Demo Driver 8: The Stanley Parable Demonstration
Please do not read the alt text for this image.
It’s hard to talk about The Stanley Parable without sounding like you’re a pretentious twit who uses the word “metatextual” far more often than is healthy. (The FDA recommends using it no more than twice per 1000 words.) And The Stanley Parable Demonstration is even a layer beyond that. It’s not so much a demo as it is a metatextual examination of game demos, layered on top of a game that is itself an examination of choice and the illusion of agency of games. So it’s at once trying to convince you to buy a game based on nothing from the actual game, and it’s also trying to point out the futility of trying to demonstrate a game in that fashion.
While it may come as something of a surprise based on all of that, it’s actually fairly effective at giving you an idea of what you’re going to be getting into. It presents its questions, gets you to ask some questions of your own, and the whole thing plays out with just the right mixture of not actually being a game adjacent with just enough player agency. Even if it’s mostly an illusion.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 10
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
It’s kind of a shame that this game hasn’t made as big of a deal about Xande as the root of all evil. Sure, he’s the guy behind a whole lot of crap that we’ve dealt with up to this point, but we haven’t seen him or even heard from him directly. Yes, I know, up until we reached the surface world he was kind of frozen in a flooded landscape, but still. It would have been nice to put a face to the name before now, you know? There’s no sense of an emotional grudge match.
Of course, Final Fantasy II tried doing that, and that had its own problems.
At any rate, the last “dungeon” in Final Fantasy III is pretty ornate, composed of four separate dungeons, albeit with one of them as an optional sidequest. Once you’ve broken through the guardian statues with the four Fangs, you’ve got the chance to see the start, but you need those keys from Unei and Doga to really get into the meat of the dungeon. So off we go, back to the spot where we unlocked the final set of jobs, ready to crush the face of whoever stands between us and our goal.
Hard Project: The Dark Tower
It’s a good game, but you need to play through it 19 times to really get the full experience.
At the heart of everything lies the Tower. The Beams lead to the great Tower, the heart of all worlds, the spoke upon which the wheels of existence turn. The tower is the heart of the battle between the White, the Red, and the Black, a conflict between forces that would preserve life and those that would see it serve more sinister powers or even cast off into nothingness. It would make, I think, a pretty great video game.
I don’t need to point out that we’ve never actually gotten a proper game based on The Dark Tower, do I?
Stephen King’s sprawling story about Roland Deschain has seeped its way into a lot of his other books. Several comics have been made chronicling the time between Roland first becoming a Gunslinger (essentially a paladin with revolvers) and the quest outlined in the books, tromping across the world to seek out the source. It’s been in development hell for an adaptation for years. And it’d make a pretty satisfying game… but I don’t think we’re ever going to get to play one. For some very good reasons.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 9
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
If you take nothing away from this series of columns, aside from the fact that I really enjoy this game, let it be this: the remake does a whole lot of things that aren’t to its credit. The last set of jobs is this in a microcosm.
See, in the original version of Final Fantasy III, the jobs were not anything remotely approaching balanced. Vikings were completely forgettable, for example, having nothing to recommend them aside from HP and some weapons that weren’t needed. Scholars were a joke. And everything in the game was outclassed by the last two jobs you got, which didn’t become available until the last dungeon of the game was well underway.
When Matrix Software remade the game, they really wanted to ensure that all of the jobs had some purpose. Certainly, the remake succeeds in making some of them far more viable – I just listed a couple of them, but even Geomancers, Bards, and Rangers became more viable with the remake. But the last set of jobs now includes Ninja and Sage, and it kind of makes a mess out of things. The efforts to “balance” these jobs ultimately just make the last set less interesting.
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.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 