Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1606https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5474Scribblenauts remix is a creative puzzle game developed by 5thCell and published by WB games. It’s a charming little 2-D puzzle game that lets the players wield surprising power. You are Maxwell, a boy with the ability to summon anything he needs using his magic pad. This translates to the player typing in a noun, and then placing that thing into the world in order to solve the puzzles. Lots of adjectives also work when accompanying nouns, leading to an even greater number of things the player can summon. (Evil sentient flying flamethrower being my favorite example) The most surprising thing about this game is the sheer number of things you can summon, as well as the many ways you can solve the puzzles. For example, in one level you must help a knight across a lake infested by a single aggressive shark. You can do everything from simply kill the shark and swim with the knight to knocking the shark out with sleeping pills glued to a slab of raw meat. There is rarely any one “right” way to solve a puzzle. The problem with this is that oftentimes the individual puzzles feel too easy; the answers tend to be obvious and the execution simple. The game offers fifty levels to play through, and thirty more for a dollar more. So because each puzzle takes a few minutes at most (including my inevitable shenanigans), the game ends within an hour or so of the purchase. It has some good replay value and an entertaining sandbox mode, but it still leaves me wanting just a bit more.Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:43:47 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5474&iddiary=9770https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5473Lets Create! Pottery is a game for iOS devices made by iDreams. Going home one weekend I found my sister had downloaded it to her ipad, and so my iphone also picked it up. It’s exactly what the title says it is: a creative game that uses the touchscreen to assist you in making virtual pottery. While at first it seemed like a silly gimmick to me, I found it growing on me. It’s the perfect game for when you have a few minutes to kill and relax. You start with a lump of clay on a spinning wheel. Using your finger you can drag it to a taller, wider, or thinner shape. Then you paint your pot with your finger and/or apply patterns. Very simple, but that makes it fun. I’ve spent way too long trying to make aesthetically pleasing bottles and vases instead of doing important things like studying. The collection of patterns are really neat looking examples of other culture’s markings (Celtic, Chinese, etc.) After your creation is done it goes to an “auction”, where you get to watch the amount of coins you receive go up in fits and starts until a final price is paid to you. You use these coins to buy other colours, patterns, and materials to make more pottery with. Playing around with selling pots seems to show that you get more money for pots with more patterns, as well as more expensive patterns, meaning the optimal pot is the biggest possible to add area to mark, then marked to the point of no recognition. That said: this isn’t the sort of game I feel like I should optimize and “win”. It’s more of a toy than anything else.Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:26:28 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5473&iddiary=9769https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5406The first entry didn’t line up so well with the poor score I gave the game, and this entry will discuss the main reason: EMERGENT GAMEPLAY. The PvE elements of the game are handled wonderfully, and were it a single player game I would have much less to complain about. But the current state of PvP interaction in WarZ ruins the experience for me. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t me whining about being killed. I love players fighting each other! One of the things that WarZ does very well is build a sense of paranoia and immersion. You learn very quickly that trust is a weakness, and you will always be checking over your shoulder to see if someone is stalking you.The issue is with the way the players can exploit the game. I’m not talking about the rampant hacking problem because the developers have made fixing that a priority, but the “legal” exploits. The game world is divided into 250 or so servers, each capable of handling around forty people at any given time. Players create up to five different characters and may log onto any server they desire so long as there is space for them. This means that it is far easier to find a building that spawns loot, and hop between servers than it is to make the long walk between settlements. So there is a significant group of people that do just that, gathering weapons and supplies at an unnaturally fast rate. More than once I will be looting an old grocery store or gas station that was empty when I went in, only to be shot gunned by someone who basically teleported in. It completely ruins the immersion. There are dozens of similar exploits available to unsavory players, and so the structure of the game rewards those who take that path, and punishes people looking for a good immersive survival horror experience. That is why I would not recommend purchasing the WarZ Beta as it stands currently.Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:39:59 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5406&iddiary=9695https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5406I bought into the War Z beta after hearing my friend raving about how much he was looking forward to it. War Z is the survival-horror MMO made by Hammerpoint Interactive made to emulate the popular “DayZ” mod as its own standalone game. The player is thrown into the wilderness of Colorado with little more than a bit of food and a flashlight to survive with. Players must be able to manage not only their heath bars, but also their hunger and thirst. Most of the game is spent picking through the ruins of old cities, looking for anything that can help. There are weapons scattered about, but you can’t count on having a gun to protect you! Guns are rare, bullets as well. I’ve played for nearly ten hours and only ever found one pistol, and it was fifteen more minutes of searching before I got ammo! Because of this scarcity of food and protection, the game has a very tense mood to it. Combat with the zombies is a bit jarring and buggy feeling at times, but nothing worse than I would expect from a game in beta. The best option is to try and avoid their notice; the game has a very good stealth engine to take advantage of. If you are still and silent zombies will mostly leave you alone, but start running or shooting and every zombie in eye/earshot will come clawing for you. If you are armed and prepared for them, a few zombies pose little risk to a competent player. If more than three or so zombies are attacking however, you’d best make yourself scarce because they have a way of dragging you down. From a pure PvE standpoint, WarZ is a good game. The desperate scavenging and almost peaceful exploration between towns is a rewarding experience. Reading some of the developers planned features only promises to make this game better. But all is not well in War Z…Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:39:12 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5406&iddiary=9694https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5301FTL is also a refreshingly difficult game. I have not been able to beat it on the “normal” difficulty and just barely able to on “easy”. Combat is absolutely frantic. You target different points on the enemy ship with your weapons in hopes of damaging vital systems and eventually forcing them to surrender (or destroy them, if you are the vindictive sort). Every ship has a set of systems housed in the “rooms” of the cutaway. Stuff like shields, weapon controls, sensors, engines, life support, etc. If that room takes damage, so does the component the room controls. This leads to very strategic gameplay, I’ll often find myself focusing first on the enemy’s shield generators before moving on to try and disable the weapons systems. Of course the enemy is also targeting your own system, that’s where the crew comes in. Crew members can man stations to add bonuses to your weapon cool down, shield recharge, and evasion chance. When things get damaged you can allocate crew members to repair them mid-battle. This makes maintaining your own ship an almost Sisyphean task when you are under fire, because often times crew members abandoning their stations gives the enemy the time they need to repair themselves. Take these complicated combat mechanics and crew juggling, and then add in things like boarding actions, fire, and oxygen deprivation. That’s where the difficulty comes in. Luckily you aren’t expected to conform to real time, hitting the space bar freezes time in case you need to breathe, or plot.Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:11:07 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5301&iddiary=9684https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5301FTL (short for Faster than Light) is a starship RPG/crew management game made by Subset Games earlier this year. The player is put in command of a top-down cutout of a spaceship, complete with crew. The player acts as the hand of god, directing the crew members to work different stations on the vessel to add bonuses. For example: the ship’s shields recharge faster if the shield generator room is staffed. The goal of FTL is to guide the ship through a gauntlet of hostile star systems in order to reach your home base and warn them about the Rebel’s progress. The story is told in bits and pieces through your various interactions with the rest of the world. The player navigates through space by “jumping”, travelling faster than light for brief periods. The ship is jumped between beacons scattered throughout the system, and must recharge between jumps. In essence, you are travelling between little event nodes. While the drives are recharging the player is faced with hostile environments, enemy combatants, and even moral choices. Do you surrender one of your crew to the slavers or risk losing the whole ship in a shootout? Do you try to help the ship in distress in hopes of a reward or is it just another rebel trap? As you progress through the game you get ample opportunities to upgrade your ship and your crew. You collect scrap from wrecked vessels or as payment for services rendered/bribes received. Gameplay is short, each game lasting a few hours at most, but in that time you cultivate your ship from a run of the mill cruiser to a well-tuned war machine. Add or remove weapons, layer shields, install exotic parts like cloaking devices or teleport assault bays: there is a surprising amount of ways to go about making war.Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:30:02 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5301&iddiary=9587https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5289While idly cruising through the app store I came across a game called Tank Hero. I downloaded the free “lite” version to give it a try, the only difference being the number of levels offered. The free version gives you fifteen levels to battle through. Tank Hero has the feel of an old school arcade action game. A little joystick is mapped in one corner of the touchscreen to control your movement and your little tank shoots at any point on the screen that you tap. The shots travel just a bit faster than the mobs, and bounce once off of the walls. Each level puts the player into a small arena with enemy tanks; if you win then they have the option to advance to the next level. The levels have walls that are designed to encourage tankers to bounce their shots in interesting ways rather than just running and gunning. As you move up, there are more barriers and more types of enemies to fight, so the game does actually get pretty challenging. The game isn’t too much fun by itself, but the scoring system is its saving grace. At the end of each level you are awarded a score based on accuracy, kills, and remaining health. Certain amounts of points earn you medals, which do nothing but show your mastery of that particular level. This seems silly at first, but it gave the game an impressive amount of replay value. I beat it in twenty minutes, but spent a few extra hours trying to earn gold medals. Overall I’d say it wasn’t a waste of my time, but I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the full version.Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:13:58 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5289&iddiary=9573https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5211Towerbloxx is timing/puzzle/strategy game developed by Digital Chocolate for social media/mobile devices. The player is in control of a crane that continually hoists new floors of a building up onto a growing tower. When the screen is tapped, the crane drops the section you were holding and a new piece appears in the arm of the crane after a brief moment. The pieces sway back and forth in the wind on the end of the hook, and so the player is trying to time their drop just right so that the piece will land safely on the top of the last one. As the tower gets higher, it too begins to sway back and forth, making the timing of the drops more difficult. If a piece lands inadequately, it and nay other precarious pieces below it fall off the tower and the player loses one of their four “hearts”. The towers are finished once they reach a predetermined height based on their colour(except in the quick game mode), or the player runs out of hearts. Score is kept based on how many people “live” in the tower. Each floor gives a set amount of people, but a skilled builder can increase the amount of tenants through careful and rapid placement! Whenever a piece lands perfectly on the one below it, it triggers a bonus population multiplier for a period of time. Subsequent perfect pieces within this time limit bump up the multiplier as well as reset the timer. This puts pressure on the player; the timer is generally long enough to drop two more quick pieces, so the player must decide whether or not they want to be careful to extend the time, or cash in with a few quick drops at x2 Population. There are also special pieces that have balconies; if these successfully land on the tower they will increase population. Once a tower is built (in build city mode) the player is asked to place it on a grid that represents a developing city. As population grows via tower placement your city will gain new types of taller towers that you can build. This is where the strategy comes in, because every tower has a very specific set of rules regarding its placement. Red towers need to be adjacent to blue ones, green need to be adjacent to both red and blue, and the coveted yellow tower needs to be touching all three to be built! These requirements only exist for the construction however; the prerequisite towers can be replaced later. This makes for a spatial puzzle of sorts that makes the player think ahead and plan how they can maximize the population of their city.Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:01:49 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5211&iddiary=9485https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5181Infinity Blade is an action game for the IPhone developed by ChAIR and Epic games back in December 2010. The player guides their warrior through a series of increasingly intense one on one duels until the player either triumphs or is killed. The gameplay is brilliantly intuitive. The player swipes their finger across the screen to strike blows(think Fruit Ninja) or if they match the enemy’s swing they will parry the blow. There are also buttons on the screen that make you block with a shield or dodge left/right. If a player avoids being hit, there is a chance that the enemy will be momentarily stunned, allowing the player a quick flurry of hits before it can raise its guard again. This is easier said than done however: the player must be vigilant in watching the enemy. Some attacks will get around certain defenses. If you dodge in the wrong direction, you will get hit. If you try to block a particularly heavy attack, your shield won’t help. As the enemies get harder to kill, the duels get to be intense tests of player skill. In addition to the player getting better at fighting, the player’s avatar will get better stats as they kill more enemies. Every kill gains experience, which works towards “mastering” weapons as well as leveling up. Whenever you master a weapon you get to add a point to your stats, and whenever you level up you get to add two. In addition, the player earns/finds “gold” over the course of their adventure, which can be exchanged for weapons/armour that increase your stats. One of my favorite parts of the game has to be the simply told, but compelling story. The player plays as a nameless swordsman out for revenge against a figure known as “the God-King” who killed the player’s father (in what amounts to a tutorial level). Every time the player dies in the attempt (which will be numerous times as the player gains skill and stats), there is a cut scene that takes place twenty or so years later of a man swearing to avenge his father. This creates a simple cyclical storyline that really enhances the replay value, as well as inspiring a vengeful attitude.Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:13:17 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5181&iddiary=9452https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5159Space Marine is a third person shooter/action/adventure game developed by Relic, released for the xbox 360 last November. The player takes up the mantle of a genetically/cybernetically enhanced super soldier fighting off an alien invasion of a human world. Now while that is hardly an original concept, the execution of the game is in my opinion brilliant. The multiplayer and single player campaigns play and feel very different, so this entry will be about multiplayer. When the game first released the multiplayer was a bit bland, having only a few game types that all boiled down to “shoot at people a bunch”. There has been some DLC since then, and multiplayer is now one of the most exciting parts of the game. Players customize their load outs and fight each other for objectives, or you can fight off hordes of enemies in a cooperative mode. One of the things that make the multiplayer memorable is the way “classes” is handled. There are three core classes the player can choose from: Devastator, Assault, and Tactical. The Devastator class allows the player to carry heavy weapons, trading speed and flexibility for raw power. The Tactical class is a flexible class; giving the player the most options for weapons and other perks that let them fight. The third class is what is innovative, the Assault class features a “jump pack” that allows the player limited flight. The options for this class are aggressive, and based heavily around melee combat. The fact that some players can fly means that even those stuck on the ground need to be able to fight in three dimensions. The maps you play on are built to accommodate these different play styles as well. Each one is decently sized and varied. There is usually a good mix of open space that lets the assault marines fly about, as well as a few high places to roost and recover health. But also has a more closed in, dense area for closer ranged fighting. For the devastators there are good spots to post up and snipe, as well as good fire lanes to protect objectives. There is always plenty of cover to duck and roll around for attackers to use on the approach as well as bolstering defenders. The environments themselves are at times as original as the game’s concept (read: not very). There is the obligatory sewer/factory map, storage yard, crumbling city ruins, etc. That said: the environments fit in very well with the grimdark far future they are meant to portray. Despite the radical differences in each class, Multiplayer seems fairly well balanced. You start with the most rudimentary wargear and must “earn” better/different perks and weapons. In many games this gives the players who have played longer a huge advantage, but Space Marine handles this problem pretty well. Each time you die you are offered the chance to “copy” the class of the person who killed you. This lets new players try out a variety of different (and proven!) classes, and ensures that veteran equipment doesn’t overpower the wielder. Another problem with games of this sort is a general lack of cohesion within the teams. Some people work together, but usually it’s just a jumble of bullets and explosions. This game suffers a bit from that, but it rewards people who work together. For example, one perk you can take allows people with a complimentary perk to respawn on your position. This sacrifices a bit of a player’s personal prowess for a more or less steady supply of backup, and makes for an interesting dynamic. Informal “squads” will form, with one man acting as a beacon for several of his allies. As a general rule, a group of average skill working together will do better than a skilled lone wolf. At first glance, it’s easy to write off this game as some Gears of War clone. But after spending a little more time with it I found it to be a lot of fun. While it lacks a bit in variety, it still will consume an entire evening if mine every now and then because of the emergent gameplay.Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:37:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5159&iddiary=9425