Telling Stories: Breaking into the middle
When I first went to college, I had a very simple goal: do better there than I had in high school. I had a sound guideline to help me establish that, as well. I figured that if my first instinct about what to do in any situation had resulted in acting the way I had all through high school, clearly the best course of action would be to gauge my first instinct and then do the opposite in any situation. Thus, when I saw a pretty girl and a guy chatting at the first meeting of the school’s anime club, I decided the logical course of action was to walk right up and invite myself to the conversation.
The result? Well, the pretty girl wound up marrying me and the guy roomed with me in college for several years and is still a dear friend. But that was lucky, since my behavior was so screamingly rude that I’m relatively certain I should have been sent to Behavior Jail. But of course, how else are you going to insert yourself in a social situation when roleplaying? Yes, there were dozens of other options open to me as a person in the real world, but if you see interesting roleplaying go down, how do you take part without making your character a rude, abrasive jerk?
Game companies feel like people
If game companies were more like cats, I think I’d like them more.
It all started when I was thinking about BioWare.
I like BioWare, if you didn’t know. I like them quite a bit. Sure, the studio has made missteps here and there, they’ve goofed up, they haven’t been as good as I know they can be. But the studio is trying. I realized that more than anything, they feel like someone worth knowing. Sure, they’re going to blow it occasionally, but not because they’re bad, just because everyone makes mistakes, and they seem to take their mistakes in stride and move on.
That, of course, led to me thinking about how many other companies feel like people instead of just machines made to take money. Yes, that’s what they are, but if the Supreme Court keeps insisting that corporations are entitled to all of the same benefits as individual people, we might as well start talking about these studios as people, right? It seems only fair.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Everything seemed to be going so well for a while there. We had an airship again after we’d wrecked the first one. We had not only just finished one leg of our supposed quest, we had done so immediately after finishing the prior leg of the quest, very efficient-like. (It’s good to have these things on your resume for future world-saving gigs according to Destined Heroes Quarterly.) We failed to save one shrine maiden! And now here we are, stuck inside of a town with a big lock on our airship.
I supposed we’d better walk back into the town and find out what’s going on, huh?
Well, yes, but we should also take the opportunity to examine the new jobs we got from the Water Crystal, because this is when we start getting into the fun stuff. The first crystal gave us the basic lineup, the second one gave us a few nice outliers, but we’ve got some new jobs to play around with! So let’s take a look at the lot of them.
Hard Project: Pacific Rim
You see that chassis and your brain immediately starts playing the theme song. Mine does anyway.
The main reason that I can’t say Pacific Rim was my absolute favorite movie of 2013 is simply because Frozen also came out last year. It was an absolute treat just the same, a summer action film that understood that it didn’t have to be dumb and didn’t have to assume you were stupid. There were giant robots, there were giant monsters, there were references to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the midst of it. Great stuff. I have seen it at least half a dozen times now.
Of course, the fact that we’re supposedly getting an animated series gives rise to the hope that we’ll get more toys and licensed products, but even from the film alone it seems incomprehensible that we didn’t get a great game. And we didn’t, of course – it was a weak game saved only by its connection to a film in which you punch the hell out of kaiju in a giant robot. But why is that? What makes the game so hard to develop in the first place? Is it possible that even with a sequel and a cartoon it’s still not going to lend itself nicely to a game?
Demo Driver 8: Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten (#179)
Next time I play this game, I’m going to name you Blinky just for continuity.
I’m very fond of tower defense games as a concept, but over the years I’ve started to get just a wee bit tired of them. I mean, there are only so many ways that you can assemble a game based on enemies coming in straight lines toward a central objective before life just plain starts getting boring. And at first glance, Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is not the game to revitalize the experience, seeing as it’s filled with Flash-level non-animations and an interface that screams indie production in all the worst ways.
Then you play it and you want to continue playing it until you forget how to play any other game ever forever. This thing is an absolute joy.
While last week’s demo barely fleshed out 15 minutes, this week’s offering was something I dove into and could happily have kept playing for another hour, both because it allowed me to do so and because the game is just plain great. I have high praise for this one, and while it has its flaws, it is a superb example of a game being well worth the asking price.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 