Demo Driver 8: The Night of the Rabbit (#181)
You said it was night, but this looks pretty much like day to me.
I’ve never felt wholly comfortable mocking point-and-click adventure games. I’m fine sharing my thoughts on the genre as a whole, but the thing is that most of them come across as almost unbearably earnest. They sustain themselves almost wholly on presentation by writing and art. Critiquing the gameplay is an easy shot, and while it’s a worthwhile topic of discussion, it doesn’t change the fact that the game in question is essentially coming to you hat in hand while asking you to be a mildly interactive participant in what comes down to a storytelling session.
At the same time, this is a genre that has some pretty significant problems as a result, so I don’t feel that it’s fair to just leave off mentions of the nature of point-and-click adventure games. They’re not quite as much a non-game experience as the dreaded “Walk Around and Stare” genre, but you’re still stuck clicking about and hoping to have an impact. So you can imagine that I’ve got some conflicted feelings about The Night of the Rabbit right out of the gate.
Demo Driver 8: Jagged Alliance – Back in Action (#65)
Dead in the water.
The best sort of demos make you intrigued about what the game has to offer. The worst get you bored with the concept.
Last week’s candidate was a demo for something that I wouldn’t call good, but it also wasn’t something I’d call bad. I felt like after taking my time, the demo left me with a good sense of what the game would play like, but also left enough blanks in the picture that I didn’t feel I could entirely satisfy any cravings simply through the demo. It was solid, it teased, it made its central hook known.
Jagged Alliance – Back in Action does not have a particularly good demo. In fact, what it has is a stilted tutorial and a single mission that both manage to remind me of why I long considered PC gaming to be far more tedious than it needs to be. And from research, it’s not really the fault of the franchise, but a combination of a developer doing a poor job of adapting a game and the demo doing an even poorer job of making the game seem enjoyable.
Demo Driver 8: Alien Breed 2: Assault (#249)
Stupid waist-high guardrails!
Do you know how many games there are on Steam? A lot. And there are a lot of demos out there, too, so many that you could use them to blot out the sun. Assuming the sun could be blotted out by game demos stored purely on hard drive space. That metaphor got a bit tortured, but I checked; at the time of this writing, there are 407 demos on Steam. So I’m grabbing one at random and playing through the demo, no matter what.
This week, I rolled 249, which set me up with Alien Breed 2: Assault. The title does not exactly inspire visions of breathtaking originality, but a stupid title doesn’t make for a bad game. So after Steam’s usual ridiculously complicated initial setup process, it was time to jump in and see about shooting the heck out of some aliens. No, I hadn’t really looked at the description on the store page, but be fair; with a title like that, there was only one game this was ever going to be.
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 