Playing a game to death and back
I’ve not talked about my older console habits and after hearing the Listen Up (1Up) podcast talking fondly of their favourite old games I remembered the hours of fun that I had playing Super MarioKart on the SNES. There were few games on the console that where played as fanatically by my friends and I, this was the most extreme case.
You had the standard game modes that occupied your normal gaming time on the game, Cup races, head to head and the awesome PvP. Additional once you had exhausted all of that content you could turn your attention to the rather addictive time trails, where shaving a fraction of second off the top time was a highly sought after goal.
Remember that in the years without achievement systems and Gamer-Scores, this was boredom redefined and redirected into playing a game to death, then doing it all again. So what to do once you had exhausted all of the content? Well in our case we got plastered and invented new game modes.
Our overall favourite map was Ghost Valley 1 which was frequently the settings for our more bizarre game modes due to the ‘unique’ features.
I’m not sure which half-crazy scheme was more enjoyable, the first was invented by covering the bottom half of the screen and using the in-game minimap to guide your character around the track. Of course the chosen track doesn’t have any barriers so as you can imagine many drunken expletives were uttered and bellowed at the console.
Another event wasn’t as extreme just was equally as fun, attempting to complete the route in reverse using only the rear-view mirror for guidance. While being easier than the mini-map game it was a right blast.
So is this Madness? Quite possibly, but also rather fun and certainly playing the title far beyond the limits it was originally destined for.
PC: Blood Bowl
Over the past few weeks I have been playing the recently released Blood Bowl game from Cyanide Studios. For those of you that aren’t aware Blood Bowl (BB) is a Games Workshop title that started life as a board game. Of all the GW titles I found Blood Bowl to be one of the more exciting envrionments they offered. I enjoyed playing the game thanks to the small amount of time needed to setup and play a match.
Based on the Warhammer fantasy universe the teams compete in a Ultra-violent sport similar in some ways to rugby and American football, teams of 11 players face off, attempting to score touchdowns and generally doing as much damage to the opposing team (of course without being sent off). The most common Warhammer world races can be found in the game and you can name, colour and brand your team to your liking, of course each race has their own strengths and weaknesses, which you’ll need to learn and play to in-order to
The game boasts two game modes blitz and standard, blitz acts more like a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game but includes a unique slow-down feature that allows you to order and direct your players around without being overrun by the computer AI. Standard mode plays much like the original board-game version with each team taking it in turns to move.
The standard game mode is played over 16 turns (8 per half), there is a timer for each players turn ensuring that your opponent doesn’t spend too long planning their next move. You can play a match in about 15 to 20 minutes.
This game is certainly well polished, delivering exciting gameplay that doesn’t depend too much on highly detailed graphics. The game is very heavily set it the Warhammer/Games Workshop world, but I don’t think that would be much of the turn off for anyone that is interested in playing a strategy game based on a playing field.
In an interesting twist of news, the developers of the game had a run-in with Games Workshop when they produced a game named Chaos League in 2004 which was similar to the BB brand. One of the terms of the settlement was that Cyanide would receive a license to develop a new title using the official Blood Bowl property and GW took ownership of the Chaos League name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Bowl_(2009_video_game)
BF Heroes
After getting disconnected ingame i turned to the website for some answers, sadly it seems the error messages there are generic as can be.
