Once again, let's get the games that you know about out the way. Dead by Daylight, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Sorcery! and Chroma Squad have all had an outing thanks to the Steam Spring Clean event. You can read much more detail about them in their respective posts, but the long and short of my time with them would be 'nope', 'neat', 'not ideal, but yeah' and 'nice idea, hope it pays off'.
The only other game that is old this week is good old Star Realms, which has seen quite the development - I've actually bought the full version. I say full version, for it's a little bit of a cheeky name. You don't get absolutely everything, you just unlock a few extra modes and options. I also bought the Colony Wars expansion for it, which effectively doubles the number of cards you can play with.
Why this change of heart on not buying the digital version? Well, myself, P2 and White Wizard Games are all in the same area at the same time next week, and there's a tournament for us to put our money where our mouths are and see just how good we really are. P2 is not expecting to progress far. I'm not expecting to get much further, to be honest, but anything can happen. It'll be my first tournament for anything of this nature, so it'll be an interesting line in the sand. Or an afternoon of getting my arse whipped. I don't know yet. Looking forward to it.
Now, I've been much busier than just those lot of games though. Mostly on the PlayStation 4, and there's a fair bit of VR in this lot too. See what I got up to after the fold.
Yes, finally I got around to Assassin's Creed Origins. I was put off from getting it earlier because I felt it had strayed too far from its origins, ironically enough. The whole concept just exploded and it seems Ubisoft are writing it without an endpoint in mind, which is often the death of things on TV, for example.
It was going at half price, I thought 'why not' and it came in the post a lot quicker than the rest of the bloody post I'm waiting for. The problem with this game is that it wants 50Gb of space on the hard drive. I didn't have 50Gb of space. I'd need to play and delete some games first...
Rise of the Tomb Raider had been sat on the hard drive long after completion for just one reason - exploring Croft Manor in Virtual Reality. I finally fired it up and put on the headset to see what Lara see's.
A dark, dank, falling to bits manor house. It has its beauty but... well, no, it has the potential to b beautiful, but first, we've got to explore the place, find our father's Will and find what else is hidden around the place.
Control comes in two forms, a point and teleport/rotate the camera system, and a full albeit slow analog stick movement option. I tried the latter for a few seconds and immediately switched back to the teleport system, which is a bit of a strange way to move but it does work.
You zip around the mansion largely picking up whatever glows, manipulate it for more information or puzzles clues and solutions, and then just go and interact with the thing it wants you to interact with.
The joy comes from actually having to remember what you've discovered, and work out the clues for yourself, in your own head. You don't get whopping big HUD pointers (though they are on the map to help you narrow down where you need to be) and you obviously don't have a way of writing down clues, meaning you have to navigate the menus and virtually physically manipulate models looking for solutions in the way a piece of paper is folded, or listen to an audio recording and correlate them to work out a certain date, which forms a safe combination keycode and so on, and so on.
There aren't many puzzles, it's a short game, but they actually ask you to think and not follow, which is good.
I did get stuck on the final puzzle though. Annoyed, I left the game, but as I was typing into Google I noticed you could play this level outside of VR too, so reloaded, somehow remembered 'oh yeah, that R3 sixth sense thing still works', pressed it, found the solution and ended the level. So a bit of an anticlimactic end for me personally, but it was an interesting experience.
The Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner - Mars demo was released this week, much to my surprise, so I had to get on board with that. Mechs, you see...
It's a funny blend of overwhelming and 'actually, thought has been put into our comfort and ease of use with this'. You are piloting Jehuty, and you are piloting it from the cockpit, located in the cock area of the giant robot, so your view is way lower than you think most of the time. This isn't first person unless you were playing as Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
You can do everything you can usually do in ZoE, but you might need to dart between watching out of the cockpit and watching a little HUD version of Jehuty, especially when it comes to attacking something with a melee attack, which usually results in you spinning around on the spot.
Apart from the rather large number of switches between 'you're in a cockpit' and 'you're in a black void watching a cutscene', I think that'd be a fun time. I'd play on the easiest of easy modes in order to give myself a fighting chance at getting through the game in one piece, but it's not because the VR mode doesn't work. They've thought about it a fair amount, as I say, and I look forward to the full release.
I also had a quick look at some PSVR demos, one of which contained the Rez HD demo, which despite owning, finally, I still haven't gotten around to playing it (but, in a few years, the original release will appear on the 1001 list). There are two camera modes, one is VR newbie friendly, and the other is not. I found out that the other is not the hard way - it can sweep a fair amount, that camera.
A lot of the action takes place in front of your face, so there's not a whole lot of need to actually look around, but it memory serves there is a deeper VR experience that requires looking behind you in a separate mode. I'm sure I'll get around to finding out in the future.
The final game I had a quick bash at was Rocket League, which is as good as it was the first time I played, a long time ago, but didn't have the staying power it had when I played back then. I hopped into some unranked matches, won a couple, lost a couple, had my Rocket League fix and that was that.
Beyond the PlayStation, there have been a fair few tabletop games too. I'll be zipping through these because there are that many.
Battlecruisers see's 3-5 players outsmart each other in a quest for victory points. Everyone has the same deck, but play the same cards at the same time and bad stuff happens, so you need to keep some sort of idea as to who has played what, and is likely to play what next. Quick, simple, nobody wants to play it because it's a little budget game set in space, and space doesn't get a lot of love.
For co-op fans, Hanabi has you play coloured cards in numbered order so that you successfully launch fireworks into the skies. The only problem is that you don't know what cards you've got until other people spend their turn advising you, and you've only got limited amounts of advice to give over the course of a game. Discarding a card will get some advice tokens back, but discarding the wrong card could mean a swift end to your game.
If there's space on the table, playing a classic like 7 Wonders is a good idea. Card drafting and city building combine in a race for points through the amount of wealth you have, how strong your army is, how many fancy buildings you've got, how much science you've discovered... you can do all sorts, but organising it on the table can be a pain.
Sea of Clouds is similar to 7 Wonders but has pirates searching for rum and treasure, both of which score victory points in many different ways. Eventually, the mostly pacific pirate who collected the most rum won. Perhaps a bit uncharacteristic, but then he does look like this:
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| Source // GeekLette |
Zany Penguins requires a playthrough just to understand the way you score, so is a tricky game to explain, and Gloom in Space was sadly cut short before untold numbers of miserable deaths could occur because the venue all these games were played in was closing.
The next week though - this afternoon, in fact - we had time to play just as many...
Secret Hitler you know about, and my opinion still hasn't changed. I was Hitler and lost, P2 was Hitler and won, neither of us could tell you why, I don't know why it comes to the table so often.
When I Dream is kind of like Dixit, but not. One blindfolded player is bombarded with the rest of the table giving clues to a card, and when you're confident in what they're trying to tell you, you say what it is and hope it's right. After two minutes, you've hopefully gotten a load of correct guesses, which you must then remember and make a short story out of to score bonus points. The catch is that half of the table was trying to score points by helping you, the other half by hindering you, and the third half by trying to get you to perform as well as you did poorly if that makes sense.
P2 didn't get any of her guesses right, and I fared better but fell foul to the kinds of answers that were close but not close enough. Comet was a guess, but I knew as soon as I said it that it was probably Meteor, Boat wasn't good enough for Rowboat and so on. It's not strictly like Dixit but I prefer Dixit.
Bang! The Dice Game often reaches the table because it's quick and easy to play. A known sheriff player is going to be targeted by unknown outlaws, who will need to be stopped by unknown deputies. Roll dice to see whether you hit your neighbours, your distant neighbours or everybody, or get shot at by arrows, blown up by dynamite or healed with beer. You choose what to keep and what to reroll, and character abilities will change up how you play the game with your hidden role. When a victory condition has been met, the game ends.
Usually, a lot of the players are out of the round by that point, dead before they could even argue their case for which side they were on. I was even killed before having a turn on one occasion, as well as having my own sheriff shoot me as deputy. I refused to help him and joined the outlaws. Not strictly speaking allowed by the rules, but that's what you get when you don't communicate.
Finally, honestly, definitely, we played a quick two-player round of Dobble. It looks like a kids game but it messes with your head. The 50odd card deck has cards showing 8 different icons and shapes and cartoons and whatnot, and no matter which cards you pick, you are guaranteed to find a matching symbol between two cards.
Sometimes you swear it's impossible, as you develop a situational blindness to the answer that is literally staring you in the face but you just can't see it, and then someone matches their card first, the next card appears and now all of a sudden you can see match after match...
It's worth playing even just once.
Blimey, that was a lot. Things should be getting calmer these next few weeks, as life get's busier and, hopefully, the 1001 side of the blog picks up. The games won't ever dry up though.