Zones of death!
“Oh, let’s build a little cottage up there!”
– No one, ever, in the history of the world
Do you know what the top of Mt. Everest is called? The Death Zone. Well, all right, to be really technical the Death Zone is any region in climbing which involves going so high that human beings can’t get enough oxygen to live. It’s a region wherein every moment you stand there brings you closer to death, because you cannot get enough precious, life-giving oxygen.
Why in the world are you going to the Death Zone? Do you want to die? This isn’t the Maybe Sort Of Possible Death Zone If You Know What I Mean, Wink Wink. It is the Death Zone!
Not that this makes the average climber any dumber than the average video game character, or for that matter, the average gamer. We get a lot of laughs out of watching characters do stupid things that we like to say we’re smart enough to avoid, but the fact of the matter is that we’re in the same boat as the horror movie fans who go wandering around int he dark without a flashlight without thinking about it.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite the fact that Firion and the Attractions failed to pick up any allies, the rebel army presses forward with an assault on Fynn. This is… well… it’s the end of the war, right? Our goal here isn’t to now conquer the nation that invaded us as a result of some retaliatory principle, right?
Oh, who am I kidding. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil men is for good men to do nothing, so we’d better keep running this resistance force like an army until we’ve wiped everyone out. I guess.
Anyhow, Hilda and Gordon have come up with a cunning plan to retake the castle. First, the troops will distract the Empire’s troops, because a disciplined military unit is going to be adequately distracted by an ill-equipped resistance band. Then, Firion and the E Street Band will go into the castle and kill the person in charge of the castle. This will result in victory, because it’s not like the numerically superior force will stick around when the commander is gone.
Hard Project: Superman
Truth, Justice, and Soaring Around Looking Majestic.
Superheroes owe their entire existence to Superman. There are worst places to start off. Sure, we’ve spent the last several years inundated with writers who feel that you can’t relate to Superman or that it’s too difficult to give Superman compelling challenges, but if you can’t think of a good setup to tell stories about an alien who was raised by humans and then decided that he liked people so much he wanted to protect all of them forever? That says more about your lack of imagination than the character.
What’s weird, though, is that we’ve never gotten a good video game based off of the Man of Steel. Not a one.
There have been some tolerable versions of Supes in fighting games here and there, yes, although Injustice loses loads of points right from the word go for buying into the “but what if we made Superman evil” school of thought. But every single game version has been some flavor of disappointment, with Superman 64 essentially being used as a synonym for Worst Game Ever. Why in the hell is that? Why is it so difficult to make a good game based around the Last Son of Krypton?
Demo Driver 8: Reaxxion (#348)
If I get that, I can quit my job! Thanks, Reaxxion!
After nearly 40 years, it might be time to stop trying to remake Breakout. I can understand the appeal, totally, but part of what made it work for so long is the fact that the core of the game is so simple. You can only change so much before it starts to become something else altogether.
If it weren’t already obvious from the statements I just made, Reaxxion is a Breakout clone. Like basically every other version of this entire subgenre, Reaxxion clearly wants to be the remake of Breakout to end all further remakes. And, like basically every other thing that tries to be the final remake of any given subgenre, there’s really no way for anything to possibly achieve this goal.
What Reaxxion does achieve, oddly, is to be nearly entirely different from the game it’s emulating. If I had to compare it to anything, it almost feels like some version of a browser game that broke free of its mooring and somehow managed to form a Steam page.
Telling Stories: Buddy event
I have several friends and acquaintances who are roleplayers. This is unsurprising, but it also doesn’t really mean a whole heck of a lot. There are several people who I can talk to about roleplaying but whom I have never actually roleplayed with, or if I have it’s only been in passing. Our connection via roleplaying is entirely based upon a shared hobby rather than any shared experiences, which is all right but does arguably lack a certain degree of immediacy.
I also have several friends with whom I do roleplay, and that’s a very different can of worms. I’m not talking about people like my wife, I’m talking about people who met me originally through roleplaying and we kept talking from there. Obviously, I don’t consider this to be a bad thing; I’m regularly podcasting with a friend I made via roleplaying, I talk to several of my roleplaying friends on a regular basis, this is a very welcome example of an online hobby feeding into actual friendships. But it does pose some unique challenges while at the same time offering some notable benefits.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 