Hard Project: Lord of the Rings
On the plus side, it’s doubtlessly better than the most recent Assassin’s Creed game and its blatant disregard for being even baseline playable.
I’m going to be totally honest here and say that as much as it’s supposedly a part of the subculture, I’ve never much cared for Lord of the Rings. This isn’t a case like Star Wars, where I think the thing as a whole is undeserving of praise; J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have been a fantastic guy, he wrote one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels (The Hobbit), and he did sort of kick of an entire genre. It’s not his fault that later fantasy writers have resorted to making thin pastiches of his original work, and while it is his fault that he found heroic sagas way more interesting than I do, that’s… not really a “fault” thing.
But it’s really, really difficult to make a game set in that universe, despite its popularity. We’ve gotten a lot of magnificent games in the universe already, sure, but this is a unique project insofar as every successful one makes each subsequent one that much harder. We should be thankful for what we have so far, but it’s getting harder to fit in more stuff.
Challenge Accepted: First-level hell and the late-game cake
All right, maybe some of them were ants and not scorpions. Split the difference.
The start of Fallout 2 is pretty terrible if you want to play a diplomatic sort. There’s a reason given, yes, but it’s still unbelievably frustrating. You’re thrown into the deep end of a pit and you have to fight your way out, and despite what you might want to be true, very few giant scorpions can be talked out of stinging you and ripping you to shreds. It’s sort of a hiccup in the game, since otherwise you’re completely free to just talk your way out of lots of problems and recruit followers to shoot stuff on the rare occasions that “talking” isn’t a viable option.
Ideally, a game start easy and gets harder, and in some cases it tapers off again toward the end. But sometimes part of the game just swings wildly, becoming much worse or much easier without any sort of warning. A first-level hell is exactly what it sounds like, a game wherein the first level isn’t just hard to clear but actively harder than most of what you’re dealing with afterward, because the tools that would allow you to deal with the game aren’t in your hands yet.
More often than not, a lot of this comes about as a result of choice.
It’s not for you, unless it is
This was most definitely for me. It was just terrible at it.
I am as fond of anyone as saying that maybe something isn’t necessarily for you. Which is a great message to internalize until something is for you and it still blows.
The problem with the idea of “it’s not for you” is that it can easily becomes some sort of precautionary principle that shields a game or a book or a movie or whatever from any top-level criticism. If you think that the Game of Thrones series is awash in unveiled misogyny and way too many gratuitous bare breasts, well, it’s not for you. On the flip side, you could also be complaining that it’s a fantasy piece with a lot of swearing and no clear heroes or villains, which… kind of does merit the “not for you” defense.
Point being, the whole thing is a fuzzy area. But there are a few pretty firm signs that someone is complaining about something that isn’t for them or something that is, in fact for them and just not doing a very good job of it.
Demo Driver 8: Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013
Will this be a game of stalking the stalkers, hunting the hunters, being at once the victim and the predator?
I generally like animals more than people, because even the most unpleasant animals I’ve known have never been pointlessly insulting or cruel. Thus, I’ve always held on to a great deal of disdain for this particular game franchise – the idea that you would have a game solely devoted to killing animals in a hunting-but-not-really environment just seemed like behavior not worth encouraging. If there was a game franchise devoted to injecting yourself with a whole lot of heroin, I wouldn’t exactly be on board with that, either.
But when I rolled this one up, I decided to keep an open mind. I kill lots of animals in video games, after all, and maybe – just maybe – these games are actually awesome. Maybe they manage to have a complex and realistic simulation of hunting without ever killing an actual animal. Perhaps these are games for people who love the thrill of the hunt but would never want to harm a living creature. It’s a long shot, sure, but it is possible that I would start playing and realize this franchise was better than I had given it credit for all along, with complex simulations of bullet physics and the effects you could have on your prey.
Killing the six-fingered man
They are not what you’re afraid of. But they’ll do.
My favorite story about The Princess Bride is Mandy Patinkin talking about Inigo’s moment of triumph. Because I’ve totally been there.
Patinkin’s story, in brief, is that his father had recently died after a long struggle with cancer. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do in a situation like that, obviously; you love your family member and try to give them strength until the end. But when he was filming Inigo’s confrontation with Rugen, suddenly he didn’t have an abstract concept to wrestle with. Here he was, in character, taking out the man responsible for killing his father. He’s said that it was a little bit like being able to avenge his father.
I know how that feels. Sure, I lost my father to alcoholism, not cancer, and I wasn’t in a movie that allowed me to externalize all of that. But I had my video games, and in places, that was enough. Hell, that’s half of the point of video games, to deal with problems that never get a truly satisfying conclusion any other way.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 