Medieval Games

Over the weekend, I got curious and picked up Medieval Games. Before anyone wonders why I would be interested in this game, I have to disclose that it reminded me of my gaming past. It reminded me of an old Apple II game named Chivalry.

Chivalry was a precursor to the modern Mario Party style titles. I don't know if it's the origin of that type of game, but modern party games have adapted its structure of a boardgame where certain spaces cause mini-game events to occur. Just like modern party games, Chivalry's boardgame elements were the worst sort of roll and move bits which curse just about every bad boardgame. The minigames were notable only for being bad, and most were only marginally playable. Yet, I played Chivalry for hours back in the day; mainly because it and Leomonade Stand were the only games I initially had to play on the Apple II and I was easily entertained by anything with movement on the Apple's screen. Chivalry branded itself as an "Educational Game" and was something akin to the old cartoon specials on VHS. It was something to pop into the Apple II which would keep a small child occupied for a few hours.

I bought Medieval Games to remind me of Chivalry, and it did so more than I could have imagined. It's just as broken and unenjoyable.

I'll start with the good. Medieval Games looks OK, for a Wii game. The game's storyline is presented in a children's stand-up book style. The characters and environs of the game are rendered in a simplistic western cartoony style. The characters have some level of stereotypical personality. Nothing stands out, but form follows function, and these graphics perform their function.

Audio is OK. The voice acting is cheesy, but suitably so. It's very much grade school stuff. Neither your standard 3 year old or inebriated frat boy will have a problem understanding anything.

OK, I'm done with the good.

The first bad things I'll explain are the loading times. To say there are loading times in this game is to understate the problem. There are loading times for the loading times. It makes pre-patch Bayonetta look loading time free. To be honest, the individual loads are only about SegaCD level (5 to 7 seconds), which would be somewhat excusable if there was a lot of material to load and the load times were infrequent. They are not. A standard example is something like this. Your turn comes up. You click to load the die to roll. The game loads. You roll the die and move to a mini-game. The game loads. The mini-game story comes up. You click that you're done with the story (you can't skip it). The game loads. The first screen of instructions comes up. You click that you're done reading the first page of instructions (non-skippable). The game loads. The second screen of instructions comes up. You click to continue. The game loads. The third screen of instructions comes up. You click to conintue. The game loads. You FINALLY get to play the mini-game, which takes about the same amount of time or less as the load screens to get to it. To summarize, the loading times are atrocious and unacceptable, expecially in a game this simplistic. This is LITERALLY a game of watching loading screens.

Wanna know how they take that flaw and make it worse? You have to watch the AI take their full turns. Yep, you have to deal with every AI turn as if it were a human player. The AI also has a tendency to leave human players out of games when it can, so you just get to sit there watching the CPU play, and you get to do nothing.

The next on the list of bad stuff is the absolute lack of options. Key among these are the inability to play with fewer than 4 players and the associated inability to adjust the CPU's difficulty. Every game must have 4 players. If there aren't enough human players present, the CPU automatically includes AI participants. This is frustrating for the loading time issues above, but also because the AI players are often supernaturally proficient.

My friend and I found ourselves in an archery competition with the other two AI players. The targeting was about as bad as other Wii games, but we mananged to peg some targets. Then the first AI player came up, and the rest of the competition consisted of the two AI players hitting bullseyes and splitting each others' arrows on the farthest targets on the course with every one of their shots. It was ridiculous because we poor humans didn't have a chance. There were other games were we humans didn't even get a chance to start playing because the AI had already eliminated us.

These problems won't exist when 4 humans are available to play this game, however they really ruined the game for my friend and I. We felt purely like spectators.

Continuing the lack of options, there was no way to set the game to automatically skip the instruction pages. Such an option would eliminate 15-20 seconds of loading screens all by itself! We got sick of seeing the same instruction scenes over and over and over.

What about the game itself? Medieval Games' basic structure is that of a roll and move boardgame. Players take turns rolling a dice and moving around a board. Each game is timed to a certain number of turns. Whoever has the most coins or trophies at the end of the turn count wins the game. There are some items to finesse the game, but they didn't come in useful for us. At this level the game is a typical vapid children's game experience.

Moving down into the gears of the game, most of the resolution mechanics of Medieval Games are handled by various mini-games with a Medieval/Swords & Sorcery feel. There are catapult competitions, archery competions, potion brewing competitions, axe throwing competitions, dueling competitions, and, of course, jousting competitions. All of these are motion controlled by flinging or tilting the Wiimote. I found the minigames to remind me a lot of Chivalry. They were mostly pretty bad. Chivalry had an attitude that any kind of action game would entrance a player. Medieval Games has the same atttitude but tosses motion controls into the mix. It was bad enough that I turned to my friend and actually commented how much I suddenly respected the crappy NES-style minigames in No More Heroes 2. The only mini-games which were kind of fun were the archery competitions involving rolling fruit and the jousting competitions, everything else sucked almost too much to be bearable.

When it all comes down to it, Medieval Games is a time sink. It is designed to waste time. It isn't designed to be entertaining in that time. It's just designed to fill time as garbage might fill a trash can. It is designed to occupy persons who are easily entertained. A small child who had no sense of judgement in regards to videogames might find it entertaining. A group of inebriated people with a pre-existing low IQ might find it diverting. Someone craving a nostalgic Chivalry experience will find the Middle Ages just as shitty as they were in the early 80s.

It's bad. Hop on your warhorse, griffin, dragon, or other trusty mount and ride far, far away.