Killed in a Smiling Accident.

While contemplating stompy robots and silly names, Pardoz mentioned Silent Storm in the comments which rang a vague bell, possibly from a previous wave of UFO: Enemy Unknown nostalgia when the XCom games came out on Steam, so I thought I’d try and track it down.

It proved a bit tricky; Silent Storm doesn’t seem to be available from Good Old Games, Steam or other download services, and the best Amazon & co. could offer were pricey used copies (the expansion, Sentinels, seems more readily available, but I’m guessing it’s not much use without the original game). Fortunately a friend had it kicking around in his collection, so I nabbed it from him and it’s proved to be quite a gem.

Silent Storm is pretty much UFO: Enemy Unknown in World War II, the ten years of development between the two resulting in higher resolution graphics on a fully pan-and-tilt-and-zoom-able map, but the core gameplay will be instantly familiar to XCom veterans: send your little squad of 6 out on turn-based missions to shoot the bad guys, nick their cool guns, and back home for tea and crumpets (or kaffee und kuchen, as you can play either Allies or Axis). The strategic aspects are a bit more straightforward than UFO, eschewing the base building, recruitment, alien interception and research aspects for a pool of 20 soldiers from whom you can pick 6 for each mission, and a more structured story where clues found on missions lead to further tasks. It’s really most splendid, and once I’ve finished it I might well grab Jagged Alliance 2, another turn based game I missed out on at the time, and rather more easily available from GOG and the like.

Champions Online seems to tick so many boxes. There’s the character creator for a start, vast arrays of crazy options you can lose yourself for days in. Then there’s power selection, where you’re not locked into a fixed class but are free to select from a wide array of offensive, defensive and various utility powers, and combine those with stances to fulfil different roles; you’ve also got fantastic travel powers for getting around. The world seems to be a good size with areas like a metropolis teeming with villainy, an irradiated desert, a frozen wasteland, suitably superheroic settings. There’s loot and crafting, fast paced action, public quests, drop-in PvP, so much good stuff, and yet… somehow it seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. Having a lifetime subscription is great for popping in now and again, and if nothing else is really gripping me I’ll bounce in and dispense a bit of justice, but it never really grabs me and keeps me in, a bit like Guild Wars in that respect, games I never really managed to stick at.

It’s hard to put a finger on why it doesn’t quite work for me; I think one aspect might be the genre. Since City of Heroes got me back into comics a while ago I enjoyed the first two volumes of the self-contained Ultimates series, but I couldn’t get into any of the more continuity-heavy mainstream superhero series I tried. I still pick up a few trade paperbacks here and there, but mostly standalone books like DMZ and The Walking Dead that don’t feature superheroes, so the hero genre doesn’t have an especially strong draw and the Champions lore and setting hasn’t particularly grabbed me. There are some nice little vignettes, like the town of Snake Gulch populated by robotic cowboys gone haywire (very Westworld), but overall it seems a bit generic. The forthcoming DC Universe Online at least features iconic characters like Superman and Batman in the rather spectacular recent trailer, and I understand there’s going to be an accompanying comic, though I’m not sure if, or how, they’re going to fit in hordes of player character heroes. Perhaps it might have that indefinable x-factor that Champions doesn’t quite seem to.

Browsing the ever-shrinking PC games section of the local game shop, I found the box for Wings of Prey; I haven’t played a flight sim for years, and got all nostalgic for the days when they were a PC staple. Contributing to the decline of retail games outlets I put the box down, went home to check some reviews, and found a demo on Steam.

Things didn’t start terribly smoothly as it didn’t seem to pick up my joystick automatically (if you know what I mean), and selecting a built-in configuration caused my plane to rapidly plummet to certain doom so I had to set up the controls manually, but after that, in no time at all bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and caught his can in the Bertie.

Wings of Prey has three modes, Arcade, Realistic and Simulation. Not wanting to worry too much about propeller pitch and fuel mixture I’ve only been trying it on Arcade setting, complete with infinite ammo for MOAR DAKKA, and had a rather excellent time tearing through formations of He-111s. Visually it’s absolutely stunning, the planes look fantastic, and take realistic damage as they go; note the holes in the wings and fuselage from the Heinkel gunners:

Heading home after a tough patrol

With plenty of games still to finish in the Steam library I’m not going to rush out and pick it up at full price, but if it comes up in a Steam sale I could well be tempted. Hectic!

In a mildly ironic turn of events I’m playing more games, especially MMOGs, than I have for a while, but finding less to write about. To steal the splendid imagery m’colleague uses, I’m sailing through the doldrums in a tarnished soup tureen (or perhaps on a raft consisting of several soup tureens lashed together, all that could be salvaged after the yacht Giddy Excitement foundered upon the rocks of Harsh Reality, though you have to wonder what all those tureens were doing on board in the first place; the crew must have really been into their soup, super tasty soup.) It’s not really with listlessness or a great sense of dissatisfaction, just a lack of the burning rage or excitement that usually fires the engines of bloggery. It’s also coming up to holiday season and the resultant drop-off in blogging, so to keep things ticking over I thought I’d borrow the idea of the Van Hemlock Podcast’s “What We’re Playing” segment, with an ingenious tweak of the title to cover the theft (though the criminal masterplan may have been slightly undermined by drawing attention to it just then).

To kick things off, a card game. I’ve generally missed out on the whole “German-style” board game movement, but we recently hit upon the cunning idea of relocating irregular pub gatherings to somebody’s house, allowing the hard drinking to be combined with game playing. Before delving right into Carcossonne or a 19-hour Talisman marathon, we beta-tested the concept with Rock Band and Zombie Fluxx, provided by Andy (purveyor of general splendidness including some rather excellent Warhammer miniature photos at Power Armoured Beard, where he’s also got a Fluxx reviewlet.) The basic rules are simple so a bunch of novices to be playing within minutes, but the point of Fluxx is that the basic rules don’t stay basic for very long as players put down cards that extend or replace previous rules and goals. A single game isn’t really enough to draw firm conclusions from, but the mutable rules are certainly interesting (something Tobold touches on from a MMOG perspective as he plays A Tale in the Desert). The changing goals make long-term strategy difficult, as cards that are essential to meet the conditions of one goal can become obstacles to meeting another, and even if the goal does stay the same for a while the action cards swiftly cause best laid schemes to gang aft agley. Playing with eight players as opposed to the suggested maximum of six probably ratcheted that chaos up a couple of notches too, even in the first turn we were drawing and playing various numbers of cards, Larry the zombie was shuffling around the table in different directions, everyone’s items got redistributed, and the goal had changed numerous times. It was rather chaotic, slightly confusing and heaps of fun, a great warm-up game. I’m rather tempted by Monty Python Fluxx now, especially as you can shuffle decks together to seek the Holy Grail during a Zombie Apocalypse.