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Mar 5th, 2008 at 04:06:19 - Dynasty Warriors Gundam (360) |
Gameplay
The game allows the player to move freely through several different environments including desert, city, cave, space, and ice. The terrains differ in size and natural obstacles and space gives the illusions of terrain and altitude change by making units float upwards as you approach. Some items lodged in the ground can be destroyed but larger objects cannot be damaged and only a few can be affected directly. Beyond that the player can fight all enemies without damaging allies and it is often up to the player to actively push the attack on enemy bases and conquer territories.
The game is broken into campaigns by pilot and each pilot in turn has a set of missions that they set out to beat. The levels are one continuous set of events that the player must react to as they occur and act to prevent a loss. The player and subsequent pilot are locked into a single mobile suit, which they must maintain in order to continue fighting and prevent a loss. At each of the levels the pilot will be arbitrarily given a mobile suit except that once the player completes all of the missions for the pilot they can choose which mobile suit to use.
The main hook that grabs the player’s interest in a game that takes the better part of an hour to do one level is the variable point of view for each pilot. Different pilots in the same mission can have completely different objectives because they have different motives as defined by their personality from the anime series. This variable personality and motivation combined with the alternating levels for different pilots ensures that no matter where the player starts they will discover new features as they continue to play.
The game holds the player’s interest by pitting them against other mobile suits that can be unlocked as they continue to play. In addition to locking the player with the promise of new mobile suits the player can unlock pilot abilities and equipment modifications that open new pathways at every turn. Some of the suits even promote themselves by demonstrating amazing and powerful techniques to the player. Many of the equipment and skill modifications only become available at later levels, which drives the player to continue exploring and fighting. The game eve drives the player by increasing the difficulty between levels and in the later mobile suits (such as the one with no ranged techniques).
Design
The gameworld consists of independent, open-territory levels, strung together to facilitate the illusion of a real battlefield where the only boundaries are natural ones. This often includes tactical objectives, retreats and advances, surprise attacks and mass numbers of both allies and enemies. The game is designed to imitate the Dynasty Warriors saga with the template of the Gundam universe and as such everything is scaled to show the difference in scale between a human and a mobile suit. For instance, an expansive temple with enough space and buildings to make any human feel insignificant gets the walls and smaller buildings trampled by the mobile suit forces.
The level designs are based around tactical arrangement of allies and enemies in order to permit any of the three possible sides to take complete control of the battlefield or lose everything. Allies and enemies navigate the terrain and obstacles to try and conquer and hold strategic points and defend key areas. Every level includes a set of units that carry names and pilot stronger suits. In most cases these are recurring protagonists/antagonists from the different Gundam shows that are represented in the game.
The rewards are given in three conditions: mid-level, end-of-level, and end-of-campaign. Mid-level rewards are items that give the player temporary upgrades to attack, defense and speed or health and special attack gauge. End-of-level rewards are given for leveling up the pilot and mobile suit during the battle and usually include items to improve the mobile suit and special skills that the pilot can use to improve their performance in combat. End-of-campaign rewards are only given once a player has completed all the missions for their selected pilot and are only presented once for each pilot. They include unlocking new pilots and mobile suits as well as granting the pilot the ability to choose from the available roster of mobile suits when they revisit old levels.
Battle for this game is conducted as if the player was engaged in a real war. Enemies consist mostly of minions, which pose no real threat to the player, and bosses/leaders, which force the player to use defenses and special techniques more frequently. The player always takes the role of a leader and can coordinate special attacks with allied leaders to release more powerful techniques. Enemy minions act as units of health for the different territories and most mobile suits have a “field clearing” button combination attack that make it more efficient to group enemies around you.
While most of the conflict for the official mode is designated by the original series and not explained very well in the game the shifting allegiances in the four-faction power struggle of the original mode are only explained by the in-game dialogue and for the most part seem to revolve around misunderstandings and sheer stubbornness. The reason for conflict usually boils down to “I live to fight,” “Fighting is a way of life for me,” or “There is someone/something/some event that I must kill/destroy/stop.” As often as not allies from original series are broken up and rivals are teamed up with each other. There is one case of interesting alliances where a protagonist of one series is partnered with the antagonist of another series and vice versa.
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Mar 5th, 2008 at 04:05:46 - Dynasty Warriors Gundam (360) |
Summary
Dynasty Warriors Gundam combines the mass-combat battle style of Dynasty Warriors with the giant robot mobile suits from the Gundam series (and there are a lot of them). The game allows you to play through the storylines of the first 3 series and allows you to play through an original campaign featuring 2 to 4 characters from at least six different series. The game makes effective use of the battle system to provide a (more or less) realistic experience of the battle including the elite warrior encounters and excluding the actual firing rate of enemies.
Gameplay
The story of the game is divided into 2 sections: official mode and original mode. The official mode lest you play through the first three Gundam series in about three to five mission zones and levels. Initially you get to play as the protagonists from each of the 3 series but as you progress and clear the missions for each of them you unlock their main rival as a playable character. The official mode starts you off with only 3 characters (again the protagonist from their respective series) but will add any characters you complete in official mode and an ally from original mode when you clear the character. The story for the original mode is a completely new story that doesn’t correspond to any
The battlefield for each level is enormous so that the player never feels tracked but there is a clear distinction between the allied areas and enemy areas. Often the player will be directed to a single area or a leader that the player must defeat. When these orders are ignored or postponed the player will start losing territories or allied leaders. These objectives usually only take a few minutes to complete but more often than not there are more than four of these events in a single level. Each level has a time limit of ninety minutes but a good player can complete an early mission in about 20 minutes while a completionist tops out at around an hour.
The player is given control of a Gundam, usually of arbitrary designation based on the chosen pilot but after a mission clear the player can revisit pilots with new Gundams. These Gundams represent advanced mobile suits that have stronger attacks and greater durability than an average mobile suit. Each Gundam has unique attack patterns and combinations utilizing beam/ bullet ranged weaponry and a beam sword/ martial arts for melee techniques. Each Gundam is also equipped with a special technique that deals much greater damage but must be recharged after every use with additional combat.
There are five different “upgrades” that can be acquired as the player progresses. During combat the player can pick up temporary upgrades and health packs that give them a slight advantage in battle. In addition they can pick up equipment items for their suit, which become available upon mission completion. As a player gains experience and completes missions they also gain special abilities that can be equipped for different effects. Once a pilot completes all their missions they unlock other pilots with different perspectives on similar missions and storylines. At the same time that pilot unlocks the ability to select different mobile suits form a roster of available suits.
Battle is conducted as real war zone combat with a few elite units commanding hordes of underlings and dominating the battlefield on their own. Minions on both sides engage in combat quickly and willingly with little regard to whom they are facing. In any territorial dispute that doesn’t involve leader suits the outcome is usually based on the size of the attacking force over how quickly the defending territory spawns reinforcements. This can take several minutes by which time a leader has intervened and tilted the odds in their favor. It is often the case that leaders from opposite sides will clash during a territorial battle and which ever wins takes control of the area. Once a territory is under a faction control the minions count as health for the territory before it changes sides.
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Feb 20th, 2008 at 04:46:45 - Wii Sports (Wii) |
Gameplay
The degree of interactivity within the gameworld is severely limited by the parameters of the sport in question and by the minimal functional space of the playing field. Baseball only has the pitcher’s position and the batter’s position that the player has any control over. Similarly all other sports are interactively limited to what a person in the real sport would be allowed to do.
Social interactions are all but absent in this game. The most reaction you get from the opposing team (baseball, tennis)/computer player (boxing, golf)/inanimate objects (bowling) is a retaliatory punch or strike of the ball. The only verbal interaction is the announcer calling score at every logical opportunity. Beyond the announcer everyone else (with the exception of the player if they choose to yell at glitches) remains adamantly mute throughout the game.
The only way to keep the player actively using the game is to hook them in an inescapable fascination with at least one sport. This means that on average (accounting for people with 2 attachments and people with no attachments) only one sport of the five is going to be in regular use. The initial problem with maintaining player interest in the game is that the time required to acquire a decent degree of skill with any sport is above the attention span of many gamers. This is made crippling when the game fails to deliver on any means of extending its shelf life beyond the release of the first few real Wii games.
Ultimately Wii Sports was made to buy time for developers to install a stronger lineup of well-built, deeper, and more extensive games. While the game comes as standard for the starting package it fails to live beyond about this point in time, when the other Wii games are coming out in droves. In the end it only serves to familiarize players with the Wii-mote, which is also the point of the Wii Play game except to a higher degree and focusing more on the player’s reflexes and cognition than ability to swing a baton around.
Design
Everything in the gameworld revolves round the use of the Mii avatars and subsequently the driver that can run the beautiful graphics of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption ends up looking like the graphics of the N-64 where everything can be traced to a lego-esc brick design. Despite the refined look of the avatars over the N-64 it nonetheless drives that image of old graphics for older systems.
At the end of each game (regardless of win, loss, or draw) the game will make a poor attempt at a reward by evaluating the player against a scale that ranks with professional players. The problem with this is that, while most players are competent with their own bodies, any first time player will not try to accommodate for the imperfect motion-detection system. When comparing the player to a professional on a scale to 1000 an average person scores along the black line that denotes the bottom most of the time. This is not an encouraging way to keep the player interested unless they have an obsessive reason to drive onwards.
The motion detection system of the Wii shows every possible fault through this one game. While it takes everything you have to move a bowling ball it only takes a flick of the wrist to make the avatar swing the bat or whack the golf ball outside of the green for the fifth time. The sensitivity issues point out every flaw in the player’s form then exaggerate them to a ridiculous degree. The inability to control stance an foot movement through the Wii-mote also adds a degree of frustration to tennis and baseball because the computer automatically moves the legs (or in most cases semi-spherical lower body) in the direction of the ball.
There is no real drive to compete with any of the other players and conflict only seems to exist in the form of friendly competition. This is the problem I would anticipate with future game systems that utilize a full body movement system when martial arts games try to expand to non-violent arts like Aikido. The main form of competition within this game is between the player and the computer and secondarily between multiple players. The real problem is that a player who takes the game too seriously will suffer a competition with their own body, which climaxes when the player can’t continue playing for more than half an hour because of the strain of pitching an batting excessively.
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Feb 20th, 2008 at 04:46:03 - Wii Sports (Wii) |
Summary
Wii Sports is almost entirely based around the premise of testing the motion sensitive controller and familiarizing the player with the functions of the Wii remote. The entire game revolves around a series of minigames that utilize the motion sensitive controller to mimic existing sports, namely: Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf and Boxing. While these games imitate the movements of the real sport the entire range of movement can be limited to the player’s upper body.
Gameplay
As far as story goes for this game it is practically nonexistent. Ultimately the only story that one could glean from the game is one that the player made up with regards to their Mii character. The game is entirely centered on the five sporting events and as such has no need for a story arc or even a goal beyond what the real sport sets out.
The gameworld consists of 5 or 6 level screens, one for each of the sports and a menu screen. The gameworld only changes when the player orders the game to change to a different sport. The limited gameworld stays true to the game’s two objectives: show off the fancy tricks for the motion sensitive controller and get the player to use some of those tricks.
The player’s role in this game puts him/her in the position of a player in the various sports that the game allows for. In most cases that means that the player is distinctly represented by a Mii avatar and, in the case of tennis, two at once. While the ability to create and play as a Mii is entertaining and provides a certain degree of customization it doesn’t substitute a story arc. The Mii avatar makes the same movements as the player (more or less) and will move at roughly the same time and speed as the player.
Some of the sports put an emphasis on how fast the player moves the remote to correspond to the force of an impact. There seems to be a severe problem with gameplay when the computer players can hit a tennis ball just outside of their racquet’s bounding box and the ball passes through the box for the player’s racquet. There also exists the inherent flaw with gaming over actual sports is that the reaction time for the avatar is slower than the reaction time of the player and often the avatar won’t move fast enough or will react to a flick of the wrist. There is no combat in this game per-say, only competition between the players and the computer or among players
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Trinity Dragon has been with GameLog for 16 years, 3 months, and 15 days |
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