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Mar 28th, 2012 at 11:42:54 - Chess (Other) |
So my second game of chess against my roommate ended in a loss as well, much to my anguish. The game was much closer this time around though and it took a fair while for him to defeat me but in the end it was a deserved victory. I think the game changed when I lost two pawns in quick succession. This gave him control of the area just outside my base and from then on, I was trapped in my own area, not being able to make any attacks of my own. I made quite a few more observations about the game of chess in this sitting but since I explained a lot about the game play in my first gamelog, I will leave most of that out for this one.
Being such an ancient game, you can’t really say chess has any innovative elements. A lot of games have indeed been inspired from chess like checkers or Go and so there is not much that is unique to chess maybe with the exception of the distinct movement of the individual pieces as compared to checkers where there are no unique pieces and all pieces have the same degree of movement.
I would think the design elements that make chess such a great game would have to be the simplicity of the rules and the uncomplicated nature of the game. It does not take a long time for even a beginner to figure out how the game works as the only restrictions are the movement of the individual pieces. Having a variety of movement from the diagonal mobility of the bishop to the single step advancement of the pawn also makes the game more interesting as the player has a great deal of options to choose from at each step and thus a diverse range of tactics to employ.
I think the game mainly keeps the player interested due to its great replay value. No two chess games are the same and in every game the player will face new scenarios and board positions to overcome. This is made possible by the myriad of choice of moves available to the players. Hence, it is interesting as you have to think on your feet and every game brings with the opportunity to try out new strategies.
There is not much I would change about the game seeing how popular a game it is. But the one thing that for me, makes it a bit unfair is that white always gets the first move. This makes the game biased in favor of the white player as he gets to set the tempo of the game and the other player may forever be responding to his moves. There is no obvious solution to this, maybe except to have two sittings in each game and alternating who gets to start first.
As we are thinking of developing a puzzle/strategy game ourselves, chess does certainly provide some have some features we can borrow for our game. For example, we could have two characters who have different degrees of movement and who must work together to achieve a common goal.
Chess certainly has emergent complexity. In fact, that’s what the whole game is about. Developing more complex tactics from the simple movement of the pieces is the basis for winning the game. The more clever the tactic developed the less chances the opponent has of guarding against it. Beginners may not be able to develop complex tactics but as they get more experience in playing, they will learn to how to respond to certain situation and thus be able to come up with their own tactics.
There is no reward structure to the game and the only goal is to capture the king. Maybe the only other place where you are rewarded for your efforts is when you can get a pawn to the end of the enemy line and which allows you to get him promoted to another piece. However, I do not concentrate much on this as it is very difficult to do and can divert attention from the main aim of the game which is to capture the king. There is also no real feeling of flow to a chess game. In fact, each board position can be imagined to be a separate puzzle to solve in itself.
I had a great deal of interaction with my opponent while playing the game. Some people believe psychology to be an important part of chess and both of us engaged in various taunts to influence the others moves.
Chess will certainly work as a computer game as there have been chess programs developed which have even beaten the World champion in chess. Microsoft’s Chess Titans has also been quite successful since its release. As per what I was taught in my AI class, the way the AI chess player works is to do a depth limited look ahead of every board position and evaluate these through a evaluation function developed through machine learning. The greater the difficulty level ,the more look ahead the AI player does. As such, it can provide a challenge to even the most advanced chess players.
So, that’s the end of my gamelog on chess. Chess is a great game which everyone can and should play at some time.
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Mar 25th, 2012 at 13:20:15 - Chess (Other) |
So, after numerous failed attempts at persuading my roommates to get off their computers and play a board/card game together, I finally managed to convince one of them, an avid chess-player to engage in a game of chess with me. Yes, I would have preferred to write about a more original game but the only other thing I could find around my room was a dusty laden Risk board game box with many missing pieces. So, the following is my reflection from the first epic war of chess I waged with my roommate.
I didn’t get off to a good start. I opened with one of my favorite opening moves, the “Ruy Lopez”, or at least I attempted to but my roommate saw what was coming and attacked my pawn causing me to move a knight out of position to cover for the pawn. However, after a couple of turns, I was powerless to resist as out of nowhere I saw a pawn taken and then another one. I then quickly lost what ended up a short-lived one-sided game, even though weirdly enough, I managed to capture my opponent’s Queen. In retrospect though, this was not as weird as I thought and it brings me to my first observation about the game of chess, a greedy approach never works. Making a locally optimum choice at each step does not enable one to reach the global optimum in chess. Once I had gotten over my aghast at the loss, I realized I had been baited. He had transfixed my attention on his Queen leading me to neglect the defense of my King. This enabled him to isolate my King and capture him easily thus winning the match. This is a great example of how you have to think a few steps in advance in chess and not just about your next move. It is certainly not a feature unique to chess though as in most strategy games, there is an element of planning for the future, but in few games are the consequences of failing to do this as stark as in chess.
It has been remarked that the complexity of a chess game tree is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. With so many different moves, one has to find the right move and this is where tactics comes in. Tactics in chess are born out of the distinctive restrictions of movement of each chess piece. The pawn has the greatest restriction, while the Queen the least, with other pieces falling somewhere in between. This gives a natural order of importance to each chess piece and the more pieces of greater importance you capture, the more closer you are to winning the game. There are quite a few famous chess tactics which you can expect to see in most games, Examples include forking, where you place a chess piece in a position in which you can attack more than one of the opponents pieces. The opponent is then only able to protect one of his pieces, leading to the capture of the other. One of my favorite tactics is that of the pinning where you can force an opponent piece to not move as doing so can result in the capture of a piece behind it. This is normally executed with a bishop or the Queen as these can travel multiple steps. Likewise, other pieces are better at executing other tactics and their importance can change depending on the game conditions. The bishop and the knight are normally ranked of equal importance but the bishop is much more deadly at the end of the game where there is vast amounts of space to move into and the bishop can exploit this more easily as it can travel multiple steps. Likewise the rook is of limited use in the middle of a game where the chess board is crowded and the rook can only take one or two steps at the most. As there is no definite rule, it is fully up to the discretion of the player to decide the optimal move.
In most games of chess, players also, whether knowingly or unknowingly prefer certain styles of play. A common preference is to control the center of the board by placing many of your pieces here as this is seen by many as a key area from which the you can have access to most parts of the board. It has been shown that most captures take place in the center. Another approach could be to take the initiative in a game and attack from the go, forgoing control of the centre in favor of moving your pieces to as close to enemy lines as soon as possible. This could be very useful as then your opponent spends most of his time responding to your moves and has little opportunities to launch attacks of his own.
Among advanced players, chess is also seen to mainly comprise of identifying common board positions and employing the best preset strategy to deal with it. Examples include the Sicilian defense, and the King’s gambit. Professional players are able to memorize various board positions and the appropriate moves for them.
That’s all from my first gamelog of chess. Hopefully, I will have a victory to write about in the next gamelog.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Mar 25th, 2012 at 13:21:58.
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Feb 5th, 2012 at 18:18:17 - Upgrade (PC) |
So, I played upgrade again over the weekend and to my horror, when I started the game, I realized my save system did not work. I’m not sure if the cookies accidentally got deleted or something but I was now left to start again at level 1. However, as I knew how the game worked now, I quickly got through to level 10( where I had left off ) in about 15 minutes. After another 20 minutes or so of bullet spamming, I had got through to level 20 and completed the whole game. Below is my reflection from the second day of playing Upgrade.
This time around I had unlocked ( bought ) two more features to the game, the progress bar and the achievements list. The progress bar tells you how much of the game you still have to explore in terms of upgrading, level completion and such and the achievements bar sets specific achievements for you to complete such as completing a certain amount of upgrading. However, I was unsure of the function of the achievements bar as you did not seems to gain anything from completing any of the achievements. I guess it is there just to give the players a sense of accomplishment.
However, I did not particularly enjoy my second time playing the game. For one, the gameplay is very routine. Once, you upgrade your weapons to more powerful ones, the game just becomes a case of pressing down the shoot key and spamming the bullets. The novelty of discovering how your upgraded weapons work had also worn off as all the upgrades worked just the same, your weapons just got more powerful without any features being added to them. They even looked the same even after upgrading. Hence, I think more variety of weapons could have been introduced as the levels increased to keep the player captivated. Another problem was that that I could not direct the missile and lighting attacks. these are done automatically and sometimes they did not target the enemies I wanted to. Better AI for this could be implemented.
The game should also introduce more types of enemies. Maybe ones that can shoot back at the player as well. Then the player would have to concentrate on shooting as well as on dodging enemy bullets. I would also give more reward to the player for completing a level as the upgrades are very costly.
Also, I feel the graphics could be better , even though you can upgrade the graphics as well because even at the highest level of upgrade the ships look suspiciously like they were drawn by a six- year old.
There is not much scope for emergent complexity in this game as it is a pretty simple one where your only action is to shoot at the enemy and the only outcome is that of the enemy being destroyed- or your bullet missing the enemy. As such, there are no advanced tactics or strategies to learn or think of in gameplay. As this game is a single player there is no interaction with other players as well. The makers of this game could introduce a multiplayer option where two player would either work together to destroy the enemies or go up against one another. This could make it more interesting than just challenging the computer whose AI is very basic.
There is some flow to the game while playing it as the enemies become more and more difficult to destroy and more numerous in number. There could have been a story-line added with a mission to add more flow to the game. This would enable the player to feel as if destroying the enemies had a higher purpose and so the feel more flow to the game as he progresses through the levels to goal of the mission.
However, for all the shortcomings, the game still seems quite successful as evidenced by the large number of players to have played it and the development of a sequel (Upgrade Complete 2 ) to it. The main idea of the game- that of upgrade is one I can use in my own games. This idea of upgrading I feel keeps the player more interested in the game as they will be keen to see how the new upgrade will function.
As a whole , I think the game has an innovative core idea which could have been implemented much better. The sequel could be worth playing if it has corrected some of the issues in the first game.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 5th, 2012 at 18:19:43.
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Jan 29th, 2012 at 00:23:33 - Upgrade (PC) |
Upgrade is a free online 2D scrolling shooter that i came upon while browsing some game sites. The game title seemed interesting and i decided to try it out. After playing for a while i found the game interesting and continued on. Below is my gamelog from the first day of playing this game.
The gameplay of Upgrade is very simple. The player is in control of a main ship and the aim is to shoot down other ships.If all enemy ships are destroyed, you progress to the next level. Where this game gets interesting is in the concept
of upgrading. Virtually everything in this game has to be bought or "upgraded", including the preloader, the title screen and even the menu buttons which give you the option of playing the game (You are given a small amount of money at the start to buy all these). Even the graphics can be upgraded. You start out with stick-figure-like ships that can be upgraded to look presentable. The money to upgrade all these comes from destroying the enemy ships. Each enemy ship gives off a coin upon getting destroyed which the user's ship has to catch.
I start off the game with my basic ship which consists of two level 1 guns and fail at the very first level. However, the good thing is that the game does not penalize you for being a failure and you can fail any level any number of times without any consequences. Shooting down some enemies has given me some money though and i use that to buy another gun. The game also gives me the option to build the ship however i wish to and i place my new gun in the middle of the other two to maximize shooting range.I get past level 1 and progress through the
other levels.In the process, i have added a lightning arc, a speed panel and a missile to my ship. I have also upgraded the graphics of the game( this costs a lot of money ) and it no longer looks like i'm stuck in the stone age.However, i also make the mistake of buying background music. If you are planning to play this game, please don't do this. The in-game music seems like something used to initiate seizure attacks and i play the rest of the game with my volume turned down to avoid a trip to the physician.I progress through to level 10 and that
is where i decide that i am done with upgrading for today and save the game for playing later(you have to buy the save system as well of course).
After the first day of playing Upgrade, I feel that the the whole game being based around the concept of upgrading is very innovative and the most
interesting element of the game.Although this is certainly not a new feature as
you can draw a parallel to games like age of empires where you can upgrade your civilization and weapons as the game progresses, the whole game being dependent on this idea of upgrading is certainly unprecedented.The main incentive for me
to carry on playing the game was finding out how your new upgrades will function/look rather than to complete the levels.
The controls for the game are very intuitive and require no time at all to learn.The arrow keys move the ship while spacebar fires bullets. The main ship can only move horizontally and not vertically.It may be an addition to the game to enable vertical movement as well, but in truth it is not necessary as the game is easy as it is and adding vertical movement will only make it easier.
There is a good diversity of weapon choice in the game from the guns which you can aim where to fire at to the lightning arc which automatically drains the health of nearby enemies.There are also other accessories to add onto the ship such as the speed panel which enables your ship to move faster and the coin magnet which attracts coins towards you.The ability to design your own ship is also very interesting for me. This is probably the only place in the whole game where you need a bit a strategy as if you place the weapons too close together or all to one side, your shooting range narrows. Thus, you need to manoeuvre the weapons around to find an optimal place for all the weapons which will maximize your shooting range.
This is a very short game. There are only 20 levels and progressing to the tenth level took less than half an hour. I guess this is a good thing as i was getting a bit tired of all the shooting and just wanted to progress through levels as fast i can and obtain the money to do the upgrades.
There is not much replay value to the game as like i mentioned before, my main interest was in finding out how my upgrades would look/function. Once i discovered that, there is no incentive for me to go back and play the earlier levels.A good idea would be to introduce some sort of difficulty level to the game as i do not find it to be much of a challenge.The added difficulty could be in the form of more/stronger enemies or more intelligent enemies.Right now, all enemy ships just drift to the bottom of the screen. It would definitely make the game much more interesting if the enemy ships tried to avoid the bullets being fired at them.
That is all from my first day of playing Upgrade. The link to the game is below.
http://armorgames.com/play/3955/upgrade-complete
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 29th, 2012 at 00:25:27.
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