Challenge Accepted: What you’re wading into
If it were just this, it would admittedly be a little boring. it would also be consistent.
Can we talk about Frog Fractions? I want to talk about Frog Fractions.
If you haven’t played Frog Fractions, that’s easily rectified – it’s free right here. Aside from absurd humor, the developer’s stated goal for the game was to get back to a time before players knew everything about a game, to get back a sense of wonder and surprise when things keep changing on you as you play the game. It’s not really a spoiler to say that the basic version of the game that you start with isn’t what you end up playing when all is said and done (hint: the dragon can go down, too).
Don’t get me wrong, I think Frog Fractions is a great little piece of art. But as a pure game, it sort of comes down to a series of brain farts. It surprises you with its gameplay, yes, but that’s because it doesn’t deliver anything close to what it promised to on the tin, and the real challenge is figuring out what random direction to head in next. So how do you interpret the challenge in a game where the whole schtick is changing what you’re actually doing?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Final Fantasy III is why this project is what it is.
We’re now entirely out of the realm of repeats from stuff I’ve written before; everything going down in these columns is totally live, so I’m not yet sure how long we’ll be exploring the world of whatever-planet-this-game-takes-place-upon. But we’re doing so on the note of exploring a game that had, easily, the most convoluted trip across the waters of any title in the Final Fantasy franchise. Which is a little weird when you consider that it more or less finished the foundational work started by Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II.
See, Final Fantasy III never came out in America. Sure, Final Fantasy II took a long time to come over in the form of Final Fantasy Origins, but that version of the game was a strict graphical update and the mechanics were identical. The original form of Final Fantasy III, however, has never been released – and at this point, odds are low that it ever will be, because the remake sort of has two sequels and is the general port of call. I told you this was convoluted.
Demo Driver 8: Alien Rage (#85)
Four unlikable protagonists rolled into one! How can you lose?
The first installment I did of this feature was about Alien Breed 2: Assault. I wouldn’t say I critiqued that game harshly for being generic, but the acknowledgement was there. Yet for all that, the nature of it didn’t make the game bad. It was what it was, and it certainly would win no prizes for originality, but I try hard to point out that there’s a distinct difference between games that scratch an itch I don’t care for (DRIVE ’07, Eschalon Book 1), games that are generic but solid (Alien Breed 2: Assault), and games that are actually not very good.
I bring this up because Alien Rage is sipping from the same well as Alien Breed 2: Assault, but where the former feels kind of bland but eminently playable and solid, Alien Rage is a game that made me lose interest before I had even gotten to shooting anything. I almost wish I had stopped there, because I knew it wasn’t going to get better, but in the words of Macbeth, bear-like I fought the course. It is a game best used as an object lesson about why “generic” doesn’t mean “bad” but it certainly doesn’t mean good either.
Telling Stories: Adult themes and porn
Let’s do something that I couldn’t really do back when I was writing Storyboard; let’s talk about sex.
I’ve touched on the subject before, but only broadly. It’s hard not to. But it’s also the elephant in the room, something that’s hard to talk about without it seeming as if that’s all you want to talk about. Thanks to the people who use ERP as a free license to be as screamingly creepy as they could never be in the real world, no one wants to talk about it, because who in the world wants to be associated with that?
But it’s part of the territory. Hell, it’s part of the community, something that it’s more than likely you’ve worked around even if you didn’t know it before. So let’s talk about it, because it’s important and relevant, moreso than the roleplaying community as a whole likes to acknowledge. Despite rumors, being involved in ERP does not automatically mean you are a supercreep, nor is it an activity solely reserved for people using it as a surrogate relationship. Heck, you’ve quite possibly brushed up against it yourself.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 