Demo Driver 8: Vector
Maybe they’d stop chasing you if you stopped pirouetting all over the place and making them feel like total dickwads.
You are being hunted. Go.
We don’t need more elaboration than that. We’ve seen countless films wherein the big action sequence is as simple as trying to outrun pursuit. There’s no fighting back against your pursuers, no hope of reasoning, only escape or collapse. They are at your heels, they are coming for you. No time to pause, no time to think, no time to do anything but hurtle forward and try to be as quick and clever about your escape as possible.
Vector is meant to tap directly into that urge, the “flight” portion of fight-or-flight, the need to escape however you possibly can and as fast as you possibly can. No frills, no waffling, no nonsense, nothing except the straight pitch of your character from left to right, traversing obstacles, vaulting railings, smashing windows, slowing not a whit until you have outrun your pursuit. And it does pretty well at that, if not perfectly.
Go.
Demo Driver 8: Hard Reset
Robot rocked.
Let’s start this real simple-like: Hard Reset is what Serious Sam wanted to be.
I wasn’t too fond of Serious Sam, partly because my love of old-school FPS games is strongly tempered by the fact that I do not have a love of old-school FPS games. I acknowledge them, sure, and I had fun with Doom and Marathon back in the day, but that love faded fast and can now be found only in a handful of things here and there. But also because it was, well, kind of boring.
By contrast, Hard Reset‘s demo makes it very clear that it understands why these games worked and what parts were vital. It is by no means flawless, and it has things that others have pointed out as being kind of odd hiccups in the whole “relentlessly old-school FPS” layout, but it is clearly hitting the notes it wants to. Heck, I was enjoying it quite a bit, and I’m not even the target audience.
Demo Driver 8: MXGP – The Official Motocross Videogame
Between the helmets and the posture, I can’t help but get the sense that the riders of these bikes are sort of confused by what’s happening. “Heavens, this bike is now airborne! I have made a grave error, whatever shall I do?”
You know, I’ve gotten several demos where I’ve had nearly the same complaints about different games, but this is the third vaguely-European hyper-simulationist sports title I’ve played now. The first was early in this feature, when I took on RACE 07 and found it lacking in pretty much everything I would want in a racing game. The second was Don Bradman Cricket 14, which may very well have had everything I want in a cricket game, I don’t know. It runs slightly afoul of the fact that I don’t really want a cricket game at all, but still.
And here we are again with MXGP – The Official Motocross Videogame, which seems to be much like RACE 07 except that now I’m playing a man on a little bike instead of a man in a car. I guess that the whole simulation of sports thing is a fairly big field for developers there, since this is now officially a trend. If you’re expecting to have a game in which you have fine control over your bike, the movement thereof, and your rider, well, here you go.
Demo Driver 8: Splice
On the one hand, I appreciate that we have arrived at a point wherein a game that would not do well with any plot doesn’t feel the need to engage in even an excuse plot. On the other hand, I’m annoyed that a game can’t be bothered to even give me an excuse plot, so perhaps I’m just messed up.
When I was younger, I had a book report to write about a book that I didn’t particularly care about. The one trick I hat was, well, an array of literary tricks. So I used them. I dove into my big bag of stylistic obfuscation and went nuts, dropping every bit of didactic deception into the requirements as I could. By the end, I had four pages or so of book report consisting of a paragraph of information and a whole lot of flourish.
My teacher gave it back to me with a note that I had written something which served as the ultimate triumph of style over substance. I think Splice would have given it a run for its money, though.
Splice, by the broadest definition, is a puzzle game. By a more practical definition, it’s really a game of stylistic clicking that doesn’t mar the experience with things so superfluous as narrative or feelings or even meaning. It’s a bit of distracted clicking. But it’s very pretty and soothing clicking, which is probably worth something, even so.
Demo Driver 8: DreadOut
Places to run away from really fast, part one of like a million.
I’ve long had massive reservations regarding the whole concept behind Steam’s Greenlight service, but another one popped into my head as I played this game. I’ve seen plenty of games flooded with negative user reviews over trivial technical issues or the usual impotent gamer publisher rage (Ubisoft, EA, Activision, pick your villain of the week), but pretty much any greenlighted game is filled with positive reviews. Because of course it is, because there’s a built-in pile of players who wanted to play the game and now they can. Regardless of whether it’s very good or not.
DreadOut is not actively a bad game from the demo, at least, but neither is it a tremendously good one. It’s got visual character for miles, and it’s the sort of thing that draws you in quickly, but actually playing the game falls victim to all of the tired tropes of survival horror without adding anything of interest besides. Or to put it a bit more bluntly, it’s the sort of game that’s only going to appeal to fans who will buy almost anything that has a horror tag attached to it.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 