Today and yesterday
Boy, this game was going to be super important and a long-runner until five seconds after it launched and no one cared.
Pop quiz, folks: who can tell me the five nominees and the winner of the 56th Academy Award for Best Picture? No using Google. These were the five best things to come out in the year of my birth, right?
I’m going to guess that you either failed that test or immediately said “this is stupid” and skipped on to the next line, both of which are completely legitimate things to do. Because if you can’t think of the answer… well, obviously the five would-be best movies of 1983 didn’t really stick in your memory, did they? They might have been important at the time, but they might not have lived up to the test of time.
I’m hard-pressed to tell you the best games of 2014, but I have no problem telling you a bunch of games that are still worth playing today with no regard for release date. And games have come and gone on that list over the years, because the truest test of quality is one you only see in hindsight. They’re what keeps being worthwhile years later, and sometimes it seems almost arbitrary what gets immortalized and what gets forgotten.
Demo Driver 8: Sacraboar
Almost every single screenshot is made up chiefly of empty space. This is not an accident, nor is it to the game’s credit.
If you’ve read the stuff I write here for a while, you know I have a great deal of love for the ambitious game that tries for lofty goals and winds up falling short. Sacraboar, however, is not such a game.
Oh, it wants to be. It wants to be some sort of never-before-seen combination of gameplay styles, mixing capture-the-flag mechanics in with real-time strategy. Never mind that there are probably two dozen mods doing exactly that right now for StarCraft II, this game was built from the bottom up to facilitate that goal! And it turns out that the goal just isn’t all that fun.
I’m not sure whether the weak skeleton of an RTS or a poor implementation of capture-the-flag gameplay came first, but what you wind up with is a game that’s just plain not fun to play. It manages to combine the worst parts of both inspirations, and the net effect is a game which is most entertaining for the squealing noise heard when you capture the eponymous pig.
Telling Story: I’d like to have an argument
I have never talked with anyone about really good in-character arguments that I’ve had in an online game chiefly because I am sure that’s the first step toward sounding like a crazy man.
“Oh, yeah, this argument was great. I was really worked up and angry by the end of it, I really felt like I was actually arguing… what? No, no, I wasn’t really arguing with anyone, I was just pretending to be angry at my friends about things that never happened. And it got me angry in the real world! It was super.”
All joking aside, if you’re invested in the character you’re playing and what’s going on in the game, yes, you’re going to wind up transferring some emotion from the game into the real world. As a result, it’s a tricky place to be. You want arguments in-character to ring true, but you also presumably don’t want to have an actual argument with pretend people in a pretend game that you at least theoretically play to enjoy yourself. So how can you make sure that your in-game arguments are 100% focused on in-game emotions and not real ones?
Challenge Accepted: First-level hell and the late-game cake
All right, maybe some of them were ants and not scorpions. Split the difference.
The start of Fallout 2 is pretty terrible if you want to play a diplomatic sort. There’s a reason given, yes, but it’s still unbelievably frustrating. You’re thrown into the deep end of a pit and you have to fight your way out, and despite what you might want to be true, very few giant scorpions can be talked out of stinging you and ripping you to shreds. It’s sort of a hiccup in the game, since otherwise you’re completely free to just talk your way out of lots of problems and recruit followers to shoot stuff on the rare occasions that “talking” isn’t a viable option.
Ideally, a game start easy and gets harder, and in some cases it tapers off again toward the end. But sometimes part of the game just swings wildly, becoming much worse or much easier without any sort of warning. A first-level hell is exactly what it sounds like, a game wherein the first level isn’t just hard to clear but actively harder than most of what you’re dealing with afterward, because the tools that would allow you to deal with the game aren’t in your hands yet.
More often than not, a lot of this comes about as a result of choice.
Telling Stories: Letting the mechanics speak
The down side of roleplaying in any sort of game with solid mechanics is that the mechanics creep in around the edges. You don’t get complete control over your character concept – once your abilities start tying into mechanics, you have to start parsing what the larger mechanical implications of your choices are. Even if you have a perfect concept, it might either be overpowered or underpowered, it might not be easily possible, and so forth.
This is also the bright side.
Roleplaying forces you to fling your character concept not just against the stories you want to tell but also the realities of the mechanical environment you play within. In fiction, all you need to do is write a story wherein your characters are presented with choices and challenges that they can overcome as appropriate. In roleplaying, all of the ideas about what your character will be run up routinely against the reality of what the game finds acceptable and what the mechanical implications of those choices will be. And that usually serves as a great way to refine your character concepts.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 