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.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
As we last left our heroes or whatever, it was time for another trip across half of the map to talk with someone. Or, as it turned out, to ask someone for the right to pay our way onto yet another airship ride. (I will give the designers credit here and note that all of these locations can technically be reached on foot, but the march is kind of insane. In fact, the map never really points you to these things; you’re just told to go take another ride.) One brief ride later, the party was plopped down in front of Kashuan, the castle where the royal family kept something or other that does mean things to the engine of an airship and… yeah, I don’t know, exactly.
Look, let’s just assume that we’re getting the missiles to shoot at the Death Star vent, all right? That’s familiar.
The bright side is that Kashuan doesn’t make you do a whole lot of searching to find the Sunfire, since it’s right there in the courtyard. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean you actually have anywhere to keep it, because that’s the most difficult part of this equation. And as you probably expected, doing this with a series of torches isn’t an option, which means a search through the entire castle to find a torch that can hold the flame.
Hard Project: Firefly
Find a ship, find a crew, make no money, fail, get an online petition going, make a movie, fail again, stare at the wall…
The announcement of Firefly Online way back in the day seemed like a marriage of the most obvious IP in the world to the most obvious game type. A series that’s all about heading out into the great unknown for various purposes married to a genre that loves to send you off and wandering. So when the game was released, it… well, we never got there, actually. It’s been started and stopped so many times that it resembles nothing so much as the engine room of the eponymous ship class.
Weirder still, the franchise has never had any sort of game made, not even the most basic adaptation. That’s odd, to say the least. Maybe not entirely odd given the fact that we’re talking about a franchise only in the strictest sense of the term, but you’d think the number of passionate fans would align to make at least some sort of game come out of this. And yet it’s never happened. The closest we’ve gotten are the many started and cancelled incarnations of an online game based in the universe. Why?
Demo Driver 8: Wings of Prey (#176)
Going out in a blaze of glory, mostly because your plane is on fire.
I swear by all that is holy, if I never see another game based upon World War II, it will be far too soon.
Honestly, I am relatively certain that we are never going to need another game which involves more skirmishes against the Third Reich. We are full up on anything that involves fighting Hitler’s forces in any theater of engagement. So my opinions on Wings of Prey has two strikes against it right from the start. It’s Yet Another World War II Game, something we have not needed since 2001 or so, and it’s a dogfighting simulator, which isn’t something I really care for.
So there was never going to be an ending wherein Wings of Prey and I ride off happily into the sunset, holding hands and smelling the flowers. The best I could hope for was that the game would turn out to be better than my lackluster expectations, and to its credit, it succeeds at that. I don’t know if that makes me really like it all that much, but sure does give me some food for thought.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 