Hard Project: Sonic the Hedgehog
When a series resorts to mining out its past, it’s usually because the present is much less interesting.
This may come as a shock to some of our younger readers, and for that I apologize. But you know all of that terrible art on DeviantArt that involves cartoon hedgehogs submitting to Jesus and usually leads directly into some mind-scarring pornography? That’s all based on a series of video games! A series of video games that were originally based around a little blue hedgehog that ran really quickly. You have to understand that the 90s were a different time. (We don’t understand how the porn and the Jesus thing happened, though.)
As funny as that might seem at a glance, the fact of the matter remains that the weird fan culture has become the most relevant part of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise in recent years. Kind of understandably so, even. The franchise has been showing cracks ever since the Dreamcast days, and the current state of affairs is lamentable but hardly unexpected. At this point, making a new game is quite possibly not a good idea, and it’s definitely a hard project.
Demo Driver 8: Satazius
Considerate enemy armadas build ships that are designed to be dangerous from exactly one angle and utterly non-threatening in every other configuration.
It’s weird to see a game that’s specifically targeting your own nostalgia when, by and large, you steer clear of gaming nostalgia. I’ve been playing video games for a long portion of my life, and I know that I’m not immune to the siren song of old loves, but I like to think I’m also aware of the fact that the past of video games is filled with missteps, bad decisions, and stuff that made sense at the time but not now. My affection for the past is rarely within sight to be targeted at all.
And then, of course, I find a game that is a direct throwback to one of my longstanding loves, a shoot-’em-up in the mold of Gradius, Darius, and R-Type. While the master genre never died, I’ve noted in the past that it’s tapered off into a steady stream of bullet hell shooters, which I have less affection for. Satazius, by contrast, feels very much like a familiar variant on old tropes, so much so that I had to double-check that it isn’t a remake of something. They found my one weakness.
Challenge Accepted: Teaching patterns
Yes, it takes a while, but you do get there eventually, and that’s part of the point.
From one perspective, there’s only one challenge in any given game, and that’s the last sequence. Every other portion is just there as training.
Obviously, the goal from a design standpoint is to have all of those intermediary challenges be just as fun. But they’re also there to train you for the final things, the real events, the big time. It’s the reason why games don’t start with the final boss fight, because you need to learn all of the elements that go into that fight. The first level in Super Mario Bros. introduces most of the major elements you’ll deal with through the game, and it does so in an environment wherein you can fairly easily learn how they work.
Every game is different, however, and there are lots of ways to teach players how to do things. So how do you teach players how to do the things they’ll have to do at the end of the game while still making the beginning of the game fun to play?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So, let’s recap briefly. Long after the original Final Fantasy IV release, Square decides to greenlight a remake of the game for the DS. Seems straightforward enough. But someone had an idea that tied into an experiment with episodic gaming. What if there was a sequel, one that told a new story altogether? What if players could download new installments as they came out, picking out individual episodes or watching the whole thing unfold at once? What then?
Well, we don’t have to wonder; that’s what happened. A new story was written, new characters created, and the episodes began coming out. So here we are with the PSP version, which collections all of them into a single packaged form. I mentioned back when I started the interquel between the two that I quite like the fact that rather than a straight sequel, this one puts quite a bit of distance between the events of the original and the events of the sequel; they’re connected by world and by several characters, but not by conflict.
A helpful guide to Western and Eastern RPGs
This game tries to trick you into thinking it’s one thing and then it becomes something else. Surprise!
As you have probably been able to ascertain from the fact that I have an entire series of columns on this very site dubbed “The Final Fantasy Project,” I have a bit of a thing for RPGs. They’re fun! And I’ve played a lot of them over the years, some of them from the Land of the Rising Sun, others from the Land of the Rapidly Diminishing Water Supply (better known as “California”). Or the Land of the Snows and Hockey (Vancouver?). The point is, there are two different distinct design systems at work when it comes to computer RPGs, that’s what I’m getting at.
Pop culture being what it is, of course these two philosophies have to be at war with one another, and you are expected to have passionate points of view on the matter about which one is better. But some of you might not have time to carefully play through earlier installments of beloved franchises to pick out which one is better, and quite frankly no one should ever be forced to play through several portions of the Ultima series or the Fire Emblem series without the promise of a paycheck. Thus, I’ve assembled a quick guide to both sides, helpfully explaining what these things are with an eye toward pissing everyone off equally.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 