Demo Driver 8: Insaniquarium (#403)
You probably pictured halfway to this to begin with, and that’s fair.
PopCap games, by their very nature, are not complex beasts to decipher. You can get a sense of them within a few moments. Oh, sure, they ramp up in complexity a fair bit, offer new wrinkles and the like, but these are not games with deep narrative structure and bewildering turns. These are games in which brightly colored things interact with other brightly colored things in a fashion which is fun enough to play for a few hours without realizing that you’ve been playing for a few hours.
If you are turned off by the idea of bright colors being a fun ride, you may wish to re-examine your life goals, as at some point you appear to have mistaken cynicism for depth.
Insaniquarium is one of PopCap’s earlier offerings, and as such it’s a bit rougher than their later offerings but still offers more or less what you’d expect. Sure, the game is probably best defined as a puzzle game, but it’s more of a fish-management simulator with pooped coins and alien invasions. If you like PopCap games, you’ll like it. You get the idea.
Telling Stories: And I’ll form the head
When you trust people, you’re usually willing to let them borrow your things. Your books, your movies, your roleplaying characters.
I’ve seen various people share their characters in the years that I’ve been roleplaying, ranging from fully shared accounts to versions of characters being controlled by multiple different players. (I’ve also seen players controlling multiple versions of the same character, but that’s a discussion for another day.) The idea is that it can form a shared experience, both players getting some of the fun of roleplaying in theory. In practice…
Look, I’m not one to say that this is something that can never work. But there are a lot of really big hurdles to climb here, ones that I don’t think are necessarily easy to surmount or even suggest a methodology. So before you even consider it, you need to really think about what you’re doing and why, especially if you’re talking about your main character and not an alt.
Zones of death!
“Oh, let’s build a little cottage up there!”
– No one, ever, in the history of the world
Do you know what the top of Mt. Everest is called? The Death Zone. Well, all right, to be really technical the Death Zone is any region in climbing which involves going so high that human beings can’t get enough oxygen to live. It’s a region wherein every moment you stand there brings you closer to death, because you cannot get enough precious, life-giving oxygen.
Why in the world are you going to the Death Zone? Do you want to die? This isn’t the Maybe Sort Of Possible Death Zone If You Know What I Mean, Wink Wink. It is the Death Zone!
Not that this makes the average climber any dumber than the average video game character, or for that matter, the average gamer. We get a lot of laughs out of watching characters do stupid things that we like to say we’re smart enough to avoid, but the fact of the matter is that we’re in the same boat as the horror movie fans who go wandering around int he dark without a flashlight without thinking about it.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite the fact that Firion and the Attractions failed to pick up any allies, the rebel army presses forward with an assault on Fynn. This is… well… it’s the end of the war, right? Our goal here isn’t to now conquer the nation that invaded us as a result of some retaliatory principle, right?
Oh, who am I kidding. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil men is for good men to do nothing, so we’d better keep running this resistance force like an army until we’ve wiped everyone out. I guess.
Anyhow, Hilda and Gordon have come up with a cunning plan to retake the castle. First, the troops will distract the Empire’s troops, because a disciplined military unit is going to be adequately distracted by an ill-equipped resistance band. Then, Firion and the E Street Band will go into the castle and kill the person in charge of the castle. This will result in victory, because it’s not like the numerically superior force will stick around when the commander is gone.
Hard Project: Superman
Truth, Justice, and Soaring Around Looking Majestic.
Superheroes owe their entire existence to Superman. There are worst places to start off. Sure, we’ve spent the last several years inundated with writers who feel that you can’t relate to Superman or that it’s too difficult to give Superman compelling challenges, but if you can’t think of a good setup to tell stories about an alien who was raised by humans and then decided that he liked people so much he wanted to protect all of them forever? That says more about your lack of imagination than the character.
What’s weird, though, is that we’ve never gotten a good video game based off of the Man of Steel. Not a one.
There have been some tolerable versions of Supes in fighting games here and there, yes, although Injustice loses loads of points right from the word go for buying into the “but what if we made Superman evil” school of thought. But every single game version has been some flavor of disappointment, with Superman 64 essentially being used as a synonym for Worst Game Ever. Why in the hell is that? Why is it so difficult to make a good game based around the Last Son of Krypton?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 