I run a YouTube channel over at https://youtube.com/r4nneko where I post videos of the games I play. In general I try to have new lets play posts up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Sometimes I write about other things too.
With our distraction set up it is time to make our move against our well secured foe. But before we really get at Karajan we have to take out his lieutenant Kelly, the man who personally lead the attack on Mark's ninja village.
I quite like that Kelly is a puzzle boss, you can't straight up fight him, you can't even stealth kill him without disabling him first. It felt good to drop the light on him and I am actually glad there isn't an option to let him live, the entire context of the game is that you are a ninja and complete pacifism doesn't make sense here. A stealthy assassin that only goes after their target and key figures in their power structure is definitely a trope that you can play you instead.
Much like the previous episode, this level felt a bit like a bait and switch, I anticipated setting the building alight to be more like breaking the transformer in an earlier level, a minor objective on the way to a bigger goal, instead it is literally the entire purpose of this level.
My favourite scene is one I could never have set up deliberately at the time, guards have two possible responses when they find a body, they can be calm and raise the alarm or they can panic, stumble backwards and fire into the dark. Honestly not sure how I triggered the latter response here, I can do so more reliably now, but mostly by dropping corpses into the light or other ways making the discovery of the body more... interesting.
It was amazingly satisfying to do here it was a completely different way to clear the room and I felt like an awesome deadly assassin striking from the dark in a completely different way compared to ghosting the level made me feel in episode 3.
How much violence you want to commit in Mark of the Ninja is pretty much up to you, so far there is no one you actually have to kill, in fact you can if you want try to sneak past everyone. Seemed like a fun time so I tried it here and it worked pretty well for me. In fact I found it a little bit faster since my priority was getting past guards without being spotted rather than killing every last one of them via stealth kills.
Interestingly enough you actually forgo honour if you try this route, a lot of the seals in this game are based around enemy kills. I guess you are a ninja after all, you are meant to be an assassin not a just a thief or a spy.
Later on you unlock costumes which let you tailor your play a bit more based on what you enjoy, but I will leave off talking more about it until later.
One of the things that caught me off guard was how long each individual level takes in Mark of the Ninja and upon reflection I think I have worked out why. Each set of levels marks a single mission and each level merely a stage of a given mission. The tutorial is an exception in how self contained it is.
As a result each level sets up it's own goal near the start which you achieve during it, it is a little bit more narratively confusing here because as the first level of a set, it is both setting up the overall mission as well as the goal for the level itself which is why I was surprised achieving what I had thought of as a subgoal took so long.
Maybe if there had been more separation between the mission set up and the level set up I would have ended up less confused?
On a narrative note we learn this level that gaining The Mark is both a great honour but also a death sentence, it is the kind of thing that is only used in a time of great need. The question is why do I start the game with the Mark then? What actually kicked this whole thing off? The raid against the village was pretty clearly in response to something. But I don't yet know why.
Time to kick off another Let's Play series. Mark of the Ninja has been sitting in my backlog for quite a while and I am not entirely sure why. It has a great reputation and involves sneaking around as a ninja which is definitely a thing I am in favour of in games.
Admittedly the only time I went to play Mark of the Ninja prior to this LP I did fall afoul of a minor issue I find in a lot of game, the assumption that just because a controller is plugged in I want to use it. If you have a controller plugged in it will only give you controller prompts and I had quite forgotten about having one plugged in at the time so it was extra frustrating to get the wrong inputs suggested. I really wish more games would move between controller and keyboard inputs smoothly, where the prompts are based on the most recently used input device rather than just what is plugged in.
This episode covers the tutorial level, which introduces most of the basics the game uses, light/dark, vents, sound and stealth kills and wall climbing. It does a nice job introducing them to you one step at a time building towards Mark being a fully capable ninja by the end.
Shortly after the Gambits expansion for Star Realms was released Jarenth and I decided it was a great excuse to record another episode of the Star Realms Diaries. Unfortunately various delays meant this episode wasn't released in quite as close to the expansion release than I would have liked, and this blog post is of course even later, but life goes on.
I really like the changes brought in via Gambits. I had played enough games that the new variation in the card pool was very welcome and the new emphasis on bases has really shifted how often I purchase them. Previously I had a very ship heavy approach to my strategy and now I find myself really emphasizing bases, using them to shield myself from enemy attacks as well as triggering the new cycle of bases that trigger on bases being played.
The new gambit cards are definitely a bit more of a mixed bag, I find them most powerful when you can use them to grab an early game advantage ideally by grabbing a powerful card in the first couple of turns. But generally results in me being disappointed when I end up with some of the gambit cards that simply aren't suited to that kind of play. Some of them are definitely weaker than others and I never feel happy to have received them.
This was a fun game and it is one I am still regularly playing with friends, in general I have about 7 games running at any one time if you want to play me just send a challenge to Ranneko.
With this we finish off Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. The ghosts in the final chapter are a very strange addition, really pushing Silas over the edge into madness. He seems to have gotten better by the time of the framing narrative but who knows what would push him back over.
I had a great time with Gunslinger and really wish there was more information available on how and why it was made. I definitely think it was stronger for its framing narrative and its willingness to strip things back and present a mechanically satisfying short western themed shooter.
As a thought experiment if they had gone for a more standard approach I think this is roughly the structure I would predict:
1. Riding with Silas's brothers, maybe dealing with some kind of ambush. (NB Need horse riding or justification for no horses)
Finish with reaching a town, cue cut scene with gambling and wild bunch, end with hanging
2. Silas trekking back to town and taking off after his brothers killers
At this point the exact ordering would be a bit trickier, but definitely you would mix in going after the wild bunch with having various regular bounty hunting style of levels.
Not sure you could pull of having a barkeep Bob with this set up, you would need to justify a big action scene like in the second last level and Bob as the barkeep loses a lot of impact without the framing narrative. So maybe you actually have Bob be in that final graveyard fight, perhaps finish with a deliberate double kill so Silas dies fulfilling his revenge.
