Demo Driver 8: Don Bradman Cricket 14 (#126)
Cricket, the last great mystery of our age.
Ladies and gentlemen, when I rolled this game, I knew I was in for a treat right from the beginning.
I do not know much of anything about cricket. I know that it is a game that is enjoyed in the UK and several points directly related, but if asked at gunpoint to name three distinct positions in cricket I would be reduced to vague guessing and prayer. I know absolutely nothing about the rules of the game. And if that weren’t enough reason to be smiling about this game, there’s the simple fact that it also requires a controller, thereby suggesting a level of precision and expectations for play that I had no way of living up to.
So why did I know I was in for a treat? Because either I would be in for an unexpected blast or I’d be reduced to playing a Very Serious Sports Game as something between Grand Theft Auto and NBA Jam due to total unfamiliarity. I can’t say it’ll provide a good evaluation of the game compared to other cricket titles, but you know, I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride there.
Telling Stories: Avoiding cabinet flaws
Once you get the idea in your head that characters should be flawed, you don’t immediately know how to go about making that a thing. So you wind up with characters who have cabinet flaws, and over time you solve those flaws, and then suddenly your character isn’t flawed any longer. You’re right back to boring old square one, but you can’t not address the cabinet flaw, right? The whole reason it’s there just cries out to be addressed and rectified!
Of course, it would probably help if I took a step back and defined what I meant in the first place by a cabinet flaw.
See, the idea of character flaws is easy to comprehend. You want your characters to have problems, to have to struggle to overcome something. At their core, flaws are problems. So you give your character an obvious hole in their abilities, something that they distinctly cannot do rather than will not do. The archetypical example is a paladin who’s ruggedly handsome, brilliant, and fearsome on the battlefield – but per the name, he can’t fix cabinets.
Keep the lights on
The light of the Crystal, great, but can we talk a little more about the light of the server’s power indicator?
When Final Fantasy IX first released, it had a whole companion website, PlayOnline. The site was an in-depth interactive walkthrough for the entire game, filled with database information, all the stuff you could possibly want from a site devoted to a single game. The site was also designed to work with people who had bought the strategy guide, which tied into parts of the website wherein players could enter codes and see additional tips and tricks about a given area of the game.
That was dumb all by itself. But it makes the owners of the strategy guide look even more silly now, because that walkthrough site is gone. It doesn’t exist any more. The URL is now devoted to Final Fantasy XI, after Square’s grand ideas about that service’s functionality fell through.
You might say that it’s irrelevant, and it certainly is. But it speaks to an issue with a lot of games that were launching around the same time that the century turned, and one of the features that gaming is still struggling to deal with. Everyone knows, of course, that online functionality is important. It’s also not free, and the graveyards are littered with the bones of functions that got torn away.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The last time around for this column, things really picked up in Final Fantasy IV. Betrayals, loss, sabotage, and other unpleasant events! It was nifty. For the audience, anyway. For Cecil, it’s kind of a pile of crap, as he’s lost literally everything yet again and now has no idea where in the hell he is. If you told him he had died and gone to hell, it would be pretty believable.
What little good news Cecil has at the moment (i.e. the fact that he’s not dead) is quickly undone once you realize where you are. Remember the very beginning of the game, when Cecil was returning from a successful campaign to steal the crystal from Mysidia? Yep. Here we are, back again. It’s not mentioned at any point if the people in Mysidia tend to hold grudges, but given that plenty of people will cast status spells on you and otherwise ruin poor solitary Cecil’s day, I’m going to go ahead and say that they do.
Hard Project: Front Mission
Oh, they did all right. I don’t trip over my own feet all that often.
I like Front Mission a lot. Except I don’t, not really; I like the tiny amount of it that I’ve played a lot, which amounts to two officially localized games, two other games handled as a fan translation project, and a whole lot of carefully researched side materials. It’s possible that there’s something within the other chunk of the games and supplementary materials that would change my entire viewpoint, I don’t know, but you’d think that there would be more than a fragment of the 11-game-strong series over here.
The entire franchise appears to be consigned to die the death of a small yappy dog now, and while I’m sad about that, I can kind of understand it. Sure, the people in charge had ideas about where to take the franchise next, and that’s a good thing. But the overall scope of the thing is a hard project to take on, and after the by-all-accounts-execrable Front Mission Evolved, perhaps the challenge was just too great for too little reward.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 