Playing games the way they're meant not to be played

So it's been a few days since I last posted.

This is solely the fault of T-Mobile, who believe that blogspot is a harmful site full of adult content, violence and sex. I'm yet to see any of it.

Nonetheless, I have still been gaming (I know, I can't believe it either) and still been taking the (slightly more occasional) screenshot.

I recently purchased Mount & Blade: Warband off of the Steam Store. It's the first expansion in the series, and really what I consider Mount & Blade version 1.0, with the original kinda being a half-baked game full of mistakes and errors.

The basic precept of the game is that you're a person dumped into the middle of a bit of dirt, with 6 or 7 factions warring over the space. You become a mercenary commander, gain an army, and take over the land for one of the various factions, get rich through trading and killing armies, raid, plunder and generally be nasty until you win.

That's great.

I got bored of doing that within a few hours.

I don't play fantasy games (even those without magic) to have hundreds of soldiers dying at my command. I play fantasy games because secretly, deep inside, I want to be that hero, who stalks across the world killing monsters and bad guys. It's secretly what every geek wants to do. No, really, trust me.

So, screw the idea of having an army. I'm going to take over the world by myself and take pictures of me doing it.

This is the world map. It's not much to look at. I try not to. It's only purpose is to serve to carry my one man party around the world.

The benefit of playing a one man party is that everyone automatically presumes you suck. This means that guys attack you.

As these looters found out... one man does not equal a sucky fight easily won and lots of loot. They all died. It was a test of the idea. My next step was to find a slightly bigger group of outlaws to take on. Here you can see the grand total of about 20 bandits that I'd been employed to hunt down. There's about half that again elsewhere in the battlefield (there were 27 of them in total). They too, died.

In the nature of curiousity, I decided that my one man party would extort some goods from one of the villages. Heading over there, I ordered my hero to burn the village to the ground and take everything. Understandably, the villagers didn't take too nicely to my doing this, and promptly attacked. 60 villagers later, they were still burnt to the ground.

I should probably point out here, my character isn't cheating in what I'm doing. He is in fact alone, he's not got any friends. He's levelling up quite quickly.

Something about having to hack his way through hundreds of enemies inbetween stops helps with that.


Next time? Karabis takes on everyone within the walls of a castle and single-handedly captures a major town! If the game mechanics allow it....