Demo Driver 8: Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013
Will this be a game of stalking the stalkers, hunting the hunters, being at once the victim and the predator?
I generally like animals more than people, because even the most unpleasant animals I’ve known have never been pointlessly insulting or cruel. Thus, I’ve always held on to a great deal of disdain for this particular game franchise – the idea that you would have a game solely devoted to killing animals in a hunting-but-not-really environment just seemed like behavior not worth encouraging. If there was a game franchise devoted to injecting yourself with a whole lot of heroin, I wouldn’t exactly be on board with that, either.
But when I rolled this one up, I decided to keep an open mind. I kill lots of animals in video games, after all, and maybe – just maybe – these games are actually awesome. Maybe they manage to have a complex and realistic simulation of hunting without ever killing an actual animal. Perhaps these are games for people who love the thrill of the hunt but would never want to harm a living creature. It’s a long shot, sure, but it is possible that I would start playing and realize this franchise was better than I had given it credit for all along, with complex simulations of bullet physics and the effects you could have on your prey.
Killing the six-fingered man
They are not what you’re afraid of. But they’ll do.
My favorite story about The Princess Bride is Mandy Patinkin talking about Inigo’s moment of triumph. Because I’ve totally been there.
Patinkin’s story, in brief, is that his father had recently died after a long struggle with cancer. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do in a situation like that, obviously; you love your family member and try to give them strength until the end. But when he was filming Inigo’s confrontation with Rugen, suddenly he didn’t have an abstract concept to wrestle with. Here he was, in character, taking out the man responsible for killing his father. He’s said that it was a little bit like being able to avenge his father.
I know how that feels. Sure, I lost my father to alcoholism, not cancer, and I wasn’t in a movie that allowed me to externalize all of that. But I had my video games, and in places, that was enough. Hell, that’s half of the point of video games, to deal with problems that never get a truly satisfying conclusion any other way.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So far, a lot of stuff has been happening in The After Years, albeit mostly to disconnected individuals. The first four tales were all pretty well self-contained and didn’t really cross over with one another at all. Moving into the fifth tale, though, it’s high time that some of this stuff started pulling together. Not coincidentally, the entire point of this particular tale is to create a larger framework for all of the various cliffhangers that we’re up to.
Unfortunately, it winds up treading over some… uncomfortable territory getting there. As in veering close to a certain (terrible) show about a whole lot of elemental ninja. Please don’t make me type the name.
But let’s leave that to one side. It’s a new year, it’s a new tale, it’s a new adventure. So let’s get started with a bunch of ninja acting like, well, ninja, doing like a ninja do. No, they are not shredding on their electric guitars while riding their totally sweet motorcycles, we’re talking closer to the traditional concept of ninja.
Demo Driver 8: Pid
Pleasant enough, but is that enough?
If you’re using the word retro to describe your platforming game just because it’s a platformer, that throws up some red flags.
Yes, I totally appreciate the distinction. Platforming as a genre is not nearly as common as it used to be. But just the idea of jumping from platform is not retro in any way, shape, or form. It’s just a mechanic of playing a game. It’s no more retro than first-person shooters or RPGs or anything else. About the only way you can call platforming itself retro is stepping back into the structural portion of platforming, moving away from tricks like seamless levels and narratives and just focusing on precision jumps mixed with power-ups.
Pid is not that game, so the few places where it calls itself “retro” raise my hackles. The fact is that it’s not retro in the least; it would be more accurate to call it an attempt at putting modern design sensibilities into a platforming framework with mild puzzle elements. How well it actually performs this task is another matter, but I give points for the attempt at all.
Challenge Accepted: The meat of challenges
When failing with panache becomes harder than succeeding gracelessly.
The most irritating part of playing through Guitar Hero III, for me, were the songs that made it easier to get a Perfect rather than a five-star rating. Since the former relied on you hitting every note while the latter relied on score, there were lower-difficulty songs where the sheer sparsity of notes meant that it was easy to use your star power at the wrong time and wind up without enough points to clear the upper threshold. It made playing a lot more frustrating, because for most of the game the real difficulty was a perfect streak, not getting that star rating.
Back when I discussed difficulty levels, I mentioned that a lot of the stuff used to tweak a game’s difficulty didn’t really alter the fundamental challenge of a game. Sure, you can alter how hard enemies hit and how hard you hit in a lot of games, but that doesn’t necessarily make the game harder. What does make a given game harder or easier than another? That comes down to a series of questions.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 