Telling Stories: Get wasted
Show me a game setting without drugs of some kind, and I will show you a setting that is either intended for young children or one that has not been adequately developed.
Pretty much every setting has alcohol, and The Secret World by definition has all of the usual real-world chemical cocktails. Final Fantasy XIV has somnus, milkroot, and presumably moko grass (it does turn into hemp, after all). WildStar features beer and cigars as more or less background elements. World of Warcraft has bloodthistle, and blood elves in general. City of Heroes had superadine on top of real-world drugs. That’s just scratching the surface.
Odd though it might seem, drugs are pretty important in roleplaying, even if you’re not playing a character who actively has a problem. The cultural impact and overall implications have a major impact on your character no matter what, and you can use them to add a fair bit of nuance to your portrayals. So with the understanding that you as a player should probably not be taking illegal drugs, let’s talk a bit about using drugs in RP.
Challenge Accepted: When good trouble goes bad
The first time you see these, you understand their attack patterns. The other way around, it would kind of be for crap.
If you’ve played Megaman 2, you know about the disappearing block segments. It starts as a simple jumping puzzle and gets more dangerous as time goes by – blocks fade in, then fade out after a second or two, forcing the player to jump from one vanishing block to the next, a masterpiece of careful timing and understanding the patterns. But the game didn’t stop there. Several of your “weapons” allowed you to make platforms which moved in unique ways. The result was that even though the segment was tricky, if you had too much trouble with it, you could bypass it. You’d have less energy on those tools if you needed them again and had to choose the right tools carefully, but there were other options.
By contrast, when the blocks reappeared in a couple of the more recent games in the Megaman X series, you didn’t have access to those extra abilities. As a result, the challenge became much harder and – really – a lot less fun. You either did it perfectly or you had no alternative. In Megaman 4, meanwhile, the platforming elements in many stages were so easy to bypass you could basically ignore them altogether. They took a good core challenge and wound up making it not nearly as much fun any longer.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Things are cascading toward what would appear to be the endgame awfully fast in Final Fantasy IV, although the chances of it actually being the endgame are about nil. For one thing, I’d be really surprised if one of these games ended with characters in the late teens or early twenties in terms of level. Also I’ve still got more elemental fiends to face, I’m sure, and there are a lot of plot elements still unexplained. Plus, you know, I checked.
But we’re still swinging right along in our goal to get an airship, rescue Rosa, kill Golbez, and then… do something? I don’t know if Cecil actually has a plan for the endgame here. Once Yang is kitted out again with some equipment retrieved from the Fat Chocobo and a few more things bought in Baron (you can unlock those stores now), it’s time to move forward! By which I mean it’s time to totally ignore stated objectives and head back toward Mist, because there’s stuff there, even though it makes no sense whatsoever.
Maybe it’s time to stop
If only there were some sort of sign.
One of the nice things about games is that really, there’s nothing that automatically says that the fifth installment of a given franchise is going to be bad. Heck, if a franchise makes it to five installments that’s kind of heartening. You don’t get that many games on the shelf if the first one was a complete train wreck, after all; I might not like the Call of Duty games, but I can at least recognize that they scratched an itch. Sequels for a game franchise can keep going for a very long time.
However, while games don’t suffer from the same issues that you see in movie sequels, you still hit a certain point where the well is dry. If you’re lucky, the series turns into clones of itself; if you’re unlucky, it becomes a shambling undead husk, like the Saw franchise but on your game device of choice. All of these franchises have been around for more than two decades, and they’ve got a lot of goodwill behind them… but it might be time to just give up the ghost and say good night.
Demo Driver 8: Don Bradman Cricket 14 (#126)
Cricket, the last great mystery of our age.
Ladies and gentlemen, when I rolled this game, I knew I was in for a treat right from the beginning.
I do not know much of anything about cricket. I know that it is a game that is enjoyed in the UK and several points directly related, but if asked at gunpoint to name three distinct positions in cricket I would be reduced to vague guessing and prayer. I know absolutely nothing about the rules of the game. And if that weren’t enough reason to be smiling about this game, there’s the simple fact that it also requires a controller, thereby suggesting a level of precision and expectations for play that I had no way of living up to.
So why did I know I was in for a treat? Because either I would be in for an unexpected blast or I’d be reduced to playing a Very Serious Sports Game as something between Grand Theft Auto and NBA Jam due to total unfamiliarity. I can’t say it’ll provide a good evaluation of the game compared to other cricket titles, but you know, I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride there.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 