Demo Driver 8: Alien Rage (#85)
Four unlikable protagonists rolled into one! How can you lose?
The first installment I did of this feature was about Alien Breed 2: Assault. I wouldn’t say I critiqued that game harshly for being generic, but the acknowledgement was there. Yet for all that, the nature of it didn’t make the game bad. It was what it was, and it certainly would win no prizes for originality, but I try hard to point out that there’s a distinct difference between games that scratch an itch I don’t care for (DRIVE ’07, Eschalon Book 1), games that are generic but solid (Alien Breed 2: Assault), and games that are actually not very good.
I bring this up because Alien Rage is sipping from the same well as Alien Breed 2: Assault, but where the former feels kind of bland but eminently playable and solid, Alien Rage is a game that made me lose interest before I had even gotten to shooting anything. I almost wish I had stopped there, because I knew it wasn’t going to get better, but in the words of Macbeth, bear-like I fought the course. It is a game best used as an object lesson about why “generic” doesn’t mean “bad” but it certainly doesn’t mean good either.
Demo Driver 8: Eschalon Book 1 (#224)
“This,” he said, “is going to be one of those games that’s like a roguelike with its nitpicking attention to detail but without its relentless powergaming to take the edge off, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” replied the narrator. “You might want to get a drink.”
The trouble with talking about games that are deliberate throwbacks to an earlier period of gaming is that critiquing them is like critiquing nostalgia. You can tell me time and again that gaming has moved on a great deal since Kirby’s Adventure or Super Metroid, for example, and you’d be entirely correct in saying so, but that’s not going to make me like either game less. Handing someone a title like Eschalon Book 1 is like being asked to tell someone why their fond memories of an earlier age are wrong or confirm that they’re totally right and games suck now.
There’s your salt to munch on whilst I tell you that this is exactly the sort of game that made me reluctant to get into PC gaming for a really long time. Much like there’s a spectrum of racing games you can make, there is a spectrum of different RPGs you can make on a computer, and Eschalon falls firmly on the side of the camp that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get into. The reason being that I was a teenager, I played Dungeons & Dragons, and I would prefer to avoid this attempt to replicate that experience.
Demo Driver 8: Insaniquarium (#403)
You probably pictured halfway to this to begin with, and that’s fair.
PopCap games, by their very nature, are not complex beasts to decipher. You can get a sense of them within a few moments. Oh, sure, they ramp up in complexity a fair bit, offer new wrinkles and the like, but these are not games with deep narrative structure and bewildering turns. These are games in which brightly colored things interact with other brightly colored things in a fashion which is fun enough to play for a few hours without realizing that you’ve been playing for a few hours.
If you are turned off by the idea of bright colors being a fun ride, you may wish to re-examine your life goals, as at some point you appear to have mistaken cynicism for depth.
Insaniquarium is one of PopCap’s earlier offerings, and as such it’s a bit rougher than their later offerings but still offers more or less what you’d expect. Sure, the game is probably best defined as a puzzle game, but it’s more of a fish-management simulator with pooped coins and alien invasions. If you like PopCap games, you’ll like it. You get the idea.
Demo Driver 8: Reaxxion (#348)
If I get that, I can quit my job! Thanks, Reaxxion!
After nearly 40 years, it might be time to stop trying to remake Breakout. I can understand the appeal, totally, but part of what made it work for so long is the fact that the core of the game is so simple. You can only change so much before it starts to become something else altogether.
If it weren’t already obvious from the statements I just made, Reaxxion is a Breakout clone. Like basically every other version of this entire subgenre, Reaxxion clearly wants to be the remake of Breakout to end all further remakes. And, like basically every other thing that tries to be the final remake of any given subgenre, there’s really no way for anything to possibly achieve this goal.
What Reaxxion does achieve, oddly, is to be nearly entirely different from the game it’s emulating. If I had to compare it to anything, it almost feels like some version of a browser game that broke free of its mooring and somehow managed to form a Steam page.
Demo Driver 8: Trine (#212)
The thief, to almost no one’s surprise, is my favorite.
It seems really odd to me that for all of the things that Blizzard Entertainment has done over the years, we’ve never gotten any sort of further development of The Lost Vikings. Maybe not necessarily in the same setting – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Interplay thing has tied up publishing rights or whatever – but it seems like something natural to update, you know? There’s a market for this sort of puzzle game, and as much as Blizzard has earned its reputation over the past few years as an obstinate behemoth, it’d be a good way to remind everyone just how clever the company can be.
Not that the concept hasn’t been explored in other places. I bring all of this up because today’s demo, Trine, explores the same fundamental conceit. To wit: you are placed in control of three different characters with three different sets of abilities, and it’s up to you as the player to guide all three of them through a level. It masquerades as a platform game, but this is a puzzle game, as surely as Portal 2 or Tetris or Braid.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 