RPG Maker II

Think you can improve on Dragon Warrior? Here?s your chance to prove it, sort of.

RPG Maker II requires three things: a lot of time, a ton of imagination, and a solid USB keyboard. If any of these things are missing from your life, skip making RPGs and stick to simply playing them.

Build a Better Dragon Warrior
To say ?the graphics suck? or ?the sound is generic? would do RPG Maker II a grave injustice because that?s not at all what this baby?s about. This is a game about making games, one that enables you to be an active participant in the act of creation, the tradition of storytelling, and the dark art of video-game design.

RPG Maker II makes a few significant improvements on the original, the most notable of which is the ability to plug in a USB keyboard and use it to enter copious amounts of dialogue and text. The level of tweaking you?re able to do is pretty high (you can edit classes, level-up structures, magic types, enemy animations, etc.), but all the graphics are now wrought with prepackaged 3D building blocks, and you?re more or less confined to a fantasy setting. Some of the joy of world building is lost when you?re locked into a graphics toolset from a first-generation PlayStation Dragon Quest clone.

The Little Brother of Invention
RPG Maker II is definitely what you make of it. A small but active community of RPG makers exists out there on the Internet, even if you can?t trade games online?you have to physically swap memory cards to exchange your games with friends. If you?re really serious about this, better game-creating titles do exist, especially on the PC, offering easier interfaces and more freedom to mess with the basic building blocks. Still, this makes for an entry point into the vast realm of game design.

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment