Heroquest has always been on my list of must-plays, especially after finishing Space Crusade a couple of years back. See, back in the early 90s, around the same time I started playing the Space Crusade board game, I also played a few games of Heroquest, which had been released at a similar time. Just like with Space Crusade before it, I also got hold of the computer game, but don't remember finishing a single quest in the board game or the computer game. That seemed like something I needed to change.

Inspired recently by The Bard's hilarious video, I finally found the motivation to grease the cogs of my Amiga emulator and fire this one up for a playthrough.
By the way, you should totally click the thumbnail to view that video. He even dishes out some almighty plinnage at 2:19. Can't ask for more than that.

Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, like the Space Crusade computer game before it, this one was a frustrating slog. I started out with Tryndamere, Gragas, Varus and Karthus as my adventurers, but the silly wizard Karthus found himself very dead on just the second mission. So Malzahar came in to take his place. My team was further decimated when my save state got corrupted somehow after I had gone through the Legacy Of The Orc Warlord quest, so I had to continue with brand new characters. Gone were my barbarian's battle axe, my elf and dwarf's broadswords, and my wizard's staff. But oh well. I never really felt like things were too hard even after that problem.

I quickly came to the conclusion this thing should have had a top-down perspective like Space Crusade had. The fixed isometric camera angle proved itself to be a problem on more than one occasion. Mostly this was down to when I was trying to move. If someone just off the screen was blocking the path, I was unable to click beyond them in order to move, when normally the characters can pass each other. Also, it seemed impossible to cast spells on someone even if they were in line of sight down a corridor, as the game would tell you they were not in sight because they were off the screen. Bloody annoying.

There were other problems, like the sheer amount of clicking required. This thing actually hurt my hand at times. It felt like a clicking simulator through and through. This was not helped by the need to return to the quest's start point after completing the objectives in nearly every mission. That was just not needed.

But it's done. And that's all that counts.

It's been longer than usual since I paid this blog any attention, but that does not mean I've not been playing any games. In fact, I've been diving into quite the selection.

Up first was strange puzzler Sokobond. In this game, you have to move atoms around the level in order to try and get them to all bond together in the right sequence. Sounds simple enough, but trust me it wasn't. Now I quite enjoy puzzle games, as they give what's left of my tiny little brain a bit of exercise, but this one wore me down. I didn't play it in massive bouts either, but rather played it for fifteen minutes or so here and there over the course of a few weeks. Though I swept through at least half of the game fairly quickly, it soon reached the point where it was a grind to get passed each level, and whether I would even complete a level in a session became unlikely. Eventually, I reached a selection of levels, all over on the right side of the table for some reason, that I just couldn't be bothered to spend any more time on, and hunted for the solutions online. I know, I cheated, but I would never have gotten through it otherwise, as I was ready to call it quits.

---

Though I've been working on finishing a couple of other games these last few weeks, the vast majority of my time has been spent playing games that don't really have an end. Up first, I dived into Marvel Heroes for the first time along with Scoob, as we're both fans of Marvel and it seemed wrong that we hadn't tried it before.
You're allowed to pick your first hero without paying, so I unlocked Psylocke as she's one of my favourite X-Men. Still pissed off they made her a villain in the last movie, but oh well. Alongside Scoob's Wolverine I got chopping and slashing villains left and right, and we went through the first chapter and started the second.

Still a little bit unsure of my thoughts on this game. It's a pretty standard isometric button masher like Torchlight or Diablo, but I think I'd rather play this than those other games because of the theme and characters. I also like how you can try all the heroes up to level 10 before deciding which ones to buy. However, as its only servers are in the U.S. the performance is a little laggy, and the fact that loads of other players are running around make it a bit chaotic at times, adding to the button mashy mayhem. It's a shame they don't make European servers, or even better have developed it as a standalone type game with online and LAN options.

I don't think Scoob is really bothered about carrying on. But I might come back to it at another time. Maybe.

---

In a surprising turn of events, I've also spent a lot of time exploring new, and re-exploring old, MMORPGs these last few weeks.

Up first was The Old Republic. I didn't play this that much a year ago because I only really wanted to play the class quests, but was being made to play a lot of grind quests in order to stay levelled. Recently I read on a forum somewhere that it might now be possible to level up doing only those quests, while adding in one or two other quests here and there to keep the levels up. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I quickly found out that what I'd read was not true. On my Jedi Kreethen's third planet, Taris, I needed to go up 5 levels to match the level of the next quest but I only went up 3. From then on it became about how far I could go until the enemies were too strong for me to take out. Honestly, I got a lot further than I thought I would, getting through Taris, Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine, before finally reaching a quest on Alderaan that was too high level. As all the enemies were 6-7 levels higher, and kept resisting or dodging my attacks, there was no way I could win. Oh well.

Still, I haven't minded playing it this time, even though every planet's class quest was essentially the same: find an ill Jedi, beat them into submission, then cure them, so maybe I'm a bit more open to the MMO style of gameplay at the minute.

Yet, there were some things that annoyed the hell out of me. For instance, quite early on the game gives you a massive ship which you can fly around the galaxy in, but you need to be level 20 to learn how to ride a tiny speeder. How does that make sense? Also, if I used my mouse to turn and move the camera, rather than turn using the keyboard, the camera would very often leap around all over the place in a very hyperactive way, especially when in combat. Pain in the ass. There was also a hell of a lot of running around involved, especially before I had my speeder. I know I was skipping a lot of grind quests, but this felt worse than the old Star Trek Online exploration missions at times.

Probably the biggest bug I had wasn't to do with the game at all, but the launcher. A few times when logging in, the launcher would take ages re-organizing the game data and verifying, a known bug with the BitRaider distribution platform which the game uses. It's somehow tied to multi-core processors, but guess what: every computer these days has a multicore processor. How that has not been fixed yet is beyond me. Apparently there is a way to remove BitRaider and download the game another way, but it doesn't seem worth it unless I feel motivated to go back to it later.

---

After giving Star Wars another go it was only fair to give Star Trek the same treatment, and I reinstalled STO. Initially, I had no intention of playing this again at all, as I was only interested in seeing what they had changed when they redesigned the galaxy map. As it turns out, I was very disappointed with the map, as it's still not all in one piece, though it is vastly improved over the original sector blocks.
What got me sticking around for a while was finding out that they had added a bunch of new missions for players who were 50+. A huge problem with this game when I played it last was the lack of content when they raised the level cap from 50 to 60, but with the new missions I was hoping things had changed.

It always takes me a while when I come back to this game to get my head around things, as it is quite different to other MMORPGs. It didn't help that in these intervening months they had completely changed the skill trees and I had to learn what was going on with that to get Macan and his crew back into action. In addition, something strange had also happened to several of my ships, and their appearances had been reset. Gone were their cool dark blue patterns to be replaced by the dull, plain Federation standard. Bums.

Once I was up to speed I was off to the Delta Quadrant and plugging away at the missions. This time, I was able to go through all of the Delta missions, and the Iconian missions, and was able to hit level 60. I think a good chunk of that also came from doing daily quests, red alerts, and other rep quests as I was trying to get some better gear and extra traits. Without those extra missions, I think I would have probably stalled around level 57 or 58.

The game is mostly still the same, that being a huge buggy mess. And it's such a shame, because if this was completely fixed it would be a decent game. In just a couple of weeks play I had my away team officers getting stuck on terrain, lots of server timeouts, graphics bugs, and quests failing to continue or complete. The ground combat is still shockingly bad, and a complete janky pile of crap. But space combat is really interesting, even if I still don't know what's fully happening.
At times when playing it, I was wondering whether to subscribe for a month and then work towards getting a better ship, but overall I don't really think it's worth much more of my time. Also, a lot of the new ships look pretty crap, and not very Trek-like at all. Some seem to be from the future, some from different timelines altogether, and some are from other species that just seem weird mixed in with the classic Federation, Klingon or Romulan ships I'm used to. And I really wouldn't want to spend good money on any of those.

---

Not one to be outdone, the Scoob has also been delving back into the world of MMORPGs. He's even been playing WoW again after many years away from it. As a lot would have to change for me to play that waste of time and money again, and he had no real interest in playing Star Wars or Star Trek again, we needed a new MMO we could both have a bash at so we could play along together.
We decided to go with Tera, a Korean MMO that went free to play a couple of years back, that I had mostly heard good things about.

When I was looking at good race/class combos for this game, a lot of people recommended going for the child-like (and creepy as fuck I might add) elin characters, as most think they are slightly harder to hit in PvP. While we thought it unlikely we would ever do PvP in this game, it was nevertheless in the back of my mind when I made my character. I ended up with a human, as they have some PvP skills that the other races don't have. I also bucked my usual trend and went with a woman instead of a man, just in case being smaller did have some benefit in PvP. And let's face it - I was never going to be an elin.
And so I entered the world as mystic Gaia Light, named after one of my Amazon Blood Bowl players. Scoob created Kharnragnar, a human berserker, mainly because he wanted to swing a massive axe around.

We're quite new at this one, so haven't puzzled it all out yet. There are few things that really annoy us, especially the dual minimaps that do different things, rather than slapping them all on one like in most MMOs. This also contributes to another problem - I find the UI quite cluttered, especially during combat. Things just pop up all over the place, and it's annoying.

Other than that, it seems quite alright so far. And the free-to-play model of this game is insane. It doesn't look like you really have to pay for anything, with subscribers just getting more EXP and reputation, and having it easier to move around the world. Seems like a good deal to me.

So, Scoob and I just got done going through the 2009 game, Trine. To be honest, I'm really not sure what to think of it.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer with some small action elements, in which you play as three heroes who have been brought together by a magical artifact called the "Trine", which you must use to save the kingdom from the undead.

I think we quite enjoyed the game when the platforming was simple and there were plenty of enemies to bash, but far too often the game focused too heavily on its platforming elements and jumping puzzles. The problem was, the game's platforming was weak, as controlling the characters seemed very inconsistent, which made those levels frustrating. Said inconsistency was definitely the biggest issue I had with it, especially the jumping. It just seemed kind of random how far or how high I would jump at any moment, including when jumping off of the thief's grappling hook. If I jumped up to a high ledge and just caught the edge of it, sometimes I would stay on the ledge, and sometimes I would fall straight back off. It was difficult to anticipate exactly what the character would do at those moments.
Also, if hanging from the underside of a ledge on the thief's grappling hook, sometimes I could swing up and land on the ledge, and sometimes I couldn't. It was so weird. Add in the fact that the hook would barely ever shoot out exactly where I was aiming it and you can see why getting around was awkward.

Other problems included weird interactions due to the physics of the game, and several times I got hurt even though I'd got the knight's shield up blocking the attack.

By far the most frustrating level of the game was the last one - a race against the clock to ascend the Old King's tower and re-unite the Trine with two other artifacts in order to save the day. Problem was, with the annoying controls of the game, getting up there before the lava raced up to meet us was a ball-ache. Probably took us 12-15 efforts before Scoob managed to reach the last checkpoint and allow us to fight off a skeleton wave and finish the thing.
Another thing that annoyed us was that after all that we didn't even get to fight a final boss. The game just ends when you get to the top of the tower. Really? That's the thing we were looking forward to the most. To be honest, if the game was more action based we'd have liked it more. Those bits were fun and sometimes chaotic, and were a welcome distraction from all the jumping around.

Oh well.

A while back I looked at the games I had finished in the last year or so, and saw that none of them were games that I had originally played years ago. Sure, there were a couple in the same series as games I played years ago, but when I went through them last year they were new to me.
In fact, the last such game I completed was Space Crusade in October 2014.

That has changed now with the completion of a game that I played a hell of a lot of around a decade ago, in the form of Rome: Total War. Like a lot of RTS games of the late 90s and early 2000s, I had only ever played the multiplayer and skirmishes rather than bother with the campaign.

I never expected it would take this long at all. Wow what a drag.

I played a short campaign at first, as I read you had to play as a Roman faction to unlock the other factions. As I wanted to use Pontus, who were my fave faction back in the day, this was something I needed to do. Problem was, when I finished that campaign, I found out Pontus weren't even a faction that got unlocked anyway, so I had to go ahead and edit some of the game's files so that I could use them.
Sigh.
But nevermind. I finally got into a long campaign as Pontus.

I quite liked it at first, going through some political wranglings with the Seleucids, Armenians and Egyptians, as alliances were formed and broken, with both the Seleucids and Egyptians stabbing me in the back. It fairly quickly got to a point where I immediately assassinated any diplomat that came my way, and went into full ass-kicking mode.
Once my immediate neighbours were defeated, I started the very, very, very long grind towards Rome.

This is where my problems truly started.

Because it takes so long to build up a city, and so long to train a full army, it took forever to get through this thing. I felt pretty much done with the game after taking about 20 towns, but I'd got to claim a total of 50 to be victorious in the entire campaign. How I managed to stick with it I will never know.

The long push across the map was not helped by all the rebellions I had to deal with, which was the one area of the game I think I hated most. Every few turns, one of my previously taken settlements would start rioting and giving me trouble, inevitably turning rebellious which meant I would have to go and take the town all over again. This constant struggle to keep order within my borders when all I wanted to do was expand really slowed me down and pissed me off no end.

The best bits of the game, which are the battles themselves, were also spoiled by the stupidly bad A.I. opponents. Unless they outnumbered me by a large amount, it seemed there was nothing they could do threaten me. Only early in the campaign, where I came up against elephants with nothing yet to fight them with, did I really have to try.

With the campaign map section spoiled by the very long time needed to build armies plus the rebellions, and the battles being spoiled by the bad A.I., I have really not enjoyed completing this game as much as I should have, as it was a staple multiplayer game for me at times in the past.