Challenge Accepted: Fair’s fair
It might seem fair to gang up on someone until you get ganged up on yourself.
If you think about it, the whole idea of challenge being fair is kind of strange at face value. Games build unfairness into themselves by design. If your average Mega Man game was fair, the boss would be able to pause the game and use weapons on me to target my weakness. The bosses start out by being unfair by design, at that; they can jump higher, run faster, fire more complex attacks, and so forth. That’s not fair.
Of course, if the boss fights were fair, the game would be kind of boring. Imagine a game where every boss dropped as easily as the player character. It’d be fair, but it wouldn’t be fun.
Fairness is a nebulous concept, but it’s also a really important one when you’re talking about games. We talk about the importance of it over and over, about the difference between games that are really hard to beat but fair compared to those that are just plain cheap. But how relevant is that, really? Are we looking for fairness, or are we just interested in accountability?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
My return to the Dwarven Caves saw me welcomed as a hero, which was sure nice, as was the fact that the dwarves opened up their treasure stores for me. Being a heroic sort, I naturally took this as the perfect opportunity to rob the short, hairy men of literally every valuable they had on hand. They wanted me to do it, I was just helping them along! Look, don’t judge me, I’ve got two more crystals to find, this is a difficult job.
The end of our Light Warrior Victory Tour (with special guest Rob the Dwarves) hit something of a down note, though, with some dying guy showing up and informing me that Tokkul was in trouble. Tokkul, that rings a bell… oh, right, that town full of sad people from way back when that I briefly pilfered. And it’s apparently being burned to the ground. Well, it would take a truly heartless individual to just keep plowing ahead and ignore that sort of news.
…no, turns out I’m not quite that heartless. Fine, let’s go save the stupid town.
Immersion isn’t a headset
It’s hard to believe that this is the device that will change gaming forever, due in no small part to the fact that it likely won’t.
What a time it was to be alive in 1995! The Cold War was over, the dot com cycle was not too far away but far enough that we didn’t need to think about it yet, and we were all still pretending that strapping a monitor to your face was the future of gaming. It’s been nearly two decades, and now people are once again holding up the notion of VR headsets as a game changer that will totally alter the way we play games because it’s like you’re actually in the game now, guys!
These people are also baffled as to why everyone else doesn’t recognize the brilliance of these devices, which kind of seems like a self-defeating cycle.
I’m not saying that the Oculus Rift is going to fail; I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t predict that. I don’t imagine it’s going to make the impression on release that everyone backing it seems to assume it will, however, and I think the reasons are pretty obvious. Yes, it’s very interesting to sit down and play a game with it, but there’s a lot more going on than just “is it pretty and 3D.”
Demo Driver 8: Unmechanical (#416)
Tim Burton has so damn much to answer for.
I’m just going to lead off here with what I think is a pretty simple thesis: if your game can’t sustain a demo that lasts for at least half an hour, you might not want to put out a demo in the first place.
I blew through Unmechanical‘s entire demo in about 15 minutes, and that was with a bug that made one puzzle take longer than it should have. That’s really short. Flash-game short. And I make that comparison for a good reason, too, because Unmechanical has definitely been sipping from the cup of Flash gaming, namely the vague and surreal cup that places an emphasis on a clever look and environments over actual narrative.
That’s not necessarily to disparage games that are all about clever looks and environment; some of them are, in fact, quite fun to play. But it’s a tricky line to walk. For every game you can think of that was a fun play while mostly being based upon looking neat, I can think of a dozen that missed the point of those great games in favor of the surface elements. Unmechanical feels more like the latter than the former.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 