Demo Driver 8: MXGP – The Official Motocross Videogame
Between the helmets and the posture, I can’t help but get the sense that the riders of these bikes are sort of confused by what’s happening. “Heavens, this bike is now airborne! I have made a grave error, whatever shall I do?”
You know, I’ve gotten several demos where I’ve had nearly the same complaints about different games, but this is the third vaguely-European hyper-simulationist sports title I’ve played now. The first was early in this feature, when I took on RACE 07 and found it lacking in pretty much everything I would want in a racing game. The second was Don Bradman Cricket 14, which may very well have had everything I want in a cricket game, I don’t know. It runs slightly afoul of the fact that I don’t really want a cricket game at all, but still.
And here we are again with MXGP – The Official Motocross Videogame, which seems to be much like RACE 07 except that now I’m playing a man on a little bike instead of a man in a car. I guess that the whole simulation of sports thing is a fairly big field for developers there, since this is now officially a trend. If you’re expecting to have a game in which you have fine control over your bike, the movement thereof, and your rider, well, here you go.
Telling Stories: Three beats
Raymond Chandler had a rule which is appropriately called Chandler’s Law. When a writer has forced himself into a corner, have a man burst through the door with a gun in his hand. Even if that turns out to be an absolute brain fart, the event is absolutely going to get the plot moving again, if for no other reason than the simple fact that having people burst in the door with guns generally changes the tenor of conversations at even the snootiest of events. “I say, Fitzgerald, there’s a gentleman here with a firearm! Do you believe he’s bitter over some tedious old affair that no one remembers?”
You might not be a fan of Chandler’s work, but he knew how to keep a story moving, and it leads nicely into the three-beat structure which I’ve been teasing for a couple of weeks without explaining. Roleplaying scenes have a beat, a certain cadence and flow, and the three-beat rule is all about making sure that the scene keeps moving no matter what. It’s about keeping things humming along at a decent pace without being breakneck, and thinking about scenes less in terms of “here is the one thing I am doing right now” and more in terms of “here are the actions and here’s why anyone should care.”
Challenge Accepted: The puzzle roadblock
Looked at in a broad enough sense, every game is a puzzle game, and the differences just come down to how it’s puzzling you.
I recently found myself playing through Half-Life 2 again for reasons that are not clear to me. But that’s not the important point right now; what’s more important is that I was struck, not for the first time, at how tedious stretches of the game could get. The tense, brutal firefights were great, but then suddenly I’m in Ravenholm and dealing with millions of small enemies nipping at my heels without any ammo to be found. Or I have to piece together another physics-based puzzle. Or I’m doing anything related to the game’s vehicles. Or the goddamn antlions and sand.
None of these are segments that are unfamiliar at this point. I know how to get through all of them with a minimum of fuss. But they wind up feeling tedious for various reasons, and every time I hit another one of these roadblocks I rolled my eyes in irritation. Which seems an apropos condition, because in some games, the puzzles evolve naturally from the existing gameplay, but in others they’re just a way of padding out the game until you get to the next good part.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 11
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The Lunar Whale is clearly the spiritual equal to the Invincible from Final Fantasy III; there’s an onboard Fat Chocobo, a free inn, all of that fun stuff. But more importantly, it’s our ticket to the moon! We’re on the moon! Yay!
What were we going to do on the moon again? I mean, I know Golbez wanted to get to the moon, but do we know why he wanted to get to the moon or what he planned on doing once he arrived on the moon?
Leaving aside that I’m pretty sure an angry fight broke out on the Lunar Whale as someone asked that question, there’s a store up here that sells Elixirs and Ethers, and there’s a big crystalline palace just sitting there that seems like the place to visit. So we find a place to park the Whale, get out, and head into a castle just outside of it. With only the slightest bit of concern, at that. I mean… I remember what happened the last time I entered a cave near an otherwise isolated tower of crystal. It wasn’t necessarily a fun ride. Stupid Cloud of Darkness.
What’s a success?
I wanted to come here when it was peaceful. Mission accomplished.
I woke up this morning to a hug from my wife, and it was lovely. Is that success?
While I don’t talk about it a lot here, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m doing, what projects I’m pursing, and generally raking myself over the coals for where I am in life as a grown adult. I look at what I’ve accomplished and I feel like I could have done more, that I could be further along than I am right now. Then I look at where I am and wonder if I’m further along than I tend to believe that I am. Then, usually, I pet the cat.
Success or failure is a big deal in basically every industry. We judged whether a game or a movie or an album has succeeded or failed. The problem isn’t that we do that, it makes sense, there’s a good reasoning behind it. And yet at the same time there’s a real challenge in any industry judging success or failure, because there’s so much more going on than the obvious metrics, and those metrics are lying bastards.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 