Demo Driver 8: Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
And with this I make it amply clear why I chose to round out the month with this out of all my possible “present” games.
In order to talk about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, I kind of feel like I have to talk about Red Faction: Armageddon, also known as one of the games I got from the Humble THQ Bundle. More specifically, one of the games I didn’t care about but just got along with the titles I did care about, most of which were well worth the price of admission and the others of which are still sitting and waiting for me to give them their due.
Red Faction: Armageddon is a pretty generic third-person shooter. Its central gimmick barely gets to come into play after the early stages, which is a shame if you enjoy tearing apart structures (and you naturally should). None of its other gimmicks get the space to really explore themselves, leaving you with a coverless shooter that’s never terrible but never quite manages to climb up to excitement either. It’s just a bland progression of shooting setpieces that never vary.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is similar in many ways, with a manheap protagonist unable to take cover facing waves of bug-things and masked enemies. The difference, though, is that this one was pretty fun.
Demo Driver 8: Gunpoint
The Real Folk Blues.
Gunpoint is probably closer to a stealth game than a puzzle game, because it reminds me a lot of Mark of the Ninja. Despite the fact that it really doesn’t play like Mark of the Ninja at all.
According to its store page, Gunpoint is a stealth puzzler, but the emphasis is more on the former than the latter. I say this because stealth games are by definition puzzle games; you’re trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B without being caught, shot, or otherwise stopped. What makes for a particularly good stealth game is when the game gives you various tools to accomplish those central objectives, allowing you to go through the stages however you want.
It’s rare for a game to explicitly give you more puzzle-like control over the stage configuration, though, which makes up Gunpoint‘s central gimmick. And it’s a gimmick that works well, no more or less realistic than Watch_Dogs allowing you to hack everything with bizarre results but far more subtle and well-paced in how it plays out. Like Mark of the Ninja, you are a predator in the shadows, but instead of lurking in corners and executing elegant maneuvers, you’re a ghost in the machine.
Demo Driver 8: Lumines
Elegant and simple sometimes leaves a distressing amount of space wherein you’d like to say something without much to say.
I am not very good at Lumines. I would like to be, certainly, but I’m not. And I don’t think I quite have the patience to get good at it, probably because some stupid part of my monkey brain looks at the amount of time I’d need to unlearn my stupid habits to get good and asks if I could be spending this time on killing enemies and earning experience in something else. But that’s not a failing of the game.
Lumines is a port of one of the early titles on the PSP, and despite the airs it puts on it’s a pure puzzler. Like any good pure puzzle, it’s remarkably simple in its execution, allowing nearly all of the complications to emerge purely through game states. It looks a lot like Tetris at a glance, but the demo makes it clear that trying to play it like Tetris will just result in you not being very good at the game and getting a game over screen repeatedly.
Guess who keeps doing that despite himself?
Demo Driver 8: Satazius
Considerate enemy armadas build ships that are designed to be dangerous from exactly one angle and utterly non-threatening in every other configuration.
It’s weird to see a game that’s specifically targeting your own nostalgia when, by and large, you steer clear of gaming nostalgia. I’ve been playing video games for a long portion of my life, and I know that I’m not immune to the siren song of old loves, but I like to think I’m also aware of the fact that the past of video games is filled with missteps, bad decisions, and stuff that made sense at the time but not now. My affection for the past is rarely within sight to be targeted at all.
And then, of course, I find a game that is a direct throwback to one of my longstanding loves, a shoot-’em-up in the mold of Gradius, Darius, and R-Type. While the master genre never died, I’ve noted in the past that it’s tapered off into a steady stream of bullet hell shooters, which I have less affection for. Satazius, by contrast, feels very much like a familiar variant on old tropes, so much so that I had to double-check that it isn’t a remake of something. They found my one weakness.
Demo Driver 8: BeatBlasters III
I am relatively sure that this is the place where Kirby bosses are born.
Sometimes games wind up with poor scores simply because no one can really categorize them, even if they want to. BeatBlasters III is kind of terrible at basically everything it appears to be, and it’s only when you start to get a feel for what it actually is that the game goes from being “bad” to “fun.” Although I freely admit that not everyone is going to feel even remotely the same way as I do about the title.
See, BeatBlasters III is not a platform game, although at a glance it sure looks like one. There are platforms and you move between them, but that is hardly the point. Nor is it a rhythm game, although there is a rhythm element to the game. It’s some very odd combination of both, and yet it manages to be neither, or at least not with any skill. It’s a game with poor play control that’s part of the experience while at the same time being a game with perfect control for creating exactly the right sort of tension.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 