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.
Telling Stories: I’m not calling you a liar
If you’ve never played Dragon Age II, you missed out on some great lying. The whole story is told with the framing device of Varric Tethras being interrogated, and his interrogator knows full well that Varric is a liar. What she has to do is sort out which parts are outright lies, which parts are exaggerations, and which bits are the truth.
This, I think, is the goal of pretty much everyone who roleplays a duplicitous character. And it’s hard to get to that point, because you need to be a liar who’s just trustworthy enough that no one knows where the lies start and the truth begins. It’s forever a fuzzy line, and while no one can quite trust your character they also can’t discard the possibility…
It’s hard to reach that point, though. Much more often, you just wind up with a character who no one trusts and quite possibly isn’t a whole lot of fun to play. So how do you make a better liar? How do you make a character where everyone knows they’re lying, but everyone still wants to hear what they have to say?
Challenge Accepted: The exploit experience
Every inch, every move, every frame can matter.
There are two words that are basically interchangeable when dealing with games: “exploit” and “trick.”
Oh, sure, they’ve got different connotations, but they both boil down to the same thing. There is a spot in this boss room where the boss will never hit but you can keep attacking him. This merchant allows you to resell experience potions as long as you don’t leave the shop interface, but you still gain all of the experience as soon as they enter your inventory. Pause the game on these bosses once an attack hits and the game will keep registering the attack as hitting, so you can unpause in a minute and win.
Pretty much none of these things are intended design elements of a game. They’re broken. Yet they’re also a part of the game, sometimes in a way that can’t be patched out. So why do we call some of them exploits and some of them tricks? How do you factor in these elements of the game that are broken just by kicking the tires?
Demo Driver 8: Gas Guzzlers Extreme
This game really has nothing to do with gas or cars that guzzle it, despite the title.
The last time I talked about racing games, I made it very clear that there’s a specific sort of racing game that I enjoy. While nothing has ever come close to matching the sheer brilliance of Split/Second and likely never will, I think that’s a better point to aim for than a game than strict simulation. Reality already exists, but in a game you can actually have a race in which cars shoot one another and explode with a meaty feel and never worry about the real consequences something like that would entail.
Gas Guzzlers Extreme seems to agree with me. It is definitely into the camp of unreal racing, with cars happily mounting weapons as they drive around and open fire at one another. And it does that pretty well. But I find myself playing it and feeling as if perhaps it took that a bit too far, turning the game into less a matter of cars racing and shooting and more into a match of tanks without turrets.
Telling Stories: Don’t be so hard on your character
Don’t be hard on your roleplaying characters.
I don’t mean this in the sense that you should give them all whatever they want and make their lives uninterrupted parades of joy, because that shit is boring. No one wants that. Your characters should constantly be facing hardship, struggling, getting knocked down and getting up again. In that sense, you should be brutal to your characters, relentlessly hard on them, unceasingly on-point about what they’re doing right or wrong.
No, what I mean is that you shouldn’t be so hard on the character you made. And yourself, by extension. Don’t berate yourself because your character isn’t as good as they could be, even if your original concept was as gut-shatteringly stupid as “Goku but in World of Warcraft.” Don’t beat yourself up over poor early roleplaying or changing your character over time or having to toss out some retcons here and there or any of the above.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 