Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=10https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=230 I am about 33 hours into Kingdom Hearts II, and I have decided to take the plunge into the endless task of completing all the side quests to unlock the secret ending. Come on, I have to. I have never been obsessed with a series like I have with Kingdom Hearts. I had to find all the lost puppies in the first game. I had to play Keychain of Memories for the GBA, both forwards and backwards (if you've played it you'll know what I mean). I MUST see the secret ending. And more than that, I must EARN it!! We'll see how far I get before I get frustrated and/or bored...after all, there's always the internet... I am going back right now and clearing all the extra "chapters" for each world that have popped up before continuing the main story. It is really hard for me to say so far whether I like this game better or the first one. I like different things about them better. Technically, this game works better. Cameras are better, combat is deeper and (maybe) cooler,the Gummi ship system is a bit nicer... However, I think the pacing was better in the first game. And somehow the worlds felt less theme-park like and more a part of what was going on in the overall story. Also, it goes without saying that collecting lost puppies is far more appealling than completing all skateboarding trials in such and such time limit. :P Can you believe it though? In Kingdom Hearts I when you complete all the Winnie the Pooh "episodes" and they are sitting together talking at the end I got tears in my eyes. And at the end of THIS series of Winnie the Pooh episodes I got all teary eyed again!! Either they really know how to hit an emotional chord with the Pooh bear, or else I am just a sucker for the Hundred Acre Woods. Sun, 04 Jun 2006 04:06:14 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=230&iddiary=761https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=222 I can play this game in short doses so far. I love the characters and the dialog and the story so far, but some of the puzzles make my jaw drop in a "you've gotta be kidding me" kinda way. I have so far played the game with a walkthrough just a couple clicks away. The puzzles irritate me in that they are distracting me from fun exploration of a really intriguing story. Anyway, at the moment I have just begun Chapter 4: Monsters. There is no way I am about to recap what has happened so far, but April has just been pulled back into Arcadia. The cutscene right before this seems to indicate that foul play has occured in regards to Cortez, April's mentor. She was supposed to go to meet Cortez, then go back to the Flipster's place to get her fake ID, then infiltrate the evil corporation/religion's HQ. Oh yeah, and she promised her friends she would party with them the following evening. I guess that's all on hold till she gets back from Arcadia though. Thank goodness for the in-game diary! Annoyingly, she is running around in her little pajamas/underwear again with combat boots. She wore her combat boots to bed! I hope she finds some real clothes to wear soon. Tue, 09 May 2006 01:04:40 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=222&iddiary=743https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=184 So I finished Psychonauts. It was a neat game, and it did a marvelous job of carrying a theme through the whole game. The characters were fun, the setting was great, and the little powers your guy got were lots of fun to use. The absolute best thing about this game is the level design. Some of the levels are truly genius inspired. Take for instance the war-game level where the level is a giant sized hex map and all the characters you encounter are playing pieces. It was fantastic! The art is really great all around, and the concept of the levels being the psyche of different characters in the game was clever and pulled off briantly. But... There were some down-sides too. Although Psychonauts was a fun game, it was basically a platformer, with all the joys and pitfalls (hah hah) of the genre. Some of the time it almost felt like it was stubbornly sticking to genre conventions, as in the case of the maddeningly frustrating bosses. Each level (except for a couple) had some annoyingly frustrating boss to defeat at the end. Why? What's the point? Except to drive me absolutely batty? It seriously to me felt like the bosses were there because -- hey! That's what you do! The final level was also nail-bitingly exhausting. Overall I would reccomend this game, but not to anyone who isn't ready to deal with the occasional desire to throw the controller through the television. Better yet, watch someone else play it and go do something else while they are fighting the same same boss 20 times in a row. Wed, 19 Apr 2006 22:51:10 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=184&iddiary=722https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=188I have been impressed with the Nancy Drew games I have played so far. This is the first one I really am going to make an effort to finish. I really enjoy how they mix in little mini-game type puzzles into the story in a very convincing way. This game, for example, has a whole mechanical miniature golf course where you can play miniature golf. If you get under par, you win a prize. The nature of the prize is part of a bigger riddle, it is one of four clues you need in order to open a carriage house. The golf course was designed and built by the man (now deceased) who the whole mystery centers around. I'm having a frustrating time actually getting under par though. The golf game is cute. You just click to place the ball, and then move your mouse around to determine the angle and strength with which you want to strike it, and then click to hit the ball. One thing that sorta sucks though it that the further back your golf club cursor is from the ball determines how hard you will hit it. There are places where your cursor is at the edge of the screen, and you can't pull it back any further, therefore you can't hit the ball as hard as you would like. The course also feels very difficult...I know these games are aimed at younger girls, and I don't know how they would manage. Another thing that is neat about these games is that you work on different threads to the story/mystery in parallel. So you always have stuff to do. At the moment I am trying to win the golf game so I can see what I get (grrr) plus I also need to figure out who this guy's favorite poet was. I also have a series of numbers and a decoder to use somewhere, but I haven't found where yet. I played this game for three hours straight tonight. A good sign. :) Sat, 01 Oct 2005 03:45:00 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=188&iddiary=595https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180 I thought I had quit Urban Dead. I was pretty frustrated actually by becoming a zombie. Thing is, being a zombie is pretty boring. The fun part is being the survivor and trying to make it, oh the tension, the drama! Once you are a zombie, all you do is wander around trying to eat people. And getting killed over and over again. But on a whim I logged in again to see if some kind soul had managed to revivify me. Nope. But Jose's character can revivify, so we are meeting up. I feel a little like I'm cheating, emailing Jose back and forth to coordinate so he can rev me. But screw it. Let someone else be a zombie. I want my live body back again. Sat, 01 Oct 2005 03:32:13 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180&iddiary=594https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180 I was shocked and surprised when I came to this game expecting to find a turn-based board game type game and wound up discovering...role playing! So you get 1 action point (AP) every half hour of real time. These points are used for everything, from looting to attacking to moving. They are also used for talking! Every time you want to talk it takes an AP. At first, this really annoyed me, but then I realized that it has the effect of only those people who really want to say something will. Your "power gamer" types want to save their AP for killing zombies. The role players actually consider it worth a point to talk. The role playing is supported by the unofficial forum, found at http://urbandead.proboards52.com/index.cgi. There are RPing threads for both zombies and humans. I was engaged in this really great exchange with another character for awhile who claimed to work for the company that was responsible for the zombies. All the while, in game working with a couple characters to try and bail out an army squad that had been surrounded. Unfortunatly though I lasted many a turn, my poor Professor Argyle has now been zombiefied himself. There is hope however, a zombie can be restored to humanity by the right people. Now just have to find those people without giving in to the impulse to eat their brains. Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:48:32 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180&iddiary=566https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180 I found the mall and am holed up with some other survivors. I have been looting like mad and have quite the collection of crazy stuff. Still no new spray can though. I have discovered you et XP for healing other players, so when someone came in and warned us that a certain player "Har"? "Hurr"? something like that had teamed up with zombies I rewarded him for the info by applying all my looted first aid kits to him. At the moment I am interested in trying to hold a conversation (which is hard, given the turn-based nature of the game, trying to loot myself a spray can, and collecting as many first aid kits as possible before moving on. Yes, the site is having alot of strain right now. I've found that being patient and re-loading lets me play the game. They are also working on the infrastructure to make it more stable so that people can actually play normally. Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:49:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180&iddiary=553https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180A friend reccomended this game to me, and it is pretty interesting. It is sort of a turn-based strategy-rpg-board-game. Usually online games like this are interesting to me for about a week, and then interest wanes until I log in twice a day, then once a day, then once every several days... But Urban Dead has kept me intrigued. You can start as either a zombie or a human. The city, of course, has been over run by zombies. Your goal is to...? The FAQ is very vague, and there is no player's guide. So it is very much make it up as you go along. Which, I think, is part of the fun. So far my goal has been to find the mall. Yes, indeed. I picked the lamest looking human character class (civilian; consumer) because, well, that's what I do with games like this. My character has no skills with which to defend himself. My only skill is that I get bonuses to finding stuff while looting the mall. So far I have spent a week just trying to find the damn mall. The map is huge!! I started making my own map, then peeked at a map someone had put together online and threw mine away. One of your options in an area is to search it. This is how I have cobbled together my collection of a crowbar, a book, two gas cans, a shot gun shell and a first aid kit. I had a spray can, which was fun, because you could tag buildings and other people would see the tags when they came by. The dev announced on thursday a mission that ended today to spray as many buildings as one could with the same tag. The person who tagged the most buildings would get a hefty XP bonus. Just as I was starting to tag like a maniac my spray can ran out, and I couldn't find another one. Oh well. So far I only have 4 XP, 3 for hitting a zombie with my fist (10% chance) and 1 for hitting a zombie with my crowbar (5% chance). But now that I have checked the map, I finally know where the mall is, so I should be able to reach it tomorrow. Then let the looting begin! Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:04:22 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=180&iddiary=550https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=156 When I first saw the character Malice, I knew I wanted this game. Look how cute she is with her little pig tails, raver outfit and ungodly huge hammer! So far, I have enjoyed the level design. I consider it a good sign in a game when I know that if I just try something _again_ I will be able to make it. The sense that it's possible is important to keep going. There have been a couple annoying bits where you have to jump _just right_ in order to make a particular jump, but these haven't been too often. Some of the levels have been genuinely cool and clever. Like Memory Maze, where you have to first watch a succession of tiles come up from the floor to form a path to your goal, try to remember the pattern, and then go for it. If you miss you head off a tile in the wrong direction, you fall to your doom. Or at least lose a heart. Malice is very forgiving as far as death goes. Once you lose all your iconic hearts, you find yourself basically in the underworld. Which is on a very gloomy beach. You run up to death himself, he whines, and then poof! You go back to the beginning of the level you died on. What's really cool is there are even "side quests" of sorts you can do in the underworld. So you have to die at least once to do these. Anyway, I left off last night on the river of gloop. Malice has to ride these barrels down the river without falling in to hit a switch. Then she has to jump her way up the stream of barrels coming down to get tot the exit. It is pretty tricky going. I kept double-jumping on instinct which would jump me right over a barrel and into the river of green slime. I'll keep at it. Fri, 22 Apr 2005 12:47:41 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=156&iddiary=478https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=15416212 This game is really amazing. I don't tend to play the Survival Horror games. I picked this one up for research for a paper. But it is so creepy, it really gets under my skin. I can only play in small doses at a time. But I love the small doses. I played a little of the previous Silent Hill game, but so far I am enjoying this one way more. Part of it I think is the setting itself. When you come back from an alternate world to the apartment, you have a moment to catch your breath and think over what has happened so far. In the last game, it was run-run-run-run-run. In general I prefer psychological horror, and the attention paid to the set designs is amazing in delivering that trepidation. Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:06:05 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=154&iddiary=472