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.
Telling Stories: The opening still matters
Endings are the part of a story that tends to get the most press as being complicated, and with good cause. A bad ending makes you wonder why you wasted the time necessary to get to the ending, after all. It’s as true with roleplaying as anywhere else, which is why I’ve had more than a few columns on making satisfying endings in a medium of ongoing roleplaying where nothing ever really ends so much as it sort of concludes.
But what gets skipped over a lot is that the beginning matters, too. Maybe not as much as the conclusion, but in some ways it’s even harder to recover from a slipshod start. A poor ending makes people roll their eyes as they walk away, but a poor start leads to walk-offs before you even get the chance to end.
So how do you make the beginning memorable, concise, and enjoyable? How do you kick off a plot with all of the same panache you’d expect from a conclusion? I’m glad you hypothetically asked.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 12
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The game doesn’t really tell you where your destination will be for the final confrontation, but it seems pretty obvious from the sheer sparsity of options about where to go on the moon’s surface. A quick trip to the Crystal Palace allows the party to walk into the back and access the space beneath the moon’s surface, complete with the power of the crystals guiding everyone or whatever. One suspects that the game was getting a bit bloated by this point.
The Lunar Subterrane is big and sprawling, but not quite so much as the last boss rush in Final Fantasy III; you can actually exit, for one thing, which right away makes the experience very different and gives you more reliable control over the encounters you’re facing. More to the point, you can save before the final boss rather than simply praying for rain. It’s not the apex of the sprawling final dungeons that would become a regular series thing later in the franchise, but this one is big and meant to be tackled in stages.
Hard Project: Robotech
So maybe it’s mostly because I haven’t done a column on enormous robots in a while, what’s the difference?
Harmony Gold, at this point, is a spite house that happens to be incorporated. And pretty much all of its spite is directed toward the license that it’s sitting on for the original Macross, which ties into its pet property of Robotech, which is used for nothing. Because wow, that thing is a mess.
The short (and glossing/inaccurate) version is that back in the 80s, Harmony Gold had gotten its hands on some anime that it wanted to syndicate. Unfortunately, syndication rules required 65 episodes to exist before a series could be distributed, and the three series in question (Macross, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross) didn’t individually hit that mark. So Carl Macek’s job was to sit down and stitch these three separate shows with different characters, premises, and setting into a single continuity. The result was Robotech, which subsequently had more material produced, making it a distinct entity from any of its predecessors.
As fascinating as that whole nonsense is to talk about – and it really is, right down to lots of polarized reactions that never approach the subject of whether or not the new series is any good – that’s not what I’m here to discuss. Because while Harmony Gold is busy not actually making more Robotech material, a video game seems like an easy way to extend the license. Yet at the same time, making one is really hard to do.
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.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 