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Feb 21st, 2008 at 10:05:57 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC) |
Gameplay:
Playing the game the second time the gameplay was still interesting but started to get a little tiring. By this time I had gotten a grip over the controls and the missions started getting harder and more interesting. Unfortunately while the missions got more interesting the basic game mechanic stayed the same so the game did start to become repetitive in some ways and lose some of its entertainment value.
I definitely did start to catch on to the flow of the game as it would basically start with the main character doing some "easy" mission (driving somebody somewhere) and then an interupting event would come into play which would turn the mission into something completely different and advance the storyling. It was interesting that most of the storyling was being advanced through the missions and game itself instead of just cutscenes as you see in some other games.
Design:
The game definitately had some innovative elements. It had a very huge open world which the player could explore at their leisure which is different from most games of similar type that I've seen where the player is forced to go a certain direction. This also affects the level design as all the missions (levels) are carried out in the same world and as you become more familiar with it the missions can get a little harder because the player will be more comfortable navigating it. While one might think that having all the missions played in the same world would become repetitive it actually makes the game more interesting. This is becaues the world is very big so there are always new areas to put missions in but at the same time often missions will have a section of them take place in a familiar part of the world (seen in a previous mission). This gets the player to expect things and react more to the progression of the level ("I've been here before now I know what to do").
The game's reward structure was mostly about acquiring reputation and wealth. Missions would boast your reputation and/or money. You could then use this money to buy property (which would make it easier to save the game as you now had multiple save points) and you could also use this money to buy food and supplies. The problem is you never actually significant amounts of money for anything (food is cheap and supplies essential for a missions would be provided). Because of this I didn't really care about wheither I got money or not and the only reward structure for me was that it is fun to play missions (I didn't care all that much about advancing the plot either). While having fun is always a good reward, it is not good enough of a reward structure to really suck me in and get me to play it continually (fun would most likely decrease with playing time).
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Feb 21st, 2008 at 02:44:19 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC) |
GTA-San Andreas is a first person action/adventure game which combines first person shooter elements with racing and rpg elements and puts them into a very large open gameworld. The goal is to traverse this world accomplishing missions and building up your reputation and/or power as the game progresses.
The characters in the game are fairly superficial and very cliche, however this helps the game in a few ways. The cliche characteres give the player a hint of what the plot is going to be about and the lack of depthness in the characters allows the game to bring in and remove characters easily without major plot changes. This keeps the focus on the player's own experiences in the world and away from his interactions with the other characters (which helps cover up the lack of strong narrative AI in modern games).
The story seemed fairly interesting (although I didn't get very far along it). Basically the part of the game I played involved you coming back to a ghetto neigborhood from which you came from. Things have gotten bad while you were gone and you need to help your gang regain control. I assume that after you achieve this then you are set further goals of extending your influence over larger areas and more neighborhoods. While the main story idea is fairly simple it is done so to allow the player to enjoy the mini stories behind each mission. These stories range from the simple (tag up some areas with your gang symbol) to the absurd (work out and eat to keep in shape seems sorta absurd in a video game) to the intriging (certain missions develop and change into something completely different as the mission goes on).
The game was very interesting to play, but I'm not sure if it would remain interesting for more than several hours. The basic gameplay remains the same with only the story and missions changing. Personally if I want a good story I'd rather watch a movie or read a book so for me a game has to have very dynamic gameplay in order to entertain me for extended periods of time.
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Jan 15th, 2008 at 00:56:26 - Battle for Wesnoth (PC) |
Gameplay:
After playing the game some more I found a few things that at first irritated me but then after a bit I saw how they were actually good things that the game had. One of these things was how the combat was done probabilistically so there was a fair amount of luck involved. This was frustrating as I would make a certain plan and it would go all wrong when something unlucky happened (note I never complained when I got lucky). However then I started to play taking the possibility of luck into account (there's some famous quote about how luck doens't matter to a good general but it does to a great general). I started to see how it added another element of strategy to consider as you had to play in such a way as to be flexible and easily adapt to minimize the damage a turn of bad luck would have as well as maximize the benefit a turn of good luck would have.
Another thing that at first I found bad was how easy it was to save and reload the game to try to get good luck. When I finished a level it wasn't very satisfying if I only did it by artificially giving myself good luck by reloading when I got bad luck. However the ability to reload saves is definately essential to the game and with some discipline players who want to avoid reloading the game can do so (you get practice on fighting the moments of weakness when one of your units dies and you want to reload to avoid this result).
Design:
The game provides a huge range of challenges with very well set difficulty levels (you can set it so it's very beatable even with many mistakes done or you can set it so it's very difficult and even a player who normally has no problem beating strategy games on the highest setting is very challenged and is forced to come up with creative ways to win).
Also the game has a great reward system as not only does the player want to win a level to get on to the next level and advance the storyline, but the player also carries on some of the gold they gained in a level to the previous level (as well as a bonus for finishing it early). Also not only do units get stronger through battle (rewarding the player for keeping units alive in order for them to develope into stronger units), but the player can "recall" units that they had at the end of previous levels to help them in future ones, so the player can keep evolving their units throughout the whole campaign as opposed to just a single level.
While Battle for Wesnoth's graphics could be made more state of the art, it would detract from the game's ability to be played on older computers as well as detract from some of the simplicity of the enviroment and mechanics (a game with as much emergent strategy as Wesnoth deserves to have the strategy be the main feature).
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Jan 14th, 2008 at 12:43:26 - Battle for Wesnoth (PC) |
Summary:
Battle for Wesnoth is an open source (www.wesnoth.org) turn based strategy game played on a map divided into hexes. There is one resource (gold) which you use to recruit troops from your castle in order to control villages (which control your gold income) and accomplish the objective your given (generally to defeat your opponent). You can either play through various single player campaigns, play single player skirmish maps against the computer or play online.
Gameplay:
I decided to play through the tutorial campaign first which I found helpful towards learning the mechanics of the game (which are fairly simple). As an experienced strategy game player I found the popup comments during the tutorial a little tedious after awhile, but for somebody without much experience playing the type of game they would probably be helpful.
While playing the game, I quickly found myself wrapped up in the story telling aspect with which the tutorial campaign (and I assume the other campaigns as well) progressed. While the characters/troops I was controlling were sprites that would not be considered as state of the art graphically, the dialogue of the characters before the campaign starts and between each level of the campaign pulled me in.
I was also impressed with the strategic depth of the game. The game utilized basic strategic ideas such as having concave battle lines in order to maximize the ratio of your troops fighting to their troops, using convex battle lines in order to quickly move troops from one part of the battle line to the other, as well as having vast room for creative strategic and tactical manuevers.
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Axslav has been with GameLog for 16 years, 3 months, and 9 days |
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