Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1068https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3980GAMEPLAY I played further into the game and found there were a lot of rooms to enter. This is one of those details that adds to the completeness of the world of the game. Each room has a lot of miscellaneous objects you can interact with that are added for aesthetic and other pleasure. Each room is designed like what one could have in real life (if one had a mansion with lots of space) and is what I alsi liked about this game. The themes the ghosts had with each room was detailed, although the fight process was usually one of three style, capture, disable and capture, or boss battle. I also like the idea of mini actions you can perform that will aid the side missions of the game. Like getting more money in the end for a bigger mansion (high score), where you can find secret treasure rooms or slightly hidden objects that give you a monetary boost. There is also the side mission of capturing all the boos that are hidden in each room, which will ultimately give you another monetary boost. I liked the fact that your vacuum can also control elements, but only three were available. There wasn't very much narrative progression except for between areas the mansion would change overall a little bit and effect your gameplay. The game was fun to play, but in this one it is hard to be a perfectionist because there are millions of possibilities to mess up. Like getting hit you have to recover all your coins, and there are minuscule amounts of money that can be missed in any of the tens of objects in every room. But you get a lot of money and you feel happy. Besides that I don't know how much better the game would be if it were two player, but this one was one player and I was fine with that. DESIGN So the main point I relish about this game is the core game mechanic. It could be grouped loosely with an FPS type game but the fact is it's different. I enjoy the fact that it's a different style of gameplay by sucking up the ghosts and there is a lot of an art in doing so. That was probably the most innovative element of the game and as the sole mechanic, there wasn't but else. But what else was there was the aesthetic design of the game. The careful detail that went into sculpting the objects and placing them in the mansion in various fashions was immense, creating the theme to each room. It felt like real rooms down to the small knick-knacks that can be manipulated for fun. Each room was built like that and that distracts you from realizing you have a very small action set in each room, but that each action you can perform has multiple and unique possibilities to each room. Lie you have an interact button which may cause you to bump a piece of furniture or open a door, but in some rooms it will make an instrument play or reveal a secret. That did all this and set a very definitive tone for the game world, which by adding only a light story to the game, completed the pleasing audiovisuals to the game. Now the game world was mostly linearly traversed, where you have opened rooms you can go back to later and reap new benefits. I responded well to the game's rewards structure, mostly by collecting the money which made little difference until the end of the game, so they were like little rewards. I did play carefully to I would not get hit and lose money or die and have to start back again. There weren't so many types of challenges except the same ones with different rewards, like instead of money getting Mario's items. The game was only as complex as the mechanic provided reactions for every one of your limited inputs. The games interactivity was a little lower than normal when you walk around and explore which may require memory, or fighting ghosts which requires reflexes. The game kept me interested by revealing a small portion of the plot here and there, and that is wasn't too big of a game, but also because each room could be totally different from the last with providing unique challenges. So overall it was a good game, it could have had a couple more unique side missions than expanding on the existing ones, and maybe more plot but with the present story I think it would be hard to develop any more.Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:42:42 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3980&iddiary=7438https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3980SUMMARY In this game you are Mario's brother Luigi who has gone to a haunted mansion and discovered that Mario has been kidnapped. He proceeds to try to rescue him by navigating through the mansion and gaining any information he can find. He meets with a lot of resistance with the ghosts that inhabit the mansion, but Dr. E. Gadd has volunteered the use of his Poltergeist 3000 to help Luigi defeat the ghosts. As Luigi sucks up the troublesome ghosts, he also collects money from random places, adding to a total for the side objective of the game. He goes through groups of areas capturing portrait ghosts, like bosses, to make progress and get to the bottom of the mystery. GAMEPLAY So to start off, it was nice to see another character have a more serious role in the plot although from a technical perspective this doesn't change much. I like how the game started off leading you into the story with a small cinematic and an easy room. The gameplay is not fast-paced most of the time so I can take my time and collect everything I want or explore some more. The story was nice a light through the game, somewhat present in between area transitions. The flow it created was good by inserting small movie animations to show you are performing a key action (no pun intended), like opening a door to a new room. It also keeps you aware that you are entering a boss battle by appearing in a different arena and seeing a different fight tactic from that particular ghost. This game was interesting to play mostly because of the aesthetic work done in it. It creates the whole world with very detailed objects that you would find in a haunted mansion, the actions of the enemy ghosts, and the audio creating a spooky ambiance. The fact that you suck up the ghosts and put them into pictures was an interesting bit to the story. One of my favorite parts is that you get to collect money, which doesn't have much use until the end, but it is still one of those rewards that keeps you going.Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:16:18 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3980&iddiary=7437https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3960GAMEPLAY I'm playing further into the game and I just experience more worlds. Now you probably get a more wholesome experience doing this, but when you don't want a longer game there are some secrets implemented that let you skip worlds. The game is long because there are eight world, and in them an average of 8 levels. Each level may take about 3 minutes to beat, but there is an inherent difficulty that keeps you dying and using up your lives to keep you going. Sometimes you can die and just be unlucky, or you haven't predicted your movements accurately and the enemies random intelligence has killed you. It's getting past this part that makes you restart the level, and sometimes the game, that you have to play through. It takes a long time to beat it, and I've only just done this once recently because I've always stopped around the third world either I ran out of lives or interest. DESIGN Some good elements about this is that the graphics are improved on, while staying on the same system as its predecessors, as well as its music, and it has minor story sequences. The level design as I said has been altered a bit in its own style. The levels are less a random bunch of challenges and parts of them are there so that you just walk around the uniquely built level. The makes the feeling of the game world a bit more seamless and fun to explore. Parts of the level show complexity out of a unique object placed there created for that scene. But sometimes it's just he grouping of certain enemies in differently arranged terrain that presents a new challenge. Some levels are built so that you are following a path by similar means throughout the level like a moving platform or a new suit. There weren't many rewards in the game except for the items you pick up. These which you can use before a level will change your characters state initially, which can be degraded upon being attacked. So it helps you until you lose it which is quite easy to do if you misuse the power. It's this which gave me a fleeting sense of the items which in turn made me not use them as often unless I had died a couple times at a level. The game would keep me interested for the most parts until the later worlds because they were just more level to pass with an increasing level of difficulty. It's only when I decided to really make it to the end to play though them all. And I did this once with a friend, where having two players effects the other, but in a very segmented way. One of you plays a level and when you complete it or die, the other plays the level or the next one. So the two players don't interact as much, but the effects do when the level is beaten the first player no longer has to do it. The two players do interact when one decides to challenge the other randomly. They step into a screen with a few platforms to hop on and you try to kill five or so enemies first, and you can hit a block that makes any extra life modifiers fly out which the other player can steal. So in all it was a good game, the best part being the play style with the items, mini-games, and differently built levels with new enemies and bosses.Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:28:06 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3960&iddiary=7406https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3960SUMMARY In this game, you are Mario or Luigi, trying to save the princess from Bowser who has captured her again. There are a series of worlds to go through, and many levels in each. You run through these levels passing or defeating enemies and getting powerups to help you. You can also use items you collect or play mini-games from the world map. You get to the next world by defeating the boss in the previous one at the last level. GAMEPLAY So as another installment of a Mario game, the story is pretty much the same. As with most of the characters, one or two like toad have new roles in your adventure which is a nice change than him telling me I got to keep going. One amusing sidenote was that each mini-koopa-boss has stolen a wand and transformed a king of a castle into an animal and beting the world turns the monarch back. The quality that brings people to play this next game is the mechanics. The levels play similarly to Super Mario Brothers 1, with slight differences makeup differences. More like the levels aren't just totally randomly placed blocks to present the same or different challenges, they make more of a contiguous scene. In addition to this game, the levels are grouped in world with distinct themes, where in SMB1 they were just abtract numbers resetting the levels. This give me a sense of what to expect and an aesthetic pleasure of moving around with a couple choices of levels to play and other elements only present here. So with slightly improved graphics I take a greater liking to this game. I also enjoy the freedom of movement that is more accurate, and with the new powerup items, gives me more choices to traverse a level. The flow of the game was created with similar environments between levels, connected with the world map movemnet, and the simple narrative segmentation between worlds.Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:58:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3960&iddiary=7405https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3940GAMEPLAY Well there are a couple main aspects or gameplay rules that occur commonly. One of my favorites is the vehicles. Driving each vehicle in this game has had special attention while designed and has a different "feel" to each. It gets you from point A to point B and has a smaller number of miscellaneous actionas associated with npcs. These vehicles cover land, air, and water too. When you're just walking around you can explore the world and realize how big it is. It was interesting when I found the two player game modes and invited someone else to play. We liked the free roam mode because the deathmatch one would end in about three minutes or less and killing pedestrians was only slightly formalized and was what we did in this mode anyway. We played this mode a couple of times, an hour or so each time, and then we felt we had exhausted the allowable game actions, expecially if we played these sessions close together, and left it at that. I would occasionally play afterwards, not having done a story mission in a couple of months I thought I would do one or two. But one aspect of the game I liked it collecting all the items for compeltion. These are not required but there are about four categories of optional items to collect that are hidden in the gameworld. Collecting all of one category would illicit a reword that would enhance your further game experience. DESIGN One main thing with this game to consider is the gameworld. It is pretty immense to the older game I have played. There is a lot of attention paid to the detail in some parts. It's mostly the buildings are each are unqiue with their own structure and artwork. But also the fact that these are modeled after cities in real life. Now one down side is about a third of these buildings are enterable, with most of the dormant ones being large skyscrapers in cities, small stores in rural towns, or any buildings that is placed there aesthetically to match the setting. Now playing the game I liked the amount of choices, the ability to pause progressiong through the story and improve my character or build his resources so I could perform better int he next mission. Each mission is a challenge in it's own rules, but it the game's constant rules that keep you from dying or getting arrested that "restart" a lot of your gameplay progression. The game is complex because it adds a lot of interactable items, buildings, vehicles, and people that have certain reactions and then simply place them in the world at appropriate times, and most of the complexity is from you changing their state in the game world and their reactions affect you or other objects. The tone is slightly dark with the subject matter of the missions and people in them, representing the "lower or bad side" of life. It might create a better sense as you are the character that is fixing the world, but fixing is the operative word where you are destorying one menace but creating your own. Any player can keep themselves interested because of the number of actions available at any point in the game. The pretty obvious elements that make this game popular are its design of the gameworld and choice or action list throughout the game, some sets of objects having very fine tuning to create a unique expereince for each, spanning sets of hundreds of objects. I like the cumulative reward structure recevied from main missions, side missions, or basic exploration, some items not just collecting but have a certain purpose or extra action allowing you to perform.Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:08:01 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3940&iddiary=7368https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3940SUMMARY In GTA: SA, you are Carl Johnson coming back home to find that the town has gotten messed up and it's his job to put things back into place. You go around completing main story missions that interact with many npcs to correct the state of parts of the city that may also bring about rewards or services for you. Eventually you unlock other cities to progress through the story. Also present is a slew of side-missions for youto complete that do not impact the story majorly or at all and bring about further rewards. You do all this in a basic, FPS, and 3D platformer set in what seems equivalent to real-life. GAMEPLAY The game is basically you running around and deciding what to do because you have a lot of choices. It offers you the main and side missions that can be pretty numerous at some ponits, and in between or on your way to complete those missions you have a lot more choices of interacting with the world to get where you want. So playing that game can be simple if you don't know what's available, or overwhelming if you do. But you can get set into a routine of what you usually do in certain situations. I seemed to have fit the last description pretty early on. I usually have fun when I perform certain actions so I can improve my character's skillset and resources. This is done by doing some side-missions, but also comes from a considerable amount of "messing around." Of course there is a bit of controversy mixed into the game by how they portray certain ethnic groups in lower forms of activity, but when I play I usually ignore that; the story semi-encouraged this. While playing there is a sense of flow doing missions back-to-back, but taking time aside to recoup your efforts or resources kind of ceases the flow and sometimes you forget what you were taking a break from in the first place. This game is mostly one player except for the two minimal cases where you find an icon in the world and it either enables a small two player deathmatch session to kill pedestrians in an allotted time, or a free-roam method where the players must stay in the same camera view, but can perform as much non-mission related activity in the game world as usually possible.Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:47:08 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3940&iddiary=7366https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3835GAMEPLAY I went more through the game and the gameplay changed as expected. There were about 10 levels so the game wasn't too long. Each level had its own theme which meant each had a nicely painted environment. And also each had some unique and recurring characters. I liked the exploring nature of the game because the levels were easy to traverse and recognize. The boss level is certainly unique as it is nearly the only one and had its own set of logic to play against. At the end the story unfolds to a cliffhanger and as he credits roll you are sometimes rewarded with something extra if you collected all the items in the game. DESIGN This game had a simple design, to create a 3D environment to explore with your character, as what the limited potential of the Nintendo 64 could provide. They did so by giving you a character that was slightly agile, along with the moves, so they could build terrain that was not only pathway, but also caused you to see what skills you had earned to open that pathway. I think that may have been the only innovative element was the puzzles they created out of a seemingly docile environment. It does get a little more complex as you must remember from you growing moveset what to use, and also how to identify a potential pathway based on what you can do. You also change charactes in certain levels and now have a new, small, but completely different list of abilities used to go farther. The only part that would be frustrating would be when a pathway was identified leading you to a goal, sometimes this pathway is longer than average and contains some inherent risks that take some of the gamer's skill to overcome, which is something some gamer's might not have without practice. This game uses this logic to build up, it does have a good amount of moves, which the sequel expands on some, but could be greater to enrich the playing experience. It's posible this is one of the things that keep players through the whole game, creating more worlds almost entirely different from the previous so the player could have new experinces. It adds to the exploring nature by making the world very spacious and some goals easier than others, which is what you can start out with when getting used to the level's theme. The game had few cutscenes, used mainly to describe big portions of the game's plot at each end of the game. Mixed inside the gameplay was random comments from the game's antagonist reclarifying the fact of why you are trying to defeat her. They didn't help a great deal as the plot is again almost removed from gameplay until the end. But the tones or messages of the game create a sense of completion that helps player want to go through, collect the required items, and beat the game. This is done so also by one gamer, there is no multipllayer yet. It does though have mock examples of social interactions when the character talks to other non-playable characters and receives sometimes vital information or other help. This builds a message that other will help you if you ask them, and you can also help them. This creates a nice playing environment with some goals that kept me playing, and while simple, is still fun to play.Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:34:42 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3835&iddiary=7212https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3835SUMMARY In this game you control a bear named Banjo with his bird partner Kazooie that team up against the evil witch Gruntilda to rescue Banjo's sister Tootie back. In a 3D environment, you walk around collecting items that help you progress through the game in different ways. These items are found in each of the many of the levels of the game. You also start with a basic set of moves to help you traverse the terrain in each level, and as you progress, learn new moves that allow you to go farther. The game's main objective is collecting enough items to reach the end of the game and beat the boss, but also doesn't require every item as the added challange is collecting the remainder and more hidden items. GAMEPLAY The game has a light feel to it, you can play at your own pace. What also adds to it is the simple cartoonish characters it uses by personifying animals and starts to create a world of it's own. The scenery isn't cluttered and uses almost everyday objects and the difficulty at most points is easy enough. I liked the feel of this game being fun without having intense gore or language, a funny fact as the words are printed on the screen but said in repetitve animal sounds unique to each character. The objective is easy to catch when playing as it is similar in each level, noticing how they place these items on pathways or another type of item in more obscure places. The control is fun because your just walking, nothing fast-paced, and the set of moves you have and learn add to the ease of movement. The game is interesting enough to play until you get to the point I have and have learned almost all the positions of the items and achieved fluid movement. This means it has great replay value, especially if you missed anything on the first playthrough. The story was ok, but it only progressed at the beginning and end of the game, almost absent in the levels, but the levels have little anecdotes of their own you have to solve. Playing this game I was pretty content and relaxed, some maneuvers took skill but it's nice to have a game that's doesn't get you tense all the time or frustrated about getting a game over.Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:18:26 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3835&iddiary=7183