Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1592https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5396Dmc: Devil May Cry demo review I have beaten the demo of the upcoming Devil May Cry game today. Believe me, I am not a real fan of the Devil May Cry series but I like hack and slash games in general. It includes two missions: Under Watch, which takes place in the heart of Limbo city, and Secret Ingredient, which is a boss battle against the very old Succubus demon. The game has three difficulty settings to choose from and if you finished the demo on the hardest difficulty setting, which is nephilim, then you can do the levels on the Son of Sparda mode. Dante, the protagonist, is equipped with his Rebellion sword, His Ebony, Ivory hand guns, his demonic axe, the Arbiter and the angelic scythe Osiris. I have done the Under Watch mission and it was pretty good that the city is expansive and I get to take out various types of demons. Dante can perform combos by attacking with his sword and shooting with two pistols. He can collect various types of souls which can be used to recover help and purchase items. For example, I used the gold orb whenever I died during this level and during the boss fights. I use triangle and r2 to take out the demons more effectively with a more powerful sword. This allows for me to be in Angel mode, in which Dante’s sword attacks change to the Osiris, a speedy scythe type weapon. Triangle gives a heavy attack and circle is to shoot. These controls have been the same for other games as well. There are new controls I have used in the game, such as mashing x two times and hitting L2 makes me jump farther distances. While a little blocky, everything oozes with a really good urban style without taking it too far from its demonic roots. Spirits come in and out as Dante runs across the city and the sickening cameras and other hellish creatures add a nice touch. The city feels alive, like an ever changing being in itself. As for the story, the game starts with Dante recovering from a hangover when he is attacked by one of the demons. He learns that he is in Limbo City, a sullen city that appears serene or calm at first, but transforms into an antithesis of itself with demons and other hellish creatures who attempt to kill him whenever he is seen by the demons. After encountering a demon, Dante meets a girl who sends him to meet the leader of “The Order,” an organization labeled by the media and the press as terrorist. The Order is fighting against the demons of Limbo and the leader, Vergil, expects Dante to join them. During the game, he is taunted and stalked by the demon Mundus, who wants to kill Dante. The opening cutscene opens with “Demons, you know your game. Your Cameras watch us. Your media brainwash us. Your drinks poison us, and your banking system enslaves us.” I like how the guy in the cutscene looks like the Anonymous guy from YouTube who rants about the government all the time. When I saw a Virility ad with a slender guy in the background, I saw a corpulent person who was drinking it. It is so contradictory. When the gameplay starts, I discover that the living cameras are watching Dante and that he has to take them out. I used the Devil Mode to pull myself into enemies in order to kill them more effectively. I used the Angel Lift to lift the cliffs and hedges off the sides of buildings. Demon lift allows me to destroy demons from far distances and to destroy whatever is surrounding the demons. I like how the game is fast-paced with all this metal and rock music that is also giving me some headaches. In the boss fight, I first tried to kill the Succubus demon on a harder Nephilim difficulty setting. I used Angel lift from one hedge to another when she poisoned the hedge that I was previously on. Killing her takes a lot of effort and she is more destructive at this difficulty setting. I only had three gold orbs to revive myself after I died. I died three times and I still did not do enough damage to her. Then I used retried the boss fight on the easier Devil Hunter difficulty setting. I was able to kill her effectively as she is not as destructive as she was in the harder level. At one point, I noticed a glitch in which I kept slashing her feet after the yellow bars went away. The white bars remain and stay stuck. I finally was so good at slashing her that I received SSS, which means Sadistic and I achieved a high score of 500,000 points. Then, I restarted the checkpoint and went back to defeating the boss. I finally killed her and I was relieved.Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:42:47 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5396&iddiary=9685https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5371Temple Run is one of the games tearing up the top charts on the App Store. Temple Run is a free running game but it doesn’t play the same as most flash-based games of this style. It plays from a behind-the-back third person view and has me fleeing form a pack of ravenous monkey monsters. The premise is that the character (there are several character who I can unlock) has escaped from a temple and is being chased by the monster-monkeys. They make a growling sound at the beginning of the game. If I trip, swipe left and right too often, or jumping to a ledge too early, I can see the ravenous monkey monsters in my view. Like Mirror’s Edge, the main control scheme is using up and down moving to either jump over or slide under obstacles while not ruining my momentum or running into things. If I make too many mistakes, I will find myself getting munched by monkey monsters or smashing headlong to my doom in a hazard ridden swamp. I find myself running along narrow walkways and having to make swift and quick decisions as to whether to make a right or a left turn where the wrong decision can mean an unfortunate doom. Within the simple gameplay, the evil genius lies. The simple, evil genius – even more tortured than the monster-monkeys that chase me. I will need to collect coins to spend on life-saving protective measures and power-ups in the in-game store. Power-ups include a coin magnet so I can scoop up any coins in my view with minimal effort, invisibility, and distance boosts. The more power-ups I have and the more features I can unlock, the higher the score multiplier and finally, the higher my score. The whole game is done in an Indiana Jones, archaeologist motif complete with an Aztec ruin backdrop which makes for a nice fantasy fulfillment for anyone who likes free runners. The complete package comes together to produce an incredibly addicting endurance challenge that will have me to frustratedly and elatedly hitting the play again button over and over. The “one more go” lure allows players to be blurred into a hazy nightmare involving hollow trees, gold and perhaps multicolored coins, Aztec-style platforms, dull rivers, fire-breathing statues, and weirdly, a football player.Sat, 24 Nov 2012 22:11:12 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5371&iddiary=9664https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5371Temple Run is one of the games tearing pu the top charts on the App Store. Temple Run is a free running game but it doesn’t play the same as most flash-based games of this style. It plays from a behind-the-back third person view and has me fleeing form a pack of ravenous monkey monsters. The premise is that the character (there are several character who I can unlock) has escaped from a temple and is being chased by the monster-monkeys. They make a growling sound at the beginning of the game. If I trip, swipe left and right too often, or jumping to a ledge too early, I can see the ravenous monkey monsters in my view. Like Mirror’s Edge, the main control scheme is using up and down moting to either jump over or slide under obstacles whild not ruining my momentum or running into things. If I make too many mistakes, I will find myself getting munched by monkey monsters or smashing headlong to my doom in a hazard ridden swamp. I find myself running along narrow walkways and having to make swift and quick decisions as to whether to make a right or a left turn where the wrong decision can mean an unfortunate doom. Within the simple gameplay, the evil genius lies. The simple, evil genius – even more tortured than the monster-monkeys that chase me. I will need to collect coins to spend on life-saving protective measures and power-ups in the in-game store. Power-ups include a coin magnet so I can scoop up any coins in my view with minimal effort, invisibility, and distance boosts. The more power-ups I have and the more features I can unlock, the higher the score multiplier and finally, the higher my score. The whole game is done in an Indiana Jones, archaeologist motif complete with an Aztec ruin backdrop which makes for a nice fantasy fulfillment for anyone who likes free runners. The complete package comes together to produce an incredibly addicting endurance challenge that will have me to frustratedly and elatedly hitting the play again button over and over. The “one more go” lure allows players to be blurred into a hazy nightmare involving hollow trees, gold and perhaps multicolored coins, Aztec-style platforms, dull rivers, fire-breathing statues, and weirdly, a football player.Sat, 24 Nov 2012 22:10:23 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5371&iddiary=9663https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5370Angry Birds Star Wars review Rovio came out with another installment in the Angry Birds franchise. After a few weeks of teasers, Rovio released Angry Birds: Star Wars. The controls are familiar for anybody that has put time into an Angry Birds game. Players have to drag back birds in a sling shot, adjust force and angle, and release in order to destroy buildings and clear each level of pigs that are scattered throughout. This time, the pigs dress as stormtroopers, Darth Vader and even get to hop in Tie-Fighters and fire lasers of their own. Bonus points are awarded based on how few birds are used as well as how much destruction is caused, with a tally awarded out of three stars. Each bird in the game has their own unique abilities, which are activated by a tap when the birds are in mid-air. The red bird spins with a lightsaber, deflecting fire from Stormpiggies and taking down structures. The yellow bird dons Han Solo’s appearance and can open up fire over the course of his trajectory. Obi-wan Kenobi, the black bird can use The Force to push objects away from his trajectory. C3-PO and R2-D2 look similar to the egg-dropping bird in the original Angry Birds game, though they have entirely separate functions. C3-PO explodes into a bunch of damaging pieces while R2-D2 can electrocute enemies nearby. The unusual pink bird is dressed up as Leia, who has a laser-firing ability similar to Han’s. As for the story, every Angry Birds game has followed a loose and boring story. Green pigs capture the eggs that belong to the Angry Birds, and the birds use slingshots to pummel the pigs and get their eggs back. In this game, however, players follow the storyling from the Star Wars’s saga, starting with Episode IV when Princess Leia gets kidnapped by pig stormtroppers. The gameplay is incredibly fun and funny. When I launch the R2-D2 bird, it screams wildly until I tap the screen, which results in R2-D2 electrocuting areas close to its position. The C3-PO bird moans in a British accent once I launch him, and by tapping on the screen, he blows up in golden shrapnel. These awesome powers were never seen in previous Angry Birds games. Unlike previous Angry Birds games, the power of the birds actually change throughout the game. For example, the Luke Bird has no exceptional powers at first, but at one point when he discovers the Lightsaber, the weapon is added to the bird’s abilities, letting players do away with obstacles with the buzz and swing of the iconic laser sword. As I progress throughout the story, the Birds seem far more super powered than ever before, and its satisfying to use those powers, like Obi-Wans blue Force and Luke’s Lightsaber, which create a lot of exceptional opportunities for creative problem solving. One of the complaints that I have about this game is that the camera automatically pans at the beginning of a level. If I notch a bird too early, this puts the slingshot out of the frame and can cause me to fire the bird backwards. It becomes frustrating when I burn up an Angry Falcon. Another complaint is that I have to zoom out in certain levels where the pigs are located far away. This makes it harder to see the birds and maintain their trajectories so they can kill the pigs at the desired locations. Another compliant is that the graphics are still as 2D as ever. This is not a really big complaint since there is a nice foreground and background perspective effects. All of the textures are well-done and really sharp. By the way, the audio is pretty interesting because it’s a mash up of familiar effects and music. The hollow speaker voices of Stormtroopers are a lot less menacing when they are relaying pig snorts or oinks. The blaster fire sound will cause pangs of reminiscence for those that have watched many Star Wars films. It is sill hard to say whether the gameplay is still fun at this point. Rovio has done some interesting twists and are throwing in some new abilities to play with in many Angry Birds games. It is the same core mechanic we have been playing for years. The first stages haven’t been much of a challenge but later stages can get tricky, especially if the goal is to get three stars. Many of the stages features core mechanics from Angry Birds Space, such as zero gravity and centripetal acceleration and gravity around certain celestial bodies. The cross-licensing going on here may be quite difficult to handle, but if Angry Birds and Star Wars have anything in common, its that they have hardcore fans after being merchandised to and back. This game maintains the charm that Rovio has become well-known for.Sat, 24 Nov 2012 20:59:56 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5370&iddiary=9662https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5309I played this new game on the app store today and it was called Extreme Road Trip 2. It is the second iteration of the original Extreme Road Trip. It is a side-scrolling and an endless runner game. Moreover, I found this game addicting once I started playing it. In other words, I cannot put my iPhone down while I play this game. To be honest, this game often looks very elementary for those who have not played it before. On the contrary, once you play it, you will discover that this game consists of complex game play that will need all your wits to survive. With the gas pedal stuck, you have one option of jumping, rolling, and doing stunts to continue rolling on in the game. As you travel farther distances, your level bar increases, making you get to another level. When you get to another level, you get to break those two crates, which hold a limited amount of power-ups. Once you lose these power ups, you have to spend 100-400 coins to use one of these power-ups. When you start the game, what you have to know is that you are running on a limited supply of gas and from the beginning, the aim of the game is to make it to the furthest distance possible on your limited supply of gas. But you can get more gas by picking up the red gas barrels along the way. Stunts are not quite complicated to perform but are hard to novice players. Well, stunts help to save on your limited gas supply. How? This is because when you perform stunts, you are given the turbo boosts for extreme road trip and as a result, you will not use your gas supply for sometimes. The stunts that can be performed in the game are long jumps, hangs, flips, and so on. According to Game Center Acheivements, I have done handfree landing, double flip, triple flip, quadruple flip, quintuple flip, infinite loop(I did six flips in a jump to get this), and I once did 12 stunts in a jump. This game is fast-paced, so if you do a stunt that lands your car upside down, your car explodes and the game is over. You have to be able to land as perfectly as you can to progress through the game. Even if your car is a little titled off the wheels perpendicular to where you are trying to land, the game will end. Sometimes, you will hit mines and that is a good thing. It is a good thing because you will have the oppourtunity to perform as many stunts and complicated as you can make it. If you hit one of the balloons in the sky, you get more coins. The coins will allow you to buy cars and use power-ups each time you play the game. There is pretty good inventory in the game. As for the missions, many of them are straightforward, and some of them are tricky to accomplish. The pretty tricky missions ask you to do a perfect slam landing, slam while upside down, and other tricky stunts that I can’t really do. Starightforward missions will ask me to crash at 300-400m, do 10 flips in a jump, do a perfect landing, and the like. As for the music, it is reminiscent of most 8-bit games. The music is so addicting too. As for balance, the game seems okay except for some things. Sometimes, I can land upside down for some time and not die. After I hit a mine, the car jumps at high altitudes and my car will sometimes spin out of control to the point I can’t make it land perfectly as quickly as possible. I run out of gas quickly so, there needs to be gas barrels in the air or something like that since most of the time, I am in the air. There should be a way to sell cars in the game in order to get more coins, since the car I got was not as fast as I thought it would be. There are too many hills and cliffs and they are disadvantages because when my car is traveling fast in the air, it is hard to predict where the car will land and if I land a car a certain way on a certain hill or cliff, I can die. Otherwise, this was one of the games I found interesting.Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:20:34 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5309&iddiary=9595https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5295The Glass Tower game series include a game with physical collisions and gravity simulation. They are examples of puzzle games that don’t have to be highly complicated. I have been playing Glass Tower games on my iPad for a while. They were pretty good and addictive. I have Glass Tower 3 first and beat 64 levels in that game. In Glass Tower 3, I got a score of about 200,000. This was all due to random power-ups, such as extra life, frozen blocks, and double score. The one power-up that brought me down was the raining blocks power-up. At the beginning of the game, you start out with 20 lives. You lose lives by breaking or letting red blocks fall off the platform. By the way, in any Glass Tower game, you are supposed to manipulate a tower full of blue, red, and green glass blocks sitting on a platform. Tapping on the green glass blocks will reveal randomly whether they are green or blue. Your goal in this game is to break down all of the blue glass blocks without causing any of the red glass pieces to fall off the platform. As you progress through the levels, the arrangements of glass pieces, as well as the physics system in the game, are obstacles in saving all of the red blocks. Power-ups in the game range from extra lives to frozen blocks, helping the player to solve each level. There are a variety of ways to solve each level in Glass Tower 2. A patient player can strategically break each blue piece while analyzing the physics of the rest of the tower in each level. Other players can solve levels by taking out piece after piece trying to balance a mass amount of falling pieces while relying on power-ups to successfully accomplish each level. With the ambient soundtrack, I found the game soothing to play. There are also some cons to the game as well. While I enjoy the variety of the physics system on each level, I could be frustrated by the occasional erratic movements of glass pieces. Some of the power-ups that appear during the game aren’t balanced correctly. For example, an entire level can be easily accomplished or lost based on the power-ups picked up. I don’t like the fact that some levels depend on luck. Just out of luck, I can easily beat some of the levels that look outright difficult to me. Right now, I am on level 44 with only one life and a score of 17,010 points. I find it very difficult to finish levels at this stage since I only have a modicum of lives.Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:39:57 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5295&iddiary=9581https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5203I played Pac-Man on my iPhone and I can’t believe how addicting it is. It is like going back to the 1980’s and playing in the arcades all the time. But this was one of the first video games that had characters and enemies. This game was themed from pong, a video game which had no characters at all. The most popular arcade video games were space shooters, in particular asteroids and space invaders. Pac-Man succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to both boys and girls. Pac-Man is one of the longest running video game franchises and the only one of the three at display in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. (along with Dragon’s Lair and Pong). The gameplay is pretty self-explanatory. I control Pac-Man through a maze, eating pellets or pac-dots. When all the pellets are eaten, Pac-Man is taken to the next stage, between some stages one of three intermission animations plays. The four enemies that are trying to catch Pac-Man are Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. If one of the enemies reaches Pac-Man, one life is lost. Lives are a limited resource in this game and they help assist me in accomplishing goals and getting higher scores in the game. They have both utility and scarcity in order to create meaningful play so that nothing can be random. Pac-Man is awarded a bonus life at 10,000 points by default. At the maze, near the corners lie four- larger flashing dots known as power pellets that provide Pac-Man with the fleeting ability to eat the enemies. The four enemies then turn dark blue, reverse direction and move more slowly. When one of the enemies is eaten, its eyes remain and return to the box where it is “reincarnated” in its normal color. Before they become dangerous again, blue enemies flash white. The length of time for which the enemies are vulnerable to being eaten varies from one stage to the next, generally becoming shorter as the player progresses in the game. In later stages, the enemies go straight to flashing, but they still reverse direction when a power pellet is eaten. In very late stages, the ghosts don’t become non-lethal at all, but sill reverse direction. The length of time that the enemies are vulnerable varies in succeeding stages and helps create a challenge for the player. Power-ups are an integral and temporary part of this game since they help give a boost and made scarce to the player of Pac-Man. Since this game was designed to have no ending, it belongs to the endless survival genre. It is still a pretty cool game as I look back at older Atari games.Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:41:05 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5203&iddiary=9479