Demo Driver 8: Sleeping Dogs (#109)
I CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL
There are some genres that I’m inclined to be a little more harsh toward than others, and then there are genres where I’m more likely to be happy a game exists at all. Case in point: free-roaming destructive sandboxes a la Grand Theft Auto, which is a genre we really need better terminology for but one which you can instantly recognize. You’re walking around, you can hop in vehicles, for some reason there are remarkably light penalties for randomly belting someone on a busy street. You know the sort.
So I was predisposed to like Sleeping Dogs even before sitting down and playing it. The demo, unfortunately, only scratches the surface of what the game has to offer, which makes a certain amount of sense; loading the entirety of a digital Hong Kong into the game would probably be a bit too much. But what was there was pretty great even aside from that, and if the rest of the game is like what the demo has on offer, it now has my distinct attention.
Telling Stories: Serial roleplaying or building events
One of the things that has made my wife and I both develop an affection for Netflix-produced shows is the simple fact that these shows don’t have to work like traditional television. They can break a cardinal rule that’s long been accepted as fact – they can be completely non-serial.
Most shows have to be designed so that you can sit down and watch with a minimum of overall knowledge. This isn’t always a bad thing; after all, Batman: The Animated Series ran on the idea of boiling down the characters to their essences, and it was one of the best animated shows ever. But when you get shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you feel the writers struggling against the restrictions imposed by a format that relied upon standalone episodes. It’s kind of a miracle that Lost ran as long as it did while putting up a wall for any new viewers.
There’s something of the same issue when it comes to roleplaying. You’ve got a tug-of-war between the serial version or a more constant continuity. The trouble is that one is a lot more rewarding than the other, and the benefits of serial roleplaying are mostly conceptual.
Tough acts to follow
So far I’ve been having a blast, and that’s usually my first goal with any game in the franchise, so mission accomplished.
The Sims 4 came out just a little while ago, and I like it. It’s had some stuff snipped from it and some other things added in; conversations feel a lot more organic, for one thing, and relationships are thankfully measured along two axes rather than one. It’s solid, in other words. But its biggest competitor is hanging over its head in the form of the third game in the franchise.
I’m not really interested in talking here about what features were removed for this incarnation of the game; by and large, the cuts feel like they were good removals considering what got more development as a result. But I found myself thinking how difficult a road the game has ahead of it based not upon its own merits but simply by virtue of being new. There’s no reason a new game with a new engine can match up to what a predecessor with five years of development has accomplished, and yet it has to do exactly that. It’s a tough act to follow.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
All right. So let’s go over this for just a minute. Assume you work as an innkeeper in a desert oasis town not too far from a major castle. One day, you see someone new strolling into town. Closer inspection reveals that he is a man in ominous black armor, carrying a young girl who has obviously been injured and weeping recently.
What I’m getting at here is that it’s a major miracle that the game’s lot didn’t end here, with Cecil being sent to every single possible jail. I mean, the explanation would just make it worse. “See, it’s because I killed her mom!”
Yes, after you’ve blown a village to hell, the only thing to really do is head for the nearest town in the hope that the girl you traumatized and almost killed isn’t actually dead. The innkeeper lets you take her to a bed to rest immediately, and said girl wakes up after about five seconds of bed rest. Despite Cecil’s eagerness, she’s a little reluctant to chat with him due to the whole dead mother thing, so Cecil also prepares to go to sleep. Until soldiers burst in, anyway.
Hard Project: Adventure Time
Well, everything looks right, I suppose.
If you haven’t seen Adventure Time yet, go do that now. The first two seasons are on Netflix, you have no excuse. Do what you have to do. Shove someone down a flight of stairs if you have to! Except probably not that, because that’s kind of an awful thing to do, and Adventure Time is a show that is generally against doing awful things like shoving people down flights of stairs. Unless they really want you to and they’re cool with it.
Where was I? Right, Adventure Time, which is absolutely wonderful. It’s a fun show. It’s got fun comics. It’s got a few games, and only one of those has produced a non-tepid response. That’s a bit weird, seeing as how the show has been running for long enough that there’s lead time for some development and a lot of creative people really like this show. There’s every reason for it to be successful, and yet the games just don’t stand up. So why is that? What’s keeping us from having a totally sweet Adventure Time video game?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 