Leave this out of your game
You move sixteen tons, whaddya get? Another day older and I’ve made a lot of gil off the Market Boards.
Guys? We need to have a talk. You’ve been making video games for a really long time now, and I’m not going to pretend you aren’t good at it. I wouldn’t have a job or one of my major hobbies if you were. I like video games!
Please stop making me regret liking video games, though, because you thought that in the middle you would be so clever by including these minigames.
Let’s not mince words. These are not clever additions. At best, what you’re accomplishing here is padding out the length of the game through a horrid minigame that no one would ever want to play. At worst, you’re making Animal Crossing, a franchise of games that is literally nothing but these minigames strung together. Or, if you’d rather, it is every tedious part of every MMO ever, but without the part where after all the tedium you get to stab orcs in the head. So when you’re approving your final design documents and such, if these minigames show up? Send that shit back, because it’s not done yet.
Demo Driver 8: Hammerfight (#308)
Spin round for what?
My cats have a pretty standard routine at this point that passes for the two of them fighting, and it’s kind of hilarious. They’ll both be perched on their hind legs glaring at one another, but neither one of them wants to actually hurt the other, just sort of whap the other around. The result is that for a couple moments they look as if they’re just going to glare or pounce, then one of them smacks the other without claws, and then the whole thing devolves into kitty paw-slaps and yowls. A confused mess of angry fur and smacking.
Hammerfight reminds me a lot of that. Not in the sense of adorable cats, but in the idea that it’s a confusing mess of a slap-fight. It’s got a fascinating and engaging premise, totally, but it’s an idea that never does a good job developing beyond that, and interesting aesthetics and concepts don’t make for a good game.
Nier and the art of pulled punches
There are more colors. But their relevance bleeds away.
You don’t save the world at the end of Nier. The main character is trying to, certainly – or, more accurately, he’s trying to save his daughter and saving the world is a fortunate byproduct. But by the end of the game and the subsequent replays, it’s clear that you aren’t saving the world. You aren’t saving your daughter. You aren’t even saving yourself. All you’ve succeeded in doing is…
Well, that’s something best hidden behind the cut. Because there are going to be spoilers here, so fairly warned be ye. Even though the odds are you won’t get to play this game.
Nier is the last game developed by Cavia, better known to people who would bother knowing about it as the same studio behind Drakengard and Drakengard 2. As you could also probably guess from that pedigree, it is completely messed up and manages to put forth a post-apocalyptic world that’s actually worse than the world in the throes of the apocalypse. It’s arguably not even post-anything; what you witness through the game is the death throes of the world of humanity, the last shuddering gasps before extinction and failure.
A game like a warm hug
When you were young.
My copy of Secret of Mana is long since dead, and this makes me very unhappy, because it means I don’t have a copy of the game right now. I know, I could buy it on the Wii’s virtual console (although I’d prefer it on the 3DS – Nintendo’s strict limitations on where you can buy older games is kind of absurd), but at the moment I can’t always justify the cost. But that’s not the point. I miss the game and I would play through it again right now, despite having dozens of newer games to play that I’ve never even beaten once.
Is this partly because of the ways that players gravitate toward the familiar over the novel? Naturally. But there’s something more to it. Some games just feel welcoming, even if you’ve played them countless times before, even if the game’s plot is anything but warm and welcoming. There are games that just feel like a big warm hug, welcoming you back no matter how long you’ve been away.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 