Demo Driver 8: Reaxxion (#348)
If I get that, I can quit my job! Thanks, Reaxxion!
After nearly 40 years, it might be time to stop trying to remake Breakout. I can understand the appeal, totally, but part of what made it work for so long is the fact that the core of the game is so simple. You can only change so much before it starts to become something else altogether.
If it weren’t already obvious from the statements I just made, Reaxxion is a Breakout clone. Like basically every other version of this entire subgenre, Reaxxion clearly wants to be the remake of Breakout to end all further remakes. And, like basically every other thing that tries to be the final remake of any given subgenre, there’s really no way for anything to possibly achieve this goal.
What Reaxxion does achieve, oddly, is to be nearly entirely different from the game it’s emulating. If I had to compare it to anything, it almost feels like some version of a browser game that broke free of its mooring and somehow managed to form a Steam page.
Telling Stories: Buddy event
I have several friends and acquaintances who are roleplayers. This is unsurprising, but it also doesn’t really mean a whole heck of a lot. There are several people who I can talk to about roleplaying but whom I have never actually roleplayed with, or if I have it’s only been in passing. Our connection via roleplaying is entirely based upon a shared hobby rather than any shared experiences, which is all right but does arguably lack a certain degree of immediacy.
I also have several friends with whom I do roleplay, and that’s a very different can of worms. I’m not talking about people like my wife, I’m talking about people who met me originally through roleplaying and we kept talking from there. Obviously, I don’t consider this to be a bad thing; I’m regularly podcasting with a friend I made via roleplaying, I talk to several of my roleplaying friends on a regular basis, this is a very welcome example of an online hobby feeding into actual friendships. But it does pose some unique challenges while at the same time offering some notable benefits.
Challenge Accepted: Selling on the challenge
Yeah, this is going to get worse before it gets better, isn’t it?
Dark Souls doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to difficulty. You will die in this game. You will die over and over, brutally, ripped to shreds by enemies that are there for the explicit purpose of ripping you to shreds. The PC version is subtitled as the Prepare to Die Edition, a not-so-subtle reminder that when you start playing this game death comes for you on swift wings. And swift legs. And swift fins. Basically, everything is going to kill you over and over and you’re going to like it.
Is that challenging?
I’m not asking if the game is really all that hard or not, that’s for reviewers to argue over. (Or, as is more frequently the case, for forum-goers to debate with “oh, it wasn’t that hard” substituting as the gaming equivalent of explaining how many one-armed pushups you can do in an hour.) Rather, it’s a question of how challenging a game can be when its entire purpose is stated right from the start, when you walk in with a solid promise that this game will kill you over and over. Are you getting a challenge, or are you just getting what you paid for?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
At roughly the halfway point of the game, Final Fantasy II has kind of worn out its welcome. This would not be as big of a deal if there was less game left to go.
Part of the problem here is that it doesn’t take many cues from Final Fantasy where perhaps it should. There are parts of the original that I accused of being a slog, and they certainly were, but at least every part of the game made a genuine effort to reward you in some way. Yes, the dungeons could turn into slogs, but at least the enemies rewarded you with experience instead of tedium.
The encounter rate is absurdly high, but the ambush rate is also absurd, leading to a multitude of turns spent watching enemies act and then act again. This includes several enemies with annoying but not actively dangerous special abilities that bog combat down even further, making themselves priority targets just so I won’t have to wait through their animations again. It’s the worst kind of battle where it would take a seriously bad day for you to lose, but you still have to wait to win, like playing against someone in Magic: the Gathering who keeps adding more life without any way to hurt you. Sure, it takes you longer to eat through the wall of health, but who cares?
But I think there’s an even more important element here, and that’s the simple fact that my tactical options are pretty much zero.
Demo Driver 8: Trine (#212)
The thief, to almost no one’s surprise, is my favorite.
It seems really odd to me that for all of the things that Blizzard Entertainment has done over the years, we’ve never gotten any sort of further development of The Lost Vikings. Maybe not necessarily in the same setting – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Interplay thing has tied up publishing rights or whatever – but it seems like something natural to update, you know? There’s a market for this sort of puzzle game, and as much as Blizzard has earned its reputation over the past few years as an obstinate behemoth, it’d be a good way to remind everyone just how clever the company can be.
Not that the concept hasn’t been explored in other places. I bring all of this up because today’s demo, Trine, explores the same fundamental conceit. To wit: you are placed in control of three different characters with three different sets of abilities, and it’s up to you as the player to guide all three of them through a level. It masquerades as a platform game, but this is a puzzle game, as surely as Portal 2 or Tetris or Braid.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 