Leave this out of your game
You move sixteen tons, whaddya get? Another day older and I’ve made a lot of gil off the Market Boards.
Guys? We need to have a talk. You’ve been making video games for a really long time now, and I’m not going to pretend you aren’t good at it. I wouldn’t have a job or one of my major hobbies if you were. I like video games!
Please stop making me regret liking video games, though, because you thought that in the middle you would be so clever by including these minigames.
Let’s not mince words. These are not clever additions. At best, what you’re accomplishing here is padding out the length of the game through a horrid minigame that no one would ever want to play. At worst, you’re making Animal Crossing, a franchise of games that is literally nothing but these minigames strung together. Or, if you’d rather, it is every tedious part of every MMO ever, but without the part where after all the tedium you get to stab orcs in the head. So when you’re approving your final design documents and such, if these minigames show up? Send that shit back, because it’s not done yet.
Demo Driver 8: Hammerfight (#308)
Spin round for what?
My cats have a pretty standard routine at this point that passes for the two of them fighting, and it’s kind of hilarious. They’ll both be perched on their hind legs glaring at one another, but neither one of them wants to actually hurt the other, just sort of whap the other around. The result is that for a couple moments they look as if they’re just going to glare or pounce, then one of them smacks the other without claws, and then the whole thing devolves into kitty paw-slaps and yowls. A confused mess of angry fur and smacking.
Hammerfight reminds me a lot of that. Not in the sense of adorable cats, but in the idea that it’s a confusing mess of a slap-fight. It’s got a fascinating and engaging premise, totally, but it’s an idea that never does a good job developing beyond that, and interesting aesthetics and concepts don’t make for a good game.
Nier and the art of pulled punches
There are more colors. But their relevance bleeds away.
You don’t save the world at the end of Nier. The main character is trying to, certainly – or, more accurately, he’s trying to save his daughter and saving the world is a fortunate byproduct. But by the end of the game and the subsequent replays, it’s clear that you aren’t saving the world. You aren’t saving your daughter. You aren’t even saving yourself. All you’ve succeeded in doing is…
Well, that’s something best hidden behind the cut. Because there are going to be spoilers here, so fairly warned be ye. Even though the odds are you won’t get to play this game.
Nier is the last game developed by Cavia, better known to people who would bother knowing about it as the same studio behind Drakengard and Drakengard 2. As you could also probably guess from that pedigree, it is completely messed up and manages to put forth a post-apocalyptic world that’s actually worse than the world in the throes of the apocalypse. It’s arguably not even post-anything; what you witness through the game is the death throes of the world of humanity, the last shuddering gasps before extinction and failure.
Telling Stories: Safe and sound
I would really like to tell a story wherein the roleplaying community is notably different from the raiding community or the PvP community or any other community and isn’t filled with all sorts of creepy players who will make you want to stop playing altogether. The only thing preventing me from telling that story is the fact that it’s not true.
Let’s face it, roleplaying isn’t exactly like any other community, but it still has those hallmarks. There are creeper and weirdos who will make you awkward, people who have no sense of personal boundaries, and a varied assortment that will make you feel some combination of unwelcome and frightened until you just leave. It’s not unique to online games, either. For some people, roleplaying just seems to lead straight into creep-ville territory. It’s gross and unpleasant, but it’s true.
I am going to assume that no one reading this wants to be a big creepy jerk who drives people away from their game of choice, although whether or not you achieve that goal anyway is another discussion. Today, I want to talk about keeping yourself safe and comfortable, though, and it’s a good idea to make sure that you don’t violate anything contained herein if you’d like to avoid being super-creepy. Yes? Yes.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 