not deny that it is a whole lot of fun. As is the case of many platform games the whole point is to go out and rescue people. In VVVVVV these people are the members of your crew (who, like yourself, have colour-based names that begin with the letter V.) In order to do this you need to navigate a large world (where much inspiration has been taken from Super Metroid) and undergo a series of puzzle-platform based rooms where obstacles include spikes, green ghosts, dollar signs, the word ‘TRUTH’ and little red men with spears.

So far, with the exception of the Super Metroid influence, this game does not sound too extraordinary. When you consider the quasi-8-bit graphics and cliched premise you do need to ask why this is on the list… oh yes… you can’t jump! The bane of games like The New Zealand Story where pixel-perfect jumps are not entirely the thing of the past but this take on the proceedings really does help VVVVVV stand out from the crowd, especially since it is used so well.

Instead of jumping you appear to engage some from of gravity boots whereby you attach yourself to whatever is acting as the ceiling. This is then coupled with decent gravity physics which in some levels is used incredibly well. In the level in question you lose some degree of control of this ability as whenever you touch a white line you immediately switch gravities. You need to use this to the ultimate advantage so you can properly slingshot your way out of danger (reminded me of Portal in a way). Most of the time, however, this makes for general use of the gravity physics to great effect – you can only switch while standing, first of all, and second you need to time your falls well – both in getting the direction right, as to make it unto certain falling platforms at the right time. Never mind the levels where spikes chase you and you need to hurry up the tower… but not too fast or the spikes at the top get you!

One issue I had with this game involved the rescuing of Verdigris. In a way the idea of having to lead a character to the exit, who will follow you unless you are walking on the ceiling) does lend itself to a number of interesting puzzles. However, there are some where difficulty and annoyance factor is ramped up in such a way because they really start exhibiting lemming-like behaviour. When will games creators realise… escort missions are NEVER fun!

Speaking of a last bit of fun – one of the nicer touches are in the level names. While they matter little to the proceedings, each screen in the game has its own name. While some contain hints, many are just fun comments on the proceedings, and even more are just general fun – (pop) culture references, jokes and taunts. They make for a nice touch when you get to see them.

Still, those rooms aside VVVVVV is a really fun game if you have a spare 2 hours where you want to complete a game. It is best played in one long slog so you don’t lose your way in the game’s giant map.

Final Thoughts

On the whole, the unique physics of this game make it a worthy game to try on its own, its indie roots clear in graphics and style. But beyond that, the game is tough enough to be a big challenge, but with frequent auto saves and a good curve, the game is fun enough that you can still spend a few hours beating it, in part following a “Just one more go” philosophy. Worth it to keep playing.

#167 Midwinter

Posted: 14th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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0

209th played so far

Genre: Action/Role Playing
Platform: PC/Amiga/Atari
Year of Release: 1989
Developer: Maelstrom Games
Publisher: Microplay Software

Some games look and sound just a bit different – slightly off, with an interesting concept and mechanics that make you want to try them. Not necessarily a game that will become a favourite, not one I might even come back to, but one that you want to play, see what it’s like. Something to add to the experience of different games as we’ve been playing them.

Midwinter is one of these. I’m vaguely reminded of Fallout or Wasteland when reading the plot – post-nuclear world, you have to survive and take down the big bad. This time, however, it’s first person, you need to recruit your guys, and there’s a lot more action to it. Intriguing, to say the least.

Our Thoughts

Back, again, to unclear gameplay, dated graphics and no help when you start. Yet, unlike Skool Daze four days ago, here it works.

The controls here are as quirky, although mostly more sensible. The difficulty in this is more defensible anyway, as there is more to do. You start off doing a lot of skiing, hopefully usually sped up by using a snow mobile. You have to watch your exhaustion (or fuel) while doing so, although the main downside of getting tired is that you need to rest up for a bit. Same thing if you get hurt, by the way – there’s no death, something that makes the game a lot more bearable. Sure, easier too, but knowing the games of this time, I actually appreciate this bit of mercy.

The game doesn’t really start off until you’ve started recruiting. You start with one character, but due to the amount of travel necessary, and the ways of failure that are possible (stuck tired in the middle of nowhere, captured by the enemy, or just being completely lost) you need the help from your colleagues. Not just that, it speeds up gameplay a lot (plus you get to ski as a helpful old lady!)

The game is semi-turn based. Each of your character gets to play for two hours (the same two hours), after which they all need to check in and give a status report. This makes it fairly straightforward to make use of all of them without forgetting or missing your chance to do something.

You do need all the help you can get. Your opponent’s troops move quickly in taking over the settlements, while raids cross the island trying to bring you down. Death, as said, isn’t permanent, but it’s annoying enough that you don’t want it to happen.

Unfortunately, it takes a while before you can recruit. Whether or not you can recruit a character depends on who comes for them, and your starting character isn’t necessarily well liked. This means that before you can do much, you need to spend time winning people over your side – an annoyance, especially in how time consuming it is.

From there on though, you can blow up factories and take up sniping as much as you want and the fun starts – quite addictively so. It’s a simple game, but plays nicely.

Whilst playing this one thing that came across my mind is how awsome a remake of this could be. Revamped graphics, ambient music and other things could really help to play up the utter desolation that is the world of Midwinter. A snowier version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with optional cannibals is what I am going for here. The game already had an insanely large world (for the time this is gigantic) so imagine that expanded to Skyrim proportions but just bleak with the occasional forest fire… I want to make this!

Final Thoughts

Fantasies of making a foray iunto the world of game designers aside Midwinter has obviously been a huge influence on many great games and the fact that it still plays well 20-odd years later is a real testament to the original developers… but if I see a game like the oe I dreampt at E3 2013 or 2014 I am going to sue!

#101 Skool Daze

Posted: 10th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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1

208th played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: ZX Spectrum
Year of Release: 1985
Developer: David Reidy
Publisher: Microsphere

Skool Daze… misspellings intentional, I’m sure. In typical Bully/Canis Canem Edit fashion, you go back to your childhood to play a not-very-holy schoolboy. The difference here is that this game came out about 20 years earlier than Bully, making for some obvious differences.

In a game I’m sure most teachers won’t approve of (damn right), you have to get the code to get into your school’s safe (in the teachers room). You need to do other stuff to get it, but yeah… Fairly simple, I suppose so far.

Our Thoughts

Here’s where it slows down. The ideas here are similar to Bully – bad kid trying to survive in a school world… shifting the blame onto others and surviving unscathed. There’s a number of differences though – twenty years really do make a difference.

You start off really just getting used to the controls – walking around, going the right way, where to go and find the places you shouldn’t go. Once you get past that, it sort of starts. You need to hit shields, as when they’re all flashing, stunning teachers gets you part of the code you need to get in the safe and change your report card. There’s a couple of options to do so. You can jump and fire your catapult, the latter being good for distractions but netting you punishment. You can write on the blackboard (something your fellow students do, with an alarming amount of errors – I think ‘skool daze’ might actually appear in there) and punch kids if they get too annoying. Not too difficult, but as the controls aren’t as intuitive, they take some time.

Punishment is worth mentioning – rather than lifes, you have lines. Once you have to write 10 000 of them, you lose the game. Different teachers also give out different amount of lines for different offenses, which will make things a bit more interesting. In an attempt to build up some form of sympathy for the protagonist there are certain situations where only you will receive a punishment whilst others get off with nothing. An example of this is during geography class where the game designers built a room where there are not enough desks for the students (a comment at the overcrowded school system or a stupid mistake… who can say). During class you will repeatedly find yourself booted out of your seat by other students and yet only you receive lines you being without a desk. There even lines for sitting on the floor as you lie there spread-eagled having been punched out of your seat… not exactly my idea of fair and that really is the point.

To be honest, I found surviving tough enough in this game. I may have touched a few shields, but you’re spending so much time going from place to place, not get caught, and actually avoiding lines that it’s quite difficult to progress in the game. It means we didn’t see as much as we could, but it felt difficult to build up the patience for this game. Aside from sound and graphics not being appealing – something that doesn’t always need to work against a game – it’s just not as interesting a game to me. It may not have helped that we already covered the fantastic Bully that this just fell on deaf ears.

The controls are awkward and feel inaccurate. Lines get given too easily at times – be kicked out of your chair and you can get them before you realised it happened (and no, the graphics don’t help, as it might mean you’re just inside a lot of black pixels). There’s few places to hide to skip classes. Dinner time… just consists of you standing in the hall for a bit for some reason (to feast on Krusty-brand imitation gruel).

There’s a few nice touches in there – writing on the blackboard is a nice touch – but I don’t really feel that naughty and my goal just doesn’t really seem to work. The whole experience never came together for me – a shame, as it feels like there’s something in the concept. Not even open world like Bully, just a bit more interesting stealth and action-based gaming than what we get in here.

Final Thoughts

A number of interesting things (such as a neighbouring girls school) were added into the sequel to Skool Daze and these changes do sound like they could have exerted a positive effect. On paper this is a really interesting game but it is really hampered by the ravages of time and an incredibly clunky set of controls. Just pick up Bully and be done with it is the tl;dr of this to be frank.

#808 Carcassonne

Posted: 6th January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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207th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Sierra Online
Publisher: Sierra Online

Time to engage long-winded story.

Carcassonne reminds me of the first time Jeroen and myself spent Christmas as a couple… with my mother. It is a tradition in this household to play Trivial Pursuit at Christmas (as in the board game… not an electronic adaptation) so Jeroen thought he would bring a board game of his own, the award-winning Carcassonne. After an explanation of the rules we engaged in merry Christmas gaming… okay so we never ACTUALLY played it because my mum didn’t understand the rules. (Oh, that and it sometimes seemed Peter didn’t want to try too much.)

And so our story ends with Carcassonne slowly gathering dust in the linen closet next to Pictionary, Pyramid and two variations of Monopoly.

Our Thoughts

Okay, so there has never really been a strong relationship between the board game and the computer game. Many have tried, millions have been sold but have any actually been great? I think that after some introspection you will realise that… no there hasn’t been (to those of you who hold up Scramble With Friends as an example I say… seriously?) Card games, such as the upcoming Uno, the ever-present Solitaire and so on have fared better in this regard, with the recent Magic the Gathering release supposedly being quite good.

With this in mind the idea that a decent version of German board game Carcassonne existed for the Xbox forced me to do a double take. Whilst turn-based strategy game are great (oh Civilization how we love you) they have rarely been well-made on consoles (some games coming on the list may change my mind). However, when I started playing this game it struck me… this could be the anomaly I was hoping it would be.

So what is Carcassonne all about? The idea is that you take a tile off of a pile to be used to build roads, castles and monasteries. You also have a small number of followers and you can use these to earn points from the structures that you build. Whilst it may sound dull as dishwater it’s very competitive and there is a fair degree of strategy involved to try to one up your opponents.

To be honest the game does not re-invent the wheel and it plays exactly like the board game with two key improvements. Firstly as a tile-based game the rules instructing where you can actually place tiles are fairly difficult to do on sight alone. In the game it actually shows you all the possible places that the tile can be placed, it makes the game a little less frustrating and a lot more fast-paced. The other big improvement on the original is the graphics. This can seem a little bit of a no-brainer but the way that the game renders the castles upon their completion is beautifully imagined and turns the gaming board into something that feels more alive.

Another nice advantage, I found, is the scoring. While some parts of it are easy – gain points equal to the length of the road and such – when it gets to fields giving you points equal to the amount of cities it reaches multiplied by the number of areas it’s in, plus or minus some things, the counting the computer does helps a lot.

In contrast to these improvements are two major issues. The AI of your opposing players are incredibly stupid at times to the point that they will begin to actively help you… it’s like hey think you’ll have them hung, drawn and quartered for daring to win against you. I think this is partially a result of us playing on easy – there’s just not much reason to try. There is also the curse of the repetitive music… I know that they have to include music but the loop comes too soon.

This is also one of those games that are improved by playing together. Multiplayer is one of those things that’s a mixed bag depending on how much the developer bothered, but here it works brilliantly. They don’t really have a choice, to be fair – this being a board game, it had to be in – but it is probably the best way to play. Aside from the strategy itself being involved, it can include some bluffing to mix things up further and there’s this constant love-hate thing going on. It’s what made it the most fun for me.

In the end though these are minor quibbles since this is a game (much like Flower and Fat Princess) that demonstrates the boon online stores have become. Small, cheap, bitesize games that can do things larger more expensive games are unable to do. £39.99 would have been too steep for this game but at 800 Microsoft Points it makes for a nice diversion.

Final Thoughts

Aside from being a lovely looking game – yeah, it looks decent, with the boardgame roots adding its own stylistic touches that work incredibly well – it plays well. The game translates incredibly well into a computer game, where most of the complexity of the board game disappears and you’re left with a streamlined, fast game that kept us coming back for another game every time we played it.

It’s gone on our list of party games – next to Buzz Quiz TV, Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart Wii.

#105 Leader Board

Posted: 2nd January 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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206th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Bruce Carver & Roger Carver
Publisher: Access Software

Golf is an interesting game. It looks incredibly boring to my eyes – hitting balls in a direction and getting it in a hole, nothing new compared to other sports, yet without defenders now, so they made the hole sm…

Sorry, that was going in the wrong direction.

Anyway, I’ve never played golf in real life (I plan to rectify this). Something I probably ought to try (connections and such), but just haven’t been interested in it. Still, I have played golf games in the past – in particular just one I remember played lots that allowed you to modify the courses yourself, which was always fun. Can’t remember the title of it, though, unfortunately.

Anyway, Leader Board precedes that, and while we’ll reach Tiger Woods’ undoubtably better golf game, we now start with the first semi-3D game.

Our Thoughts

Unfortunately, I remember that game being better. Possibly in part for that same construction, but also just gameplay…

The game seems to get the basics of a golf simulation right – swing and force, picking a club, and so on. In practice, it just doesn’t work as well. First of all, the courses are annoying in how they’re set up. There’s two types of terrain: Grass and water. Grass is easy. Water means you need another swing. There’s a lot of water around and between courses (and no bridges, making you wonder how your golfer gets from place to place). Thing is, that turns a lot of the game into trying to guess how far to swing to avoid the rivers/lakes and have the ball land on grass instead.

That leads to step two, the controls. A bit unclear, it’s difficult to know what the best course is and there’s no indication to what the meters mean. Yeah, manuals help here, but it’s not intuitive – first bar, longer is harder, second, shorter is a harder hit and further movement, which doesn’t entirely feel like it makes sense.

Of course, that system isn’t universal, and when putting you just have one power meter. Because consistency is for wussies! I realise that’s probably how golfers have two different ways of doing the different actions, but it’s odd.

Putting is probably the most frustrating. You see, the hole isn’t that, it’s actually a list of three or four dots that vaguely specify where it is. The ball can bounce out of this (though rather mysteriously) if it goes too fast, but the angle is weird. But then there’s step two. Your golfer is supposed to face the hole when you try to put. When you’re too close, however, it’s not a straight line. Instead, you seem to pretty much be standing on the hole and can’t put it from the angle you have. It’s frustrating and can make you feel quite screwed over – your good record can easily be spoilt by some bad game mechanics.

During our first round of golf I found myself fall victim to this putting problem, to the point where not only was I getting incredibly frustrated by it but was really wondering why the player was standing on it. Another piece of frustration occurred on our next round of golf. Anyone who knows anything about golf knows that it is not played on uniformly level courses. There are hills and dips (and of course some wind issue) and to give this game some credit they have tried to incorporate some of these in. What does not help is that the ground is always the same shade of green without any hint of contour meaning that your ball can curve in a random direction for no rhyme or reason. As I always say; difficult is good but play fair.

I see how the gameplay of the game is revolutionary and had an influence on future games. When it worked, it was fun and great to play. It’s a thing that has potential. Just… not how it works right now. When a game makes you want to throw stuff at the screen, then you know you’re doing something wrong.

Final Thoughts

Like we said with John Madden Football we can see the merit behinfd this game but it does not stand up well to modern games (casing point, every hole had to be actually drawn by the game which took a while an became really tedious after a while). The fact that this was the firs golf game to not do a top-down view of the sport is really impressive and that alone means this game deserves a place on this list.

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