Demo Driver 8: Steam and Metal
Some of you will see this and instantly be “that’s my jam!” In that case, well, you’re welcome! Glad to help.
The nice part about top-down scrolling shooters like this is that even a short demo gives you a pretty good picture of what you’re going to be getting. This is not a genre wherein there are big, hidden mysteries right around the corner. I am flying a plane vertically, there are things to be shot, they will try to shoot me down, and so forth. Dodge the stuff that hurts you and hurt the things that would otherwise kill you.
As a result, evaluating the game comes down chiefly to side elements and trying to pick out whether or not the game really delivers a novel enough experience to justify its price tag in the first place, something not helped by the fact that the game’s store page appears to have been handled by someone whose grasp of the English language is only slightly firmer than Kanye West’s grasp of social niceties. Once you get past all of that, though, the game certainly seems to do its level best to deliver on its stated goals. Whether you want those goals is another discussion.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 12
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I am not sure how to classify the ending sequence of The After Years, I’m really not. Because on the one hand, the game basically decided to just throw everything to the wind and fling the entire group into nothing more than a huge, lingering dungeon crawl to cap off the game. That’s sort of the height of laziness. On the other hand, it’s the first time in all of this installment that we actually get some choice and control over the characters, even if it’s just insofar as setting up the party.
Final Fantasy IV is the only game in the franchise that really took that option out of player hands in the first place, I’ll note, but that’s a different discussion.
Regardless of that, it is what it is, and we have all of the team members assembled in the Lunar Whale as we speed off to the final confrontation. Which seems like a long time for us, the players, because getting to this point has easily taken 40 hours. For the characters this is happening over the span of a couple days. Bit of a difference in scale.
Hard Project: Cowboy Bebop
3, 2, 1, let’s jam.
When I find myself looking at anime and wondering if it was always just a series of horrible premises and teenage breasts, Cowboy Bebop is kind of my fallback. If you’ve never seen it, you should go fix that, but you could do worse than boiling it down as Firefly without references to the Civil War and with references to the mob. It’s not much of a leap from the two, is what I’m saying.
There have been two attempts to bring the title into video game format, one of which was an on-rail shooter that was more or less forgotten in the time it took to write this sentence while the other almost had a US release before everyone noticed that it was a terrible game. On the one hand, it’s somewhat refreshing to see a popular anime neither based off of video games nor mired in a series of weak and forgettable game adaptations. But what makes a Cowboy Bebop game so hard to get moving in the first place? Is it all the same problems that stymie a Firefly game?
Nope! It’s a comfortably unique series of problems.
Demo Driver 8: Croixleur Sigma
If you’re expecting a personality beyond “girl one” and “girl two” you will be sadly disappointed.
Remember how I said two weeks ago that if you put out a demo for your game, it should include a tutorial? Apparently that advice was taken to heart by the makers of Croixleur Sigma in the worst possible way. Because they included one that is entirely non-interactive, thus invalidating the benefit of having a tutorial by preventing you from putting your hands on the controls and actually feeling how the game controls. Then again, considering the game was already going out of its way to make sure it didn’t actually recognize my gamepad mappings, perhaps that’s a… understandable thing?
Croixleur Sigma is one of the various Japanese indie games that’s popped up on Steam, and like so many of them it’s kind of a thin offering. By no means is it one of the worst games I’ve played here, but it manages to commit the worst of all sins. Not by failing to last 15 minutes (although it does that, too), but by making slashing my way through a whole pile of monsters feel boring.
Challenge Accepted: What you know you don’t know
I know something you don’t know.
There’s an old card game called Mao, and the whole gimmick is that when you teach someone to play, you’re supposed to start off with a simple statement: “The only rule of Mao that I can tell you is this one.” You can be told when you’re breaking a rule, but not what the rules are or even what the objective of the game is. The point is that you have to figure out everything based solely upon inference. There are no explicit ways to find out the rules.
If that sounds infuriating to you, I have some bad news: video games do this all the time. There are whole categories of challenge out there based almost entirely upon keeping information out of player hands until the last possible minute. Sometimes they’re wonderful ways of making the game rely more upon your ability to figure things out and adapt on the fly; at other times, they’re a cheap way to set up artificial bottlenecks that mean nothing as long as you have the information. They’re fake challenges and real ones all wrapped up into one.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 