Demo Driver 8: Alien Breed 2: Assault (#249)
Stupid waist-high guardrails!
Do you know how many games there are on Steam? A lot. And there are a lot of demos out there, too, so many that you could use them to blot out the sun. Assuming the sun could be blotted out by game demos stored purely on hard drive space. That metaphor got a bit tortured, but I checked; at the time of this writing, there are 407 demos on Steam. So I’m grabbing one at random and playing through the demo, no matter what.
This week, I rolled 249, which set me up with Alien Breed 2: Assault. The title does not exactly inspire visions of breathtaking originality, but a stupid title doesn’t make for a bad game. So after Steam’s usual ridiculously complicated initial setup process, it was time to jump in and see about shooting the heck out of some aliens. No, I hadn’t really looked at the description on the store page, but be fair; with a title like that, there was only one game this was ever going to be.
LA Nawwwww
Is Detective Cole Phelps tracking down a case that required an awful lot of explosions behind him, or is he suffering from severe gas? It’s kind of ambiguous.
I’m really late for a hard-hitting review of LA Noire, a fact I freely admit. Worse yet, at least from my perspective, Chris over at Game By Night hit one of the really big failings of the game right off, which is one of the two major things that’s been going through my head recently as I’ve been playing the darn game. But, hey, it’s still set to come out later this year for the PC, so I can at least get in some reasonable lead time to advise most players that it might not be all that and a bag of chips.
The problems with the game, however, don’t stop where the aforementioned post stops discussing them. It’s kind of ironic that one of the first DLC cases for the game makes reference to electroplating, since the entire game feels like it’s been coated with a thin layer of awesome. But a solid scratch makes it clear that there’s nothing underneath.
Under the Alien Dome with Number Fourteen
It’s really hard to get a screenshot from the game that’s not either staggeringly busy or just plain boring.
I might not always like Valve all that much, but I do adore Steam. There’s stuff you can find there that you’d never find through any other route. Case in point: Anomaly: Warzone Earth.
Tower defense games are one of my longstanding loves, and I’ve burnt away many an hour trying to set up the perfect maze of destructive towers for critters to march along. So when some random Steam-clicking sent me along to Anomaly, I immediately checked to see if there was a demo available. The game is the sort of thing that could backfire horribly, after all – a tower defense game in which you play the part of the oncoming hordes rather than building towers in your defense. And while that could be a neat inversion, it could also be a game that takes away one of the core bits of fun that make up a good tower defense romp.
Final Fantasy VII And The Great Big Undeserved Credit
I wonder how many people have sat down and seriously thought about the fact that this image stops being relevant less than ten hours into the game.
So today I got just a little bit angry when I posted on Facebook. Nothing wrong with that, exactly; it happens a lot. Specifically, I said that anyone who claims that Final Fantasy VII is the best thing Square has produced over the past fourteen years is either an asshole or a liar.
I meant it, too.
And the thing is, as soon as I said it, I knew that there was more to say. Because I didn’t say that FFVII is a bad game (it’s not), I didn’t say that it shouldn’t be your favorite game (I don’t care), I didn’t even say that it was the worst thing. But after reading yet another comment about how Square peaked in 1997, something in me finally snapped. I’ve been watching this happen around every subsequent Final Fantasy title after the polygonal lens-flare-festival that pioneered the concept of a multi-disc game on the PlayStation, and it’s gone from being mildly odd to being downright stupid.
Gyromancy, Magic of Gyroscopes
“Gastrosaur” seems less like a good name for a monster and more like a name for a dinosaur-themed restaurant chain.
Of all the games you’d expect to have started a trend, Puzzle Quest seemed like an unlikely candidate to say the least. I mean, the game as an admittedly bizarre blending of two or three totally unrelated games, and while it was fun it was also the sort of game where the random number generator ruled. One wrong move – or even one right move – could start a cascade of bolts to the face that ended with your destruction, and you couldn’t help but feel like balance wasn’t really in the top ten priorities of the designers.
Apparently, PopCap and Square-Enix felt that this was as good a foundation to improve upon as any. Hence, Gyromancer, a collaboration between the incarnate deities of casual gaming and the lords of… well… whatever it is Square is the lord of these days. The game fell into the trap of a lot of really neat projects, however, where the concept attracted a lot of attention and the actual game sort of fell off the radar after a couple of weeks. Even I forgot to purchase it when it came out a couple years ago, remembering early the following year as part of my “I am making money from journalism, let’s buy games!” rush.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 