Demo Driver 8: Vector
Maybe they’d stop chasing you if you stopped pirouetting all over the place and making them feel like total dickwads.
You are being hunted. Go.
We don’t need more elaboration than that. We’ve seen countless films wherein the big action sequence is as simple as trying to outrun pursuit. There’s no fighting back against your pursuers, no hope of reasoning, only escape or collapse. They are at your heels, they are coming for you. No time to pause, no time to think, no time to do anything but hurtle forward and try to be as quick and clever about your escape as possible.
Vector is meant to tap directly into that urge, the “flight” portion of fight-or-flight, the need to escape however you possibly can and as fast as you possibly can. No frills, no waffling, no nonsense, nothing except the straight pitch of your character from left to right, traversing obstacles, vaulting railings, smashing windows, slowing not a whit until you have outrun your pursuit. And it does pretty well at that, if not perfectly.
Go.
The dark heart of Final Fantasy XI
You know it doesn’t want you there, but you can’t help but feel a stirring of nostalgia.
When Final Fantasy XI launched in America, it received a pretty shining reception, which should say a lot about MMOs at the time. This release was a port of a game programmed for a very specific Playstation 2 peripheral, released long enough after its initial launch that a significant portion of the existing Japanese playerbase viewed the incoming American players in much the same way that you would view an army of roaches assembling just outside of your front door. The resultant culture clash and sheer ambiguity of the way the game functioned led to problems that Square-Enix is still pretending to clean up, not to mention that it included PlayOnline, a service so magnificently useless that it makes Games for Windows LIVE seem almost fashionable.
It was problematic, is my point. And that isn’t even getting to the actual game, which I’ve previously said is sort of like some bizarre outgrowth of Stockholm Syndrome, constantly assaulting you for the crime of trying to play it even while you find yourself aware of its deep-seated loathing and contempt for players. And yet the game did well. It was a success. It’s still relatively successful now, more than a decade out from its launch, warts and all.
Like any game, there are lessons to be learned here.
Telling Stories: Going to the chapel, et cetera
Ah, marriage! That binding of kindred spirits, that most loving of all acts, that quick and easy way to cause plenty of drama. And not just via the usual routes of drama where in-character romance throws all sorts of wrinkles at you; that is actually secondary to this particular flavor of dramatic potential.
Unfortunately, most roleplaying weddings really do just treat weddings as the endpoint of a romantic relationship, which is fine as far as it goes. I’ve used it for that purpose, and in real life I am relatively certain my readers here do not want to hear yet again how much I love my wife. (A lot.) Marriage is certainly useful for that.
But there are so many other ways to get drama out of weddings. Many ways which can not even require romantic relationships, or actively work against the in-character relationships you already have. So let’s talk a little bit about how you can make good use of weddings in roleplaying and what marriages can provide for drama.
Challenge Accepted: Breaking out of the challenge box
The game is substantially helped by its fair assortment of hellmouths in need of closing despite everything.
Playing The Secret World was in many ways both satisfying and infuriating. On the one hand, here’s an MMO that genuinely wanted its players to be engaged with puzzles beyond simply clicking on the right answer from a short and obvious list. That’s kind of awesome. On the other hand, the actual puzzles it had were highly reliant upon you scanning through fake websites, assembling clues very vaguely hidden in context, and then producing a synthesized answer. Or, as was far more often the case, looking up the solution online and skipping that whole tedious and unenjoyable aspect.
Still, there’s something to be said for the fact that the game did earnestly try to provide a challenge for its players that stretched beyond the norm. It was trying to challenge players beyond the usual sides of gameplay (which ties into that bit I outlined near the start of this feature) or simple common-knowledge trivia, asking players to flex a different skillset. They’re challenges that rely partly on things you’re not usually asked to do and partly upon the fact that you’re taught there’s a certain way video games play.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV -Interlude-, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So let’s tell the story of why I didn’t play the Final Fantasy IV remake on the DS, and the convoluted story that is the sequel to the original. Because by my own rules, it could be argued that the remake is closer to being the default for Final Fantasy IV now, especially as that’s what’s up on Steam at the moment.
See, when Final Fantasy IV was being remade, the developers had a clever idea. If the players wanted more story, why not give it to them? Why not have a companion piece produced showing what happened after the events of the main story, showing the next generation of characters many years down the road?
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years started life on mobile phones, then as a series of downloadable installments. On the PSP, the whole thing was packaged into a single game, which essentially took the remake version that was released for the Gameboy Advance (i.e. minus the improvements in the DS release) and added a new feature. Which brings us to today’s piece, a bonus piece of content between Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, bridging our way to a sequel that I’m pretty sure no one needed.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 