Growing out
I have it on reliable authority that this was largely okay.
Reading the descriptions of anime on Netflix made me wonder why I’d ever cared about it.
It wasn’t as if I really needed to; I had just finished watching through Star Trek Voyager and needed something new to watch, so I was browsing through shows. I was glancing at anime because, hell, it’s been years since I’ve seen an anime that I genuinely enjoyed, despite the fact that anime was central to such important parts of my life like “meeting my future wife” and “starting me on my current career path.” So I was flipping through, looking at some of the shows that had gotten critical praise, and…
Crap on a stick. Was anime always just a parade of teenage breasts and shitty premises?
I still think there are loads of wonderful stories that anime has given us over the years, and I’m reluctant to say that it’s somehow modern anime that’s the problem; there have always been terrible shows designed to serve as high-velocity fanservice dispensers. The problem, in part, is me. Novelty made these things appealing enough to overlook when I was younger, but once the novelty light gets yanked away I start to see what was always there.
Demo Driver 8: The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight
You can set up how many visual effects are on screen, which can make this cleaner to read as necessary.
What bothers me about “retro” games so often is that they miss the entire point of the exercise. The games that I played as a child were not in any way, shape, or form undiluted masterpieces; they were products of their time as surely as anything. Too often retro games wind up treating the entirety of these games as religious experiences, as if every single element was equally important in making games fun and you can’t have a truly fun game without a whole pile of obscuring and unpleasant tedious components.
In theory, you can do better. You can take the parts that did work, the genres and elements that don’t really make it in the triple-A marketplace these days, and get rid of the tedium and missteps. Cut out the spirit and pull that forward, but leave the bones where they lie. Separate the platform and the moment from the overall experience.
The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight is close to what I’d consider a prime example of how to do exactly that. It’s not entirely there, and some bits and pieces are unlikely to change before it moves from Early Access to an actual launch. But even those broken bits aren’t broken enough to make it an exercise in tedium.
Telling Stories: The space between “can” and “should”
Let me make two points that are so self-evident they should be entirely unnecessary, and yet they come up time and again. The first is one that has been discussed to death: You can make any sort of character for roleplaying that you want. The second is equally obvious: There are a lot of things you should and should not do when making a character.
These are not contradictions.
It can be hard, at times, to separate the two. But the entire purpose of this column, and the one I did before this, and any subsequent columns on the same topic I do after this is talking about what you should do. A column talking about what you can do with roleplaying would be extremely short and boring, consisting of exactly one entry (“you can do what you want”) and offering no useful advice. But among all the things you can do, there are a lot of things you should or should not do, and just because something is in fact possible does not make it a good idea.
Two points for conventions
Every time I think that I’m out, I get pulled back in. And that’s not counting the sheer number of times I want to be out.
As you read this – but not as I write this, since I work ahead – I’m getting my last preparations in order for another ride up to Boston for PAX East. I’ve been going every single year for work since it first started running, and every year I have kind of hoped that this would be the year I didn’t have to go, because I don’t particularly like Boston or conventions in general. Yet it keeps happening no matter how many stars seem to align against it. Here I go again on my own, et cetera.
Despite my stated dislike for conventions, though, there’s a lot of good that does come out of them, sometimes in spite of everything. So as much as people complain about the lines, the smell of sweat, the crowds, the expense, and the creepers that infest every event like a Minecraft region gone horribly wrong, there are two good reasons to still head up to one if you can take the time. Even when I don’t want to ship out – which is usually the time – I’m happy that these are still there.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 14
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
It’s all over but the shouting now. If you’ve managed to build a party that could reach this far into the final dungeon of The After Years, you’ve gotten everything on lockdown. Time to wrap up what has been one of the most bizarrely drawn-out sequels in the franchise, which is saying something when there are only three games in the franchise that have had actual, direct sequels at all.
The problem I have, of course, is that there are really two stories being told through the game. The first is the overarching plot regarding the Mysterious Girl, the Crystals, and so forth. That’s about 50% interesting and 50% rehashes. The second, though, are the individual stories with bits of character development and so forth. For reasons known only to the designers, the conclusion basically abandons those individual stories altogether, despite the fact that the individual tales sort of left them halfway to being finished. Instead of bulking out this conclusion with those smaller resolutions, well, you read the last column. It was bulked out with 20-odd bosses.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 