Demo Driver 8: System Protocol One
Not one of the more interesting layouts, but those are kind of impossible to show in a two-dimensional image.
It’s kind of neat how tower defense games, as a genre, have reached a point where they have two distinct sub-genres as a bare minimum. All of them have the same core elements – enemies come from point A and move to point B, make that as difficult as possible for them – but in some games, the path is already laid out. Your job is to place your towers at the right points for optimum damage, as seen in games like Defender’s Quest (which is excellent). Others ask you to build the path, walling your enemies in and creating the most circuitous possible route through walls of cannon fire.
System Protocol One is of the latter variety. I used to think it was my preferred sort of tower defense game, but time has cooled that particular bit of ardor. I wouldn’t say it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination, and it definitely hits the notes it’s aiming for, but I suspect a good portion of my affection comes down to my usual love of anything involving tower defense. Still, it’s an entertaining enough way to spend some time clicking away, so doesn’t that fulfill its purposes?
Telling Stories: Your flaws weave a tale
Let’s start this off with a trivia question: what’s the difference between Iron Man and Batman, other than their powers?
If you think about it, they’re closer than you might think. Both of them are inheritors of immense fortunes while being brilliant in their own right. They both created weapons to fight against injustice and horrible things – sure, Iron Man built a suit of armor while Batman made himself a weapon, but the only reason Batman doesn’t have an armored exoskeleton is because the writers choose not to go that route. Yet you know the characters are very different in so many ways, despite their similarities.
At the core, it’s because of their respective flaws and weaknesses. For all their similarities, Tony Stark’s weaknesses do not belong to Bruce Wayne and vice versa. It’s sort of a supertype of avoiding cabinet flaws as I discussed two weeks ago, wherein a given flaw is directly related to the sort of problems that a character has and what sort of story the character works within.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
While we’ve already had to ditch all of our metallic equipment (i.e. most of the good equipment we’ve got) just to approach the stupid dungeon, there’s one more hoop to jump through – reaching it. That means a trip way to the north to pick up a chocobo capable of crossing rivers, something that’s only vaguely hinted at by the game. It’s easy to miss the very existence of these chocobo forests, so that doesn’t help matter. And, unfortunately, there’s no way to just bring the airship up to the darn thing…
Anyhow. The net upside is that you have to catch a Black Chocobo, which will allow you to fly over, land in the forest, and then get moving. No idea how we’re getting back, but that’s how these things go. Tellah and Yang are quite confident that this cave shouldn’t pose a problem despite the fact that the other half of the party does, in fact, make use of metallic stuff. Also, there’s the fact that Tellah barely has enough MP to sustain casting for long. Also, Yang is kind of terrible. Neither of them thought this plan out at all.
Hard Project: Half-Life
Defiant!
Half-Life is not one of the most voluminous franchises in existence. It consists of the original game, a smattering of expansions for that game, the sequel, and two-thirds of an episodic follow-up to that sequel. Oh, and a whole lot of talk, which puts me in the mind of paying money for an idea, but so long as there’s no Kickstarter my carefully cultivated rage gene doesn’t get activated by pretentious talk by people who cannot get a video game to launch.
Then again, I may be a little harder on Gaben & co. than they deserve. I’ll snark endlessly at the fact that it has taken seven years without so much as a peep about Half-Life 3, but when you think about it, it’s a hard project to start on. Not because of lack of money or licensing rights, but because the game has some pretty huge shoes to fill, and a whole lot of baggage that’s weight the hypothetical down.
Demo Driver 8: Magic 2014
This is as dramatic as it gets.
Usually, I play a demo all the way through to the end before I make a comment on it. But not this one. I passed the half-hour mark and I was already done, largely because I didn’t need a great deal of introduction to playing a card game that I had already played for several years and have opted out of continuing to play for a variety of reasons.
The easy verdict here is that this is the most recent version of the game, and if you’re looking for a version of Magic: the Gathering that works as close to a box set of the game could possibly work, here is your game. Based on the demo, it provides exactly what it advertises on the tin, which is a faithful digital recreation of the card game as it stood when the game was made, frozen in time and yet with a clean visual interface and implementation of the rules. It manages to hit enough of the genuine game’s notes without being the same game, which is noteworthy. At the same time, it’s also a bit buggy, and it doesn’t exactly do the source material any favors.
You’re probably looking for a bit more, huh?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 