Five Steps to a Better Game

While it is generally considered that games made back in the 80's are on average harder than those made today, there are still plenty of crazy hard games being produced. While some of these, such as Metal Slug 7 and Contra 4, are continuations of earlier series new IP's such as Super Meat Boy, Battle Kid, and Legend of Grimrock all provide new settings in which to put your gaming skills to the test. What follows are five simple steps to get better at these difficult games, with techniques that can also be applied to most games.

Step one: No Cheating
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. One of the best known cheats of all time and unfortunately a very easy way to prevent yourself from getting better at the game. Having 30 lives per continue means that you can progress through the game by attrition only. When playing Contra 4 I don't even let myself use a continue, while this is more extreme than the no cheating rule needs to be, the point is that my progress in the game is due purely to getting better with the controls.

Step Two: Use Training/Challenge Stages
Quite often these extra challenges and levels ask you to do something much harder than what is required in the main game. The advanced skills you develop will not only help you excel in the sections of the game you are already familiar with, but also mean that you will be better prepared for new more difficult levels later on.

Step Three: Demand Perfection
This is something I learnt from my sister. Her and I played Rainbow Islands a lot as children and if she lost a single life before reaching world three she would slam on the reset button and start again. I also adopted this system, later changing it to not losing a life before world four, and both of us eventually managed to finish the game.

Step Four: Learn From Others
Guides, tips, tricks and advice in general can greatly help improve your game. I mentioned above that both my sister and I finished Rainbow Islands, but what I didn't mention is that while she merely finished it, I got the harder to achieve good ending. I was only able to do this because of one key game mechanic that I read about in a gaming magazine.

Step Five: Find a Rival
As a child my rival was my sister, as an adult my girlfriend. By pushing each other and throwing down the gauntlet to say try and beat that score both people become much better at the games involved. I was once shaken awake at 3am to be informed that my high score in Sin and Punishment: Star Successor had been beaten, naturally I dragged myself out of bed and played until I was once again number one (this score also put me in the number three spot for the regional online leader board).

So there you have it, five simple steps to playing a better game. Now what are you waiting for? Go win some games!

Sometimes You Don't Want to be First

It's no surprise that I'm looking forward to the Wii U launch. I bought a Wii at launch and enjoyed playing Wii Sport and Twilight Princess. However, once I finished Zelda I was left thinking okay now what. While I ended up getting Monkey Ball and WarioWare one game that I intentionally avoided was Red Steel.

I had read the reviews for Red Steel and they were not flattering. However, earlier this year I finally picked up a copy for £1 and this month finally got around to playing it. All I can say is that the reviews were right, this game is severely flawed. It just shows so many signs of being rushed for launch, cut scenes are sometimes still frames, some times animated and sometimes the voice acting just stops half-way through them.

You can see what the developers were trying to do but the game just never lives up to it's promise. The controls are the opposite of the successful shooters that followed later on the Wii, the button which I expect to jump snaps to sights, the expected snap to sights button is crouch and what I expect to crouch jumps. At one point in the second mission I tried to duck and ended up inside a piece of furniture and had to reset the game to continue.

Perhaps these control issues could be forgiven if the sword fighting worked. Unfortunately these controls are even worse. There is significant lag between inputting a swing and the character performing it, also on default sensitivity the swings only register half the time.

But why bring this up now? The reason is that Red Steel is made by Ubisoft, the same company that is producing the Wii U launch title Zombi U. When I was young I played the original Zombi on my Amiga and I would very much like for this reboot to provide me with as many hours of fun as the original. I just hope that Ubisoft have learnt from their experience with Red Steel. After all the fantastic Red Steel 2 proved that given enough time they can indeed fulfil their promises and deliver a great experience.

Keeping it on the Level

First let me apologise for not having updated in quite some time, it turns out that moving to a new country takes up a lot of your time and resources. That being said, I will probably be cutting back to only one update a week for the next wee while.


I quite often talk about how to maximise your chances of winning a game through various strategies. Another way is to minimise thoughts and actions that can cause you to lose. More specifically, DON'T GO ON TILT! Having been watching peoples recordings of themselves playing Magic Online I'm amazed at how easily some players will fly into either a rage-filled mindset, or else just become totally nihilistic. What also surprises me is how petty some of these things are. For example, your opponent taking an excessive amount of time to pass priority. Yes it's annoying but in online magic it just runs down their clock giving you another win condition, and maybe before you start raging you could politely mention that you would appreciate them playing faster.It is quite possible that they are new to the game and aren't aware of the keyboard short-cuts that they can use to help speed up the game.

What I find most concerning is that if someone were to behave like this in a game of paper magic the judge wouldn't even bother to penalise the player playing slowly because they would be too busy removing the other player from the tournament.

Losing is a skill, if you know that you're not good at it then please try and improve. Play some casual games with friends with silly prizes, like jelly-beans or a lucky dip for the winner. Personally if I lose to someone then I like to get in behind them and support them for the rest of the tournament, this is partially so I can claim that I only lost to the best but also because it means that I'm going to be able to remain calm and happy during the rest of my games.

So please don't go on tilt, it just makes you more likely to lose and also makes it less fun for those around you.

Barrier to Entry

After my earlier failed video attempt I got into a discussion about how much it costs to play Magic Online. To create an account you need to part with US$9.99, which gets you an account, one M12 booster, 2 Magic Online tickets, 5 Avatars, 1 Planeswalker 2012 Deck Pack (cards that can only be used in the Planeswalker format), and 300 additional cards, after this it is up to you how much you want to spend buying new cards and playing in tournaments. However, it is worth noting that is cost nothing to play casual games.

With this in mind I have put together two casual decks that each cost less than two tickets. The first is an aggressive tribal deck featuring allies, and the second is a combo deck with creatures that have the unearth ability. Once again I had some trouble making the videos, of the seven games I attempted to record with the Allies deck (all of which I won) only one of them actually worked. The Unearth deck actually recorded but in all three games I had to revert to plan B of actually playing creatures, rather than being able to combo off. However, I did manage a turn four win in a test game I played when I was first putting the deck together.

I'm still not 100% happy with the videos, I become far to quite when thinking so have resorted to using some of kurtjmac's patented snarky yellow text to try and stop things getting too boring, but this provides a starting point for future videos to improve on. If you are having trouble reading the cards then you need to increase the video resolution.

I've Gone Mad

The free to play model for games has really taken off lately. Everquest II, DC Universe Online, Team Fortress 2, and Star Trek Online all changed to free to play and from what I understand have higher profits because of it. There are also games which have just released as free to play such as Realm of the Mad God and Tribes Ascend, both of which I started playing recently.

The strange thing about these games is that they have almost all of the content available to free users. The only items a non-free user can't obtain in Tribes is bonus xp and possibly some cosmetic upgrades, while in Realm real currency is used to buy extra character slots, guilds, additional vault space, and cosmetic changes. Personally I don't understand why someone would part with real money just to change the colour of their character's costume, but plenty of people seem to be quite happy handing over £1 just to have a polka-dot shirt. In truth, had they just asked me for a few quid to buy the game and have all the features then I probably would have, but I'm not willing to pay for cosmetic changes or just for the additional convenience of extra space in the item vault.

In Tribes the use of real money is purely so that you don't have to spend excessive amounts of time playing just to unlock everything. For example to unlock a new class you can either play for several hours, or simply hand over a couple of dollars. For $50 you can unlock and buy practically everything in the game, which is the equivalent of having just bought a new game. However, for me at least, part of the fun associated with the game is the levelling up process. As my experience and skill with a character increases so too will the equipment and items that character has, this could just be because I enjoy RPG's and other people who play more FPS style games would be more frustrated and bothered by not having access to all the equipment, then again CoD also uses a level system.

I suspect that the market for free to play is getting over saturated. The business model of get people into the game, take a few dollars off them as they try it out and then not care if they leave only works when people have enough time to try out all the different games. I think of this as similar to Facebook games where there are now so many of them that I just can not be bothered trying to work out which are worth while any more and have stopped even trying new ones.

The Failings of Technology

I'm currently trying to learn French. To facilitate this I started by going to the Apple App store and downloaded about half a dozen different trial versions of the various learn French apps. Unfortunately, none of them really stood out as being anything special, that's not to say they were all the same, just that none of them made me want to part with any real money.

Next I downloaded a couple of audio guides, but I found it was far to easy to zone off while listening, and also it was very hard to hear the correct pronunciation while travelling on the underground. So in desperation I decided to do things 'old school' and went to my local library.

Now, while travelling I read through Living French, an old text book from the 50's, and read about the adventures of the Dubois family. A couple of days ago I noticed that most people who were reading around me were doing so with a Kindle and it dawned on me that a Kindle would be terrible for reading this book. The reason being that I am constantly flicking back and forth looking up words and declensions, something the Kindle isn't suited for.

I find it slightly ironic that with all my love of technology and gadgets, the best way I've found to learn French on my own is an old, yellowed book from 1957.

How I Made Skyrim Fun!

Over the years I've played a lot of RPG's. I've player every numbered game in the Elder Scrolls series, except for Arena, but strangely when I first started to play Skyrim I found that I wasn't enjoying it.

The first game in the series I played was Morrowind. I decided that I wanted to play a character that was a master of various combat styles and so picked a Redguard and chose various weapons and heavy armour as my key attributes. After playing for a while I found that having a high level in multiple weapons wasn't worthwhile and was also constantly frustrated by my inability to open locks, cast spells, or sneak. So I rerolled, still using a Redguard as a base, but this time I spread my skills around. I was still primarily a fighter but had lockpick and destruction as key skills to give me some diversity.

I next played Daggerfall. Daggerfall has a very detailed character creation system, letting you choose advantages and disadvantages, so I min-maxed like crazy. My character couldn't use any weapons less than steel in quality but had much higher stats as a result. This made the first few hours quite difficult but in the long run made the game much easier.

In Oblivion I wanted to try out some of the less usual star signs and my first character was a high-elf mage, who regained MP by absorbing the spells cast at them. Unfortunately I kept having to fight people armed with swords and arrows, so my magic meter was never full. Feeling dissatisfied I rerolled as an Argonian who was good at everything. I had a high skill in sneak, lockpick, archer, swords, alchemy and speech. I was also reasonable with some of the magic schools. This made the game easy enough to play through, but the character felt like a generic Jack of all trades.

When I came to Skyrim I started with a Khajiit, and began leveing up the same skills I had used in Oblivion. Once again they prooved useful and I was making good progress, but I found myself getting bored. The character just seemed so generic and lacked flavour and depth. I then found that I just stopped playing the game altogether. This was a strange situation, I had a game from a series I enjoy and in a genre I enjoy, but I wasn't enjoying it. I decided to try the game again, but this time I was going to be a character, not just someone moving through the plot while being good at everything. So I made a Dunmer mage, I realise that in Skyrim you don't actually pick a class but rather equip class stones as you move through the game, but I resolved to only use magic in combat, unless I ran out of MP at which point I could draw a weapon. I also only equipped mage robes on my torso and light armour elsewhere.

I now have 21 hours play time clocked in and am greatly enjoying myself. Because I want to be this character, rather than just do everything in the game, I have refused to progress the Brave Companion's quest line as I don't want to become a werewolf. In some ways I think it is a shame that Skyrim took such a relaxed approach to character creation, although it's better than letting players 'cheat the rules' as they could in Daggerfall.