Hard Project: Half-Life
Defiant!
Half-Life is not one of the most voluminous franchises in existence. It consists of the original game, a smattering of expansions for that game, the sequel, and two-thirds of an episodic follow-up to that sequel. Oh, and a whole lot of talk, which puts me in the mind of paying money for an idea, but so long as there’s no Kickstarter my carefully cultivated rage gene doesn’t get activated by pretentious talk by people who cannot get a video game to launch.
Then again, I may be a little harder on Gaben & co. than they deserve. I’ll snark endlessly at the fact that it has taken seven years without so much as a peep about Half-Life 3, but when you think about it, it’s a hard project to start on. Not because of lack of money or licensing rights, but because the game has some pretty huge shoes to fill, and a whole lot of baggage that’s weight the hypothetical down.
DmC and the crossroad
Simultaneously a terrible, bland, generic protagonist and a protagonist of surprising depth and clarity.
DmC: Devil May Cry is a game trying to be two things at once. If I thought it was intentional, it’d be brilliant.
It’s a game that wants to criticize the young male power fantasy and the utter silly emptiness of it while at the same time reveling in the trappings. It wants to be an action film, it wants to be a drama of a war between demonic forces. It wants to create a strong and self-sufficient female lead while at the same time making her a damsel in distress for the protagonist to rescue. It wants maturity and then revels in exploitation, it wants depth and shallowness at once, it wants to be taken seriously and yet has a solid minute of characters yelling obscenities at one another louder and louder.
To say that it’s kind of all over the place even without touching upon the gameplay elements would be understating the matter. And if there’s a game that more perfectly encapsulates the state of gaming and gamer culture at the moment, I certainly can’t think of it.
Demo Driver 8: Don Bradman Cricket 14 (#126)
Cricket, the last great mystery of our age.
Ladies and gentlemen, when I rolled this game, I knew I was in for a treat right from the beginning.
I do not know much of anything about cricket. I know that it is a game that is enjoyed in the UK and several points directly related, but if asked at gunpoint to name three distinct positions in cricket I would be reduced to vague guessing and prayer. I know absolutely nothing about the rules of the game. And if that weren’t enough reason to be smiling about this game, there’s the simple fact that it also requires a controller, thereby suggesting a level of precision and expectations for play that I had no way of living up to.
So why did I know I was in for a treat? Because either I would be in for an unexpected blast or I’d be reduced to playing a Very Serious Sports Game as something between Grand Theft Auto and NBA Jam due to total unfamiliarity. I can’t say it’ll provide a good evaluation of the game compared to other cricket titles, but you know, I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride there.
Keep the lights on
The light of the Crystal, great, but can we talk a little more about the light of the server’s power indicator?
When Final Fantasy IX first released, it had a whole companion website, PlayOnline. The site was an in-depth interactive walkthrough for the entire game, filled with database information, all the stuff you could possibly want from a site devoted to a single game. The site was also designed to work with people who had bought the strategy guide, which tied into parts of the website wherein players could enter codes and see additional tips and tricks about a given area of the game.
That was dumb all by itself. But it makes the owners of the strategy guide look even more silly now, because that walkthrough site is gone. It doesn’t exist any more. The URL is now devoted to Final Fantasy XI, after Square’s grand ideas about that service’s functionality fell through.
You might say that it’s irrelevant, and it certainly is. But it speaks to an issue with a lot of games that were launching around the same time that the century turned, and one of the features that gaming is still struggling to deal with. Everyone knows, of course, that online functionality is important. It’s also not free, and the graveyards are littered with the bones of functions that got torn away.
Timing your purchase
Re-buy these games, only in the exclusive versions that we didn’t give you the option to buy before and that only exist because so many people bought the original version!
Video games are the only product I can think of that make when you buy as important as how you buy. Sometimes even massively so.
In the earliest days, of course, there was no difference whatsoever. You bought the game when it was on the shelves, just like other stuff. Considering the time, you were walking over to the shelves across a field of shag carpeting while proclaiming loudly to everyone in earshot that your current fashion statement wouldn’t make you look like an argument against the concept of clothes in thirty years, but it was 1978. You could hardly be held responsible for that.
Eventually, some bright spark had an idea. I’m going to assume it was a lady named Judy Gamespot. She figured there was no reason not to just sell the games before they came out if you already knew they were coming out. Other industries had been doing it, it was no great stunt to say that you wanted to buy the next issue of X-Men before it was actually out. Why not let consumers do the same with games if you already know they’re coming out?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 