Spelunky

Spelunky is amazing. Fact. There. Review over. Go home to your wife and tell her you had a good time. Why is it good? You want me to explain? Jesus. Ok then.

Spelunky is a 2D Indiana Jones themed oldschool platformer, created by a guy called Derek Yu, on his own, and released as freeware. This is incredible in itself – the polish that’s gone into this title is heart-warming, and the game is a slick joy to play compared to the vast swathes of dross that a PC gamer normally has to suffer.

Your goal is simple – get through the underground cave system alive, defeat the final boss, and grab as much loot on your way through as you can.

What lurks in the depths below?

Let’s start with the graphics. They project a warmth of a cosier era, a rose-tinted view of the past, where strange bearded men sat in their bedrooms and composed games on floppy disks.

I love the graphics. They are bright, clear, simple and flow amazingly well. The smoothness of your spelunker as he jumps to his death never gets old. The sounds are solid, beeps and boops, with an 8-bit music background, again adding to the retro-ambiance, yet never grating or annoying. They take you back to a simpler time, a happier time, when 8mb was a lot of RAM and people hadn’t heard of circle-strafing.

I am also in love with Spelunky because it is so hard and utterly unforgiving. Gone is the spoon-feeding, nampy pampy gameplay of a generation of cry babies who don’t know the meaning of the words ‘instant death’. You start with four lives, and once they’re gone, it’s game over. There’s no save game feature, no checkpoints (although by saving up enough gold, you can eventually pay for tunnel shortcuts to later levels). You live and die by your wits and your skills. As you progress deeper into the caves, your palms begin to sweat. What was once an easy jump over a spike pit now becomes a yawning chasm threatening to suck your spelunker to his doom. If you die, it’s all over. You know you can’t afford to fail. It’s even worse when you are down to your final life. Every second you spend onscreen could bring imminent death - quite literally, as an unseen clock ticks constantly down, sending an unstoppable ghost to kill you should you dally too long in each level.

A rare shop - no refunds

You can get shot with arrows, devoured by man-eating plants, squashed by boulders and thrown by yetis, among dozens of other ways to die. And you will die. A lot. It took me well over a hundred deaths before I recorded my first victory and finished the final level. And the levels get progressively harder, as deadlier traps and nastier creatures are introduced in the differing zones.

Secrets abound throughout the game, requiring you to experiment and learn. What is this key for? Why do I need the Udjet eye? What does that beeping sound mean and how do I get to the mysterious City of Gold? All these need to be discovered yourself.

The mysterious ice caves. Full of yetis. And, um, ice.

One of the key facets of the game is that the levels are randomly generated, yet always present a perfect challenge and never trap you unless you are careless. You have access to a limited number of bombs and ropes, and may even get your hands on more exotic goodies as you progress. A warm feeling spreads through you when you discover a weapon in a crate, or find a shopkeeper willing to sell climbing gloves or a jetpack. Only being able to carry a single item in your hands makes for some tense moments, as you juggle a damsel in distress, a golden idol and your expensively acquired digging tool, all the way to the exit.

A damsel. Stereotypes abound.

 

But it’s also about the choices – the choices! Example. You’ve rescued a trapped damsel (who handily restore lives via a kiss if you get them to the level exit), but you’re faced with a proximity arrow-trap blocking the only exit. You have no bombs left and nothing nearby to trick the trap into activating. You know getting hit will kill you, and you need to get past. The answer? Lob the damsel – she takes the hit from the arrow and you can proceed. If she’s lucky, she may even survive. The budding spelunker faces many such moral grey areas as he proceeds through his adventure.

The game sucks you in. You want to play. Again and again. It reaches that perfect point of being easy to play yet fiendishly difficult to master, confoundingly frustrating in its brutality, but yet possessing a goal of achievement which is worth all the deaths. The primal thrill of reaching a new level zone drives you onwards – although it is often followed by the crushing defeat of being instantly murdered by a previously unencountered foe.

Speaking as a simple human being to another simple human being, I beg you – give this game a try. It would be criminal not to.

Final Score – Amazingly Happy Dog

Napoleon : Total War

I’m not going to give much of an intro here. Everyone knows what the Total War series is all about, and if you don’t, you are a hermit crab. You control a faction in history trying to achieve various objectives and/or total conquest of a region of the world. Napoleon Total War has you getting to this goal by shooting muskets and advancing in line while wearing silly hats.

I’m a big fan of the Total War series. Medieval Total War 2 is among my favourite ever games, and for amount of time played, has got to be in the top 5. I would quite happily be buried with that game, and take it up to heaven with me, and rub it in God’s big beardy face.

I got sick a few weeks ago, and watched a marathon 9 episodes of Sharpe in two days, which is probably unhealthy and against European regulations, but it left with me a hunger for more sexy hot musketry action, and I needed my fix. NTW stepped into the breach.

Spot the moustache

The Good

You really have two games when you buy a Total War title – a cool strategy game and a really fun tactical combat game – you know what I’m talking about, you big lug. The giant map with the cities and regions, and then the battle map, where you crush the enemies forces beneath your imperial boot and laugh at the AI’s foolish attempts to overthrow its human oppressor.

The graphics in both are great. The strategic map is a living, changing thing, especially as the seasons roll on. The game timeframe is about 2 weeks per turn, which makes the movement of armies fairly realistic. Choke-points and zones of control are useful too. The battle maps are even more wonderful. You can zoom right in and the see the moustaches on your little soldiers faces, see the smoke and fire from the muskets, and so on.

Europe - yesterday

POW! KA-BLAMO!

The battles are solid Total War, and really fun, like chewing on a satisfying bone (if one were a dog.) Executing a cunning flanking move, routing your enemies morale with a cavalry charge from a hidden position, or fending off a massively superior force through clever defensive deployment is still fun and satisfying. You control your little army unit by unit as usual, and the action can get almost excitingly overwhelming at times in the larger battles, when you are rushing from one end of the battlefield to the other like a mad raccoon who has eaten a particularly exciting acorn, desperately trying to direct your troops. For a real challenge, try playing without using the pause button.

Even better, real world tactics can be employed, such as Wellington's favourite - reverse slope defence – whereby you line up some of your troops just behind the crest of a hill, shielded from cannon fire. As the enemy gently stroll over the top, they walk right into your pre-prepared gun sights. (yes, I have actually read a book on Napoleonic warfare (lovely book), and no, it was awesome, and yes, girls love hearing about the reloading times of 18^th century muskets)

And that’s where the battle tactics are slightly different from medieval Total War, obviously. You have guns! Each ranged unit has a handy zone marked out for it when selected, showing its musket, rifle or cannon range. Many infantry units can’t fire on the move, so positioning becomes important – if your unit is static, it will open fire first. Hand to hand combat is still important, but fighting head on in a prolonged melee is costly for any unit.

The Campaigns are also great fun – as much as I dislike the cheese-eating surrender monkeys on purely national grounds, playing the French is fun. Early campaigns are short and easy (Italy, Egypt) and walk your through the beginning of Napoleon’s climb to power, and you get a good story progression. Balancing your budget and deciding which buildings to invest in are other Total War staples still kept – with added naval warfare, which is sadly kinda pointless. Very quickly I let all naval battle autoresolve themselves.

The Bad

Well, lordy, like a girl with a great body but a face that demands two bags (one bag for her head, and one bag for yours in case hers comes off), the game ain’t perfect. The battle AI can at times be utterly, almost inexcusably inept, like someone has installed a special-needs patch. There are plenty of examples, but one of them really sums it up – the AI takes no consideration for elevation of terrain when firing it’s cannons. The result? It’ll often fire directly into a mound 5 metres ahead of it for the entire battle. Utterly, utterly retarded and inexcusable. You can (and I have) installed simple fan mad mods to improve the AI, but really, do you need a community patch to stop your cannons shooting into the bloody ground, or the army General running about willy-nilly in musket range of my line infantry, for no other obvious reason than to show off? I think or not

The game lacks historical accuracy on almost anything that you care to point out, from the range of the muskets to the types of little coloured hats worn by French horsemen (this is a real argument – the NTW forums are full of slightly scary people who know far too much about this sort of thing. There is nothing so fierce as an angered fan of history).

Silly hats - mandatory

Even the size of the armies involved are way out, and are actually tiny. Take for example, the Battle of Austerlitz, a famous French victory over the Third Coalition. More than 70,000 men were involved from both French and combined Prussian/Russian armies – in the game, a single stack of 20 units can at best muster around 2,400 individuals.
 

Is this even a bad thing though? I don’t think so. This is a game based on some general details after all, not a historical representation. The gameplay that derives from these mistakes is still very enjoyable.

However, you are only allowed single stacks within a battle. Any nearby reinforcing stacks will then begin to add their units in, one by one, as your current units get destroyed or run away. This is very unrealistic, even in a computer game. And you don’t even get to choose which direction the reinforcements come from, or have any idea from which direction they will arrive. Or indeed, if you want them to join the battle at all.

Another problem is that every turn, one has to scour one’s towns and cities to determine what can be upgraded. This process can at times become something of a mindless exercise, with limited strategic options. For example – you have a Gold mine. You can upgrade it to a Better Gold Mine if you have enough money. This Better Gold Mine can then be upgraded to the Best Gold Mine if you have even more money. And so on with many other buildings. There is some strategic choice here e.g. picking which cities you want to produce your troops and focusing your military buildings there, but often these are obvious anyway (e.g. Paris).

Conclusion

Despite these reservations, Napoleon Total War is a really fun game, and is definitely worth your time. I'm not going to go down the artificial route of assigning arbitrary percentages to games, which I feel a little trite. How exactly does one work out a game scores 86% precisely? So instead, I'll be using pictures of animals to represent my emotional state while playing the game.

Napoleon : Total War scores – comfortably smug Polar Bear

Intro

Welcome to ‘How I Mine For Fish’, one of the very first games-review-blog-webpages on the global internet. I took a long hard look at the internet the other day, and saw immediately that not enough people were on it shouting and flailing around giving their opinions on things to random strangers. I thought I’d better join this elite group of intellectual powerhouses, and boost the dwindling numbers.

So, the point of this blog – for me to write my opinions willy-nilly about whatever game takes my fancy, hopefully for readers to read (as is their want) and enjoy, and maybe encourage people to play games they have not played before.

I will be sticking exclusively to PC games, for I enjoy big expensive boxes of noise that frequently need upgrades. I have no time for these upstart consoles, which I believe the young people use, along with the hip-hop and the baseball caps, all things of which I heartily disapprove.

I will try not to wander off into the realms of reviewing movies, books, Pokémon’s, flavours, or types of cat, as I do not want the blog to lose its focus and becoming the internet equivalent of a crazy old man standing at the edge of the road yelling at traffic, something which I have enough trouble trying to contain every day as it is.

The games will be any and all from the history of PC Gaming, taken up and reviewed as and when I play them – some old, some new, some bought, some, um, maybe borrowed. Comments are encouraged, as are rants, flames, mum jokes and so forth. I hope you enjoy my forthcoming word explosion. It will taste delicious and opiniony.