Demo Driver 8: Rag Doll Kung Fu
I understand that the spastic flailing is part of the intended charm, but that is not the selling point you may believe.
Being first is not special. Or, more accurately, it is special to be the first to do something, but that alone does not somehow entitle you to a life free of critique or feedback. Being first just makes you, well, first. It’s entirely possible to be first and yet still be pretty damn awful. You can probably gather where I’m going with this.
Rag Doll Kung Fu is the first non-Valve game to be offered on Steam, way back in the day. That’s something. It is also… well, it’s a game with an okay premise that wound up stretching pretty thin within seconds, and then it just sort of keeps going. I know that I talk a lot about games that feel like Flash titles stretched out far beyond their breaking point, and this one definitely falls under the same header. It also manages to somehow fail at that, though, which is very much to its discredit.
Still, first!
Telling Stories: Repair tools
So your character got just plain screwed up.
I’m a big advocate of the idea that however bad things might get with a given character, you can accept the imbalance and move on. Like a cat, characters don’t need a great deal of herding. But just like you may have to eventually address the fact that your outdoor cat stinks to high heaven and does need to be washed, eventually you might have to sigh, grit your teeth, and realize that something is rotten in the state of your character. You’re going to need to repair.
Fortunately for you, there are tools in place to help you do just that. Somewhat less fortunately, those tools range in overall utility from being super helpful to being kind of severe. So let’s talk about your tools, the long-term effects of using these tools, and try to provide a framework for deciding which option is right for correcting your particular problem without the usual costs of labor.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 10
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
All right, people, let’s talk about villains.
Redeeming a villain is at once the best and worst thing you can do to them. It’s super tempting, obviously, because when written well a villain is easily one of the most fascinating characters in a story. So now you get one of the most interesting characters in the story as someone the audience can actually cheer for, which is why the temptation arises. Yet a redeemed villain has to be different than their original villainous incarnation, often meaning that they set aside the cool stuff that made them likable in the first place.
Yes, it can be done; Emma Frost was a prime example of taking a villainous character and making her a protagonist with good aims rather than necessarily a hero in her early days (that’s kind of been undone with years of character decay). It just doesn’t happen frequently. I bring all of that up because The After Years is wandering into that territory now, and given the game’s narrative chops and track record up to this point, you will hopefully forgive me if I don’t have the utmost confidence in the game’s ability to do a complex concept justice.
Hard Project: Guitar Hero
I have no regrets about five-starring Through the Fire and the Flames, but I think I was pretty much done afterward.
In 2004, nobody would have predicted that one of the most popular video games would involve standing in front of your television with a fake plastic guitar and pretending to play music. In 2011, the idea seems pretty ridiculous. And yet the Guitar Hero franchise exploded in 2005, enjoyed huge popularity, then violently collapsed and can now be found littering bargain trade-in bins sans guitar. Not that it’s alone in this; the Rock Band franchise dropped in the same timeframe, which for those who don’t remember was the spiritual successor by the same team as the original Guitar Hero.
Fads in gaming are nothing new, but the sheer popularity and the sudden drop-off is worth exploring. It’s an astonishingly quick rise and fall, and it’s not as if the core idea – “pretend to play music” – suddenly became forbidden like whatever the plot was in that Aerosmith video game. But when you think about it, it’s less a matter of surprise that the games didn’t last forever and more a surprise that they were ever a thing at all, because they’re the definition of a hard project.
Demo Driver 8: Running With Rifles
It’s basically like playing with your army men, except you only get one guy and no further control over things.
We are living in the year 2015 of the common era, and folks, I’m as ashamed to write this as you are to read this, but your demo should include a tutorial. You should do the bare minimum necessary to ensure that when someone loads your game they are aware of what in the ever-loving hell they’re doing, because the alternative is both stupid and awful. Precisely one game has ever gotten away with throwing you in sans any tutorial, and that was Worms, which succeeded chiefly on the strength of making progress almost a secondary objective.
Yes, I could write entire articles about my love of Worms. And in this case, the comparison is not entirely unwarranted, as Running With Rifles shares some traits with that venerable squad-based deathmatch. Sadly, it lacks the wit and humor that define that franchise. It also lacks a tutorial, hence my irritation. There’s a lot of stuff going on in Running With Rifles that isn’t really explained, which pushes some of the game’s central conceits out of focus and make it seem less fun than it might be.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 