Challenge Accepted: The entry point
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The biggest problem that’s always faced Star Trek is pretty simple: continuity.
Not to say that it’s unique to Star Trek, but right now I’m watching through Deep Space Nine, and you can really feel the crunch of continuity as the show reaches its conclusion. Season 7 is more or less impossible to navigate or understand if you haven’t been watching since the beginning; nearly every episode is a densely woven net of references, allusions, and call backs to earlier events. It’s a lot of fun to watch, but I’d be completely out of luck if I hadn’t been watching the whole thing from the start.
So what does this have to do with challenge in games? Well, it’s the same sort of problem. The game industry has to keep bringing in new people, and that means that new players need to have a consistent entry point. Which creates a problem when dealing with veteran players, because what’s challenging to someone new to games isn’t going to present much trouble to someone with a long and storied history of gaming. Which brings us, appropriately, to the topic of entry points.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The Final Fantasy Project is a look back over the franchise’s entire history, starting from the beginning and moving up to the most recent game when I finally finish this whole thing. Those of you who have followed my work in various places may remember that I already started this project over the summer, but it sort of fell off the radar between a combination of Final Fantasy XIV and the steady realization that the format I had picked was not actually a good one for what I wanted to do.
So consider this a revival. Not a reboot, though; I’m still pretty happy with what came out of my work over the summer, so the first couple of weeks are going to involve a repost and cleanup of what was written during the initial run. That’ll be compressed as much as possible, but if you really want to spoil yourself, the original versions are out there. So let’s start from the very beginning.
Demo Driver 8: Alien Breed 2: Assault (#249)
Stupid waist-high guardrails!
Do you know how many games there are on Steam? A lot. And there are a lot of demos out there, too, so many that you could use them to blot out the sun. Assuming the sun could be blotted out by game demos stored purely on hard drive space. That metaphor got a bit tortured, but I checked; at the time of this writing, there are 407 demos on Steam. So I’m grabbing one at random and playing through the demo, no matter what.
This week, I rolled 249, which set me up with Alien Breed 2: Assault. The title does not exactly inspire visions of breathtaking originality, but a stupid title doesn’t make for a bad game. So after Steam’s usual ridiculously complicated initial setup process, it was time to jump in and see about shooting the heck out of some aliens. No, I hadn’t really looked at the description on the store page, but be fair; with a title like that, there was only one game this was ever going to be.
Telling Stories: Getting back to roleplaying
Don’t call it a comeback; I’ve been here for years.
Yes, we had a blip last week, but I’ve been writing about roleplaying for the past four years, and I’m not about to stop now. So I’m picking up where I left off with Storyboard, still doing my best to give people a place to read about roleplaying, a weekly place for suggestions, ideas, and guides, and every so often a link hither and yon that leads to an archive trawl which will include readers telling me that I am a monster for doing this. Won’t that be fun?
I really hope you think so.
Now, while I could pick up exactly where I left off (and was initially tempted to do just that), the first installment really does deserve a little more grandeur than that. So let’s talk about getting back into roleplaying when you’ve been out for a long time. Maybe it’s been a while in your game of choice, maybe it’s been a long while period, maybe you roleplayed around a kitchen table years ago but now you’re jumping into roleplaying in an MMO for the first time. Whatever your situation, let’s talk a little bit about getting back in when you’ve been out of the game. Read More…
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 