Demo Driver 8: Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten (#179)
Next time I play this game, I’m going to name you Blinky just for continuity.
I’m very fond of tower defense games as a concept, but over the years I’ve started to get just a wee bit tired of them. I mean, there are only so many ways that you can assemble a game based on enemies coming in straight lines toward a central objective before life just plain starts getting boring. And at first glance, Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is not the game to revitalize the experience, seeing as it’s filled with Flash-level non-animations and an interface that screams indie production in all the worst ways.
Then you play it and you want to continue playing it until you forget how to play any other game ever forever. This thing is an absolute joy.
While last week’s demo barely fleshed out 15 minutes, this week’s offering was something I dove into and could happily have kept playing for another hour, both because it allowed me to do so and because the game is just plain great. I have high praise for this one, and while it has its flaws, it is a superb example of a game being well worth the asking price.
Challenge Accepted: Fair’s fair
It might seem fair to gang up on someone until you get ganged up on yourself.
If you think about it, the whole idea of challenge being fair is kind of strange at face value. Games build unfairness into themselves by design. If your average Mega Man game was fair, the boss would be able to pause the game and use weapons on me to target my weakness. The bosses start out by being unfair by design, at that; they can jump higher, run faster, fire more complex attacks, and so forth. That’s not fair.
Of course, if the boss fights were fair, the game would be kind of boring. Imagine a game where every boss dropped as easily as the player character. It’d be fair, but it wouldn’t be fun.
Fairness is a nebulous concept, but it’s also a really important one when you’re talking about games. We talk about the importance of it over and over, about the difference between games that are really hard to beat but fair compared to those that are just plain cheap. But how relevant is that, really? Are we looking for fairness, or are we just interested in accountability?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
My return to the Dwarven Caves saw me welcomed as a hero, which was sure nice, as was the fact that the dwarves opened up their treasure stores for me. Being a heroic sort, I naturally took this as the perfect opportunity to rob the short, hairy men of literally every valuable they had on hand. They wanted me to do it, I was just helping them along! Look, don’t judge me, I’ve got two more crystals to find, this is a difficult job.
The end of our Light Warrior Victory Tour (with special guest Rob the Dwarves) hit something of a down note, though, with some dying guy showing up and informing me that Tokkul was in trouble. Tokkul, that rings a bell… oh, right, that town full of sad people from way back when that I briefly pilfered. And it’s apparently being burned to the ground. Well, it would take a truly heartless individual to just keep plowing ahead and ignore that sort of news.
…no, turns out I’m not quite that heartless. Fine, let’s go save the stupid town.
Demo Driver 8: Unmechanical (#416)
Tim Burton has so damn much to answer for.
I’m just going to lead off here with what I think is a pretty simple thesis: if your game can’t sustain a demo that lasts for at least half an hour, you might not want to put out a demo in the first place.
I blew through Unmechanical‘s entire demo in about 15 minutes, and that was with a bug that made one puzzle take longer than it should have. That’s really short. Flash-game short. And I make that comparison for a good reason, too, because Unmechanical has definitely been sipping from the cup of Flash gaming, namely the vague and surreal cup that places an emphasis on a clever look and environments over actual narrative.
That’s not necessarily to disparage games that are all about clever looks and environment; some of them are, in fact, quite fun to play. But it’s a tricky line to walk. For every game you can think of that was a fun play while mostly being based upon looking neat, I can think of a dozen that missed the point of those great games in favor of the surface elements. Unmechanical feels more like the latter than the former.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen: I’m in some real trouble here. I kind of expected that by this point in the project I’d be halfway-ish through the game, like I was with Final Fantasy II, but darn if there isn’t a lot of good stuff going on here and if we’re not even at the second of four crystals. This is not going to be a shorter jaunt, it seems. I’d be much more upset about this if Final Fantasy III weren’t a joy to play.
Albeit one with some reservations. I mean, we’re up to the Tower of Owen now, and this dungeon pulls in a lot of stuff that really could have remained by the wayside. Sure, it was cute when you had me turn my entire party into miniature versions of ourselves for about a year, but now you’re asking me to turn the group into a bunch of toads. Toads! Go home, designers, you’re drunk. At least it’s not something you need to keep up for the whole dungeon.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 