Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=232https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1517“Lice” is a short but sweet platformer game by Natlie Barrett, Soloman Gonzales, created using the Game Maker. I played this game expecting to play as a louse navigating hair follicles, so it was somewhat of a letdown realizing that I play as a guy in a white suit that runs through a valley shooting dinosaurs with arrows. However, the guy is wearing something on his back that resembles, a shell, as well as a helmet. I guess he’s a guy in a louse costume. The controls were fair and the lack of distinction in terms of your character’s velocity made jumping incredibly easy. I reached the end in no time (less than five minutes), where I was expecting to find a boss. Instead, I was simply informed via pop-up window that I had won. Not a very rewarding ending. At this point, my score was recorded to a list. So I guess the reward is supposed to come competing with your friends for the highest score. Personally, the ending is where I was most disappointed. What I enjoyed most were the graphics, which seemed to be cobbled together from various NES and SNES games displayed in different sizes and resolutions. The soundtrack did of good job of fitting this aesthetic, a piece of techno music using very simple synths reminiscent of an NES game. For all I know, it could be a remix of an NES game. Some sound effects would have been nice. Also, the transitions between levels were jerky and awkward, something resembling a belabored screen-wipe ala Star Wars. I enjoyed the abstract, unspecified setting and how the non-literal title encourages the player to imagine what it’s all about. Although I still wanted to play as a louse and navigate some guy’s scalp. NOTE: Due to the game’s shortness, reason demands that I only write one entry on it.Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:58:51 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1517&iddiary=3182https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1373When I arrived in the butter castle level, I was quite impressed by the game's graphics.The shading effects feel way more organic than your standard NES game: at one point, you come across a tower made out of butter with such complex shading and animation that it looks like a 3D polygon. The graphics make Kirby's Adventure feel more like a SNES game. I love the aesthetics of food and how the game evokes the sense of taste in setting the mood for each level. Vegetable Forest to Ice Cream Island might not be major departures from each other in their design, but the names evoke completely opposite feelings. This game is a good example of how the player’s understanding of tropes informs the gameplay experience. For example, at several points you have to fight bosses that can only be defeated by spitting projectiles, but there are no objects available for ammunition -- or so it seems. In the end, you discover that you have to inhale things such as the stars that erupt from the dust clouds when your enemy hits the ground, or the notes that pop out of the enemy’s mouth when it sings. Normally, we understand stars upon impact and musical notes from the mouth as cartoon tropes that stand in for invisible physics that cannot be visually represented so easily. However, in Kirby, the symbol is a tangible object in itself that must be seized and used as a weapon. The game designers were no doubt aware of this mental process of trope recognition and purposely designed these boss fights to challenge the player to think outside the box. Another trope they play around with is the exploding boss. In Kirby, when you defeat a boss, it starts flashing and prepares to explode as we would expect. However, instead of exploding harmlessly to yield a power-up or some item as a reward, as is the case with many platformers (Mega Man for example), the boss just creates an explosion that hurts you, and nothing more. Kind of silly, if you ask me. After the twentieth level or so, I felt like I had seen all there was to see and turned the game off. Nonetheless, it was fun during that time. (This entry has been edited2 times. It was last edited on Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:19:16.)Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:41:37 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1373&iddiary=2910https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1373Kirby is a fun little platform game. Coming into this game I had already played Kirby’s Dream Land on Gameboy, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. Compared to other platform games, this one has way more rules of affordance, especially compared with the Mario games. In Mario, you are confined by gravity and must risk falling to your doom as you navigate several precarious cliffs. Not so with Kirby, who can inflate himself and fly wherever he pleases. Floating down a gap and dying is possible, but highly unlikely. Another thing about Kirby is that he always has something to keep between him and the enemy, whether it’s a projectile, a bludgeon, or the vacuum created by his mouth. In Mario, if you want to defend yourself, you usually have to hop directly on top of the sucker and risk a harmful collision. Another thing is, in Mario, you are defenseless in the water unless you happen to have a fire flower. Not so with Kirby, in fact, you’re better off in the water because you have a water-spitting ability that you can aim in three directions and use as frequently as you like, unlike on land, where spitting a projectile can only be done in two directions and requires the player to first perform a sucking action. I was actually thrown off by this whole water business, as it was not a feature in the Gameboy game. At one point, you have to spit water in an upward direction in order to advance in the game, but I had just barely discovered the water-spitting ability itself, much less the ability to spit upward. Another thing omitted from the Gameboy version that took me while to figure out is how to absorb enemy abilities. Thankfully, the makers were smart enough to include tips and instructions on a screen that appears whenever you pause the game. I then remembered that in Super Smash Bros., Kirby has the exact same power, which is performed via the exact same input on the controller. I find it interesting that someone could theoretically be completely unfamiliar rules and control schema of the Kirby games and still instinctively know what to do by virtue of their experience with the character’s mythology in pop culture. Another thing that really ground my gears was when I got stuck at one point because I had to walk through a white doorway placed on a backdrop of the sky, which featured several clouds that the door blended right in with. I paced back and forth across this level at my own peril trying to figure out what to do. I was even driven to commit virtual suicide a few times out of frustration. (This entry has been edited2 times. It was last edited on Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:13:59.)Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:41:13 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1373&iddiary=2909https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1158As I continue to play Trauma Center, I find myself stopping every now and then to read the dialog between operations. It’s interesting to know that the little monsters that are infecting everybody are from a disease created by some terrorist organization. I guess surgery in itself wasn’t exciting enough. My first major challenge came when I had to perform the same operation 5 times in a row in 10 minutes! Or so I thought. Apparently, I was rushing and killing my patients for nothing, because this level (and only this level) won’t end the game when the timer reaches zero. Why in God’s name didn’t they tell me that? This game just went down a few notches in my eyes. Finally, after performing some fairly easy operations, I’m faced with the final boss. For ten whole minutes I’m forced to scramble to fight this virus-monster while keeping the patient alive at the same time. Just when I’m about to finish the thing off, it goes into some kind of super-attack mode and becomes impossible to kill. So I consult the internet and discover that this thing can only be killed if you save your healing touch (which can only be used once per operation) for the very end. Again, how the hell was I supposed to know that? Maybe in a Zelda game this kind of thing is acceptable, but this in this situation, every second counts. Furthermore, each attempt takes up ten *very* stressful minutes of my time. Trauma Center gets the award for least considerate game of the year.Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:23:57 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1158&iddiary=2511https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1158Trauma Center is the world’s first surgery simulation game, and a perfect match for the DS hardware. Using the stylus on the DS touch pad, you’ll really feel like you’re holding the scalpel as you cut into the patient. One little slip and you hurt the patient. Trauma Center is most likely the first game to challenge the player’s ability to keep their body steady. Likewise, it is probably one of the more stressful games out there. You can’t just lean back on the couch to play this one. After playing, my neck felt a little stiff. So, I resumed play on the large intestine level, in which I have to extract several aneurisms before they rupture. It took several tries, but in the end I was able to develop a strategy to deal with them. The motions here required are so precise, you can’t have them explained to you, but instead must figure it all out through trial and error. Not so much fun. Stitching up a wound requires that you draw a “zig-zag” across the wound. I’ve tried zig-zags, loops, squiggles, and yet it always seems to be a 50/50 chance of getting it right. DS is great and all, but I’d say these touch-based games till have a way to go. In between every operation is a cutscene that consists of unanimated anime-style characters exchanging a few dialog boxes. I think it was a good idea to have the bodies you operate on rendered in 3d while the characters themselves are 2d. Also, the 3d bodies are placed on a grid background that makes it look like everything takes place in virtual reality. All this serves to make things significantly less creepy. While the cut scenes are silent, the operations have bit of voice acting: at certain points, the nurse will shout something like “Doctor!” to grab your attention. This cues the player to look away from the operation for a minute to read her instructions. The music is appropriately tense, cliché hospital drama fare. So, much to my disappointment, the next patient suffers from some disease in which tiny little monsters swim inside her body and I have to shoot them down with a laser. Suddenly, the world’s first surgery sim just became an homage to Space Invaders. At first this was cute, but it once it became apparent that this mysterious disease is what I’d be fighting for the rest of the game, I was rather disappointed. To mix it up a bit, one of the levels has you disarming a bomb using your surgeon’s tools. Clever, but it wasn’t explained very well. I’m told that I have to cool the bomb with the gel, but I’m not told where to apply it. Blah. I had to go to gamefaqs.com just to know what was going on.Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:51:25 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1158&iddiary=2487https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=943Continuing my LoZ adventure I was able to find the next dungeon. The boss was such a pushover that it went down after one bomb. As my great reward for this victory, I was sent back to the world map for more aimless wandering! The last thing I did that could be considered progress was finding a cave where I got to swap my crummy wooden sword for a metal one. After that, the rest was…you guess it, aimless wandering. While doing this, I come up with the brilliant idea of turning off the harsh, repetitive music and listening to something (anything) else on headphones. I really hate having to return to the same spot every time I die. How am I supposed to discover anything like this? Link is a pretty lousy fighter in this game too. Instead of swinging his sword in an arc, he merely stabs forward, which severely limits your range and forces you to be directly facing your enemy if you want to hit it. Furthermore, he doesn’t have his spin-attack! There is really no way to guard your back or even you side in combat! So I just keep dying and not caring, waiting for my 45 minutes to be up. Yeah, I could look up a guide, but I don't swing that way: this game is getting judged on its own merits. In the northeast I discover a man selling keys in his shop. Are these really the same keys that you earn in dungeons to advance to the next room? Well that’s just great. Now I don’t even have to bother completing the challenges and puzzles in the dungeons, I can just earn 100 rupees and give them to this guy! And how do I earn my money? How else? Killing enemies while aimless wandering! Either that or playing “money making game.” Why not? It’s more fun than this. Hell, they should have just gone and made “The legend of Money Making Game” instead. (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:43:56.)Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:40:08 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=943&iddiary=2072https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=943The LoZ world is a big green and beige vacuum in which your only friends are couple of ubiquitous bearded men who function as nothing more than signposts, conducting single sentence conversations in broken English. You play as Link, who is just about as complex of a character as the Quaker on the oatmeal box. Of course, this was the standard for video game characters at the time, so one can’t hold it against LoZ. However, when one is forced to wander aimlessly for long periods of time, the experience sure feels empty without towns to visit, comrades to interact with, and so on. Furthermore, having an intriguing story gives the player motivation to keep playing in those tedious times of wandering aimlessly without any immediate goal. Also, a good story reduces the chances of such aimless wandering because, as Aristotle observed, a good story contains time and place within a logical structure. A well-written story in a game helps you know where to be and when. I’m not saying that a game of exploration needs exciting characters or a brilliant story to draw one in. The SNES Zelda game, Link’s Awakening, certainly doesn’t have any compelling writing in it, but the story is nevertheless necessary for making the game compelling because it keeps things moving. Furthermore, the visuals weren’t limited to two colors and the music wasn’t limited to two songs looping over and over again. Of course, the reason why I am harsher on LoZ than other NES games in these categories because they are necessary in a game that doesn’t provide constant action like, say, Mario Bros. If you are made to wander in circles without making any progress, your boredom should at least be of the aesthetically pleasing variety, as experienced in lava lamps and new age music. As for what I did: The first dungeon wasn’t that hard to find. I managed to beat it. Some old man told me to go to the peninsula on the east coast. So I headed east and got some scrap of paper to show to an old woman. I eventually found the old woman and all I got was the “privilege” of purchasing medicine at outrageous prices. Great. So then I went east again and decided to “play money making game” with the old man for a while, which isn’t even a game, according to Costikyan’s definition. I walked around and killed some monsters, accomplishing nothing in the process. Still, I give LoZ a 4 for its importance in video game history. Besides, I'm biased because I never played it back in the day like everyone else. I guess it was just one of those "you had to be there" things. (This entry has been edited2 times. It was last edited on Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:40:50.)Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:08:49 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=943&iddiary=2070https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=756I'm beginning to remember why I don't count this game among my favorites. In addition to the problems with the camera and the shaky wall-climbing feature, this game gets old really quickly. Although each level presents a new arrangement of obstacles, they all have the same look and feel. And although the game has many novel concepts, the rules of the game are uninspired and allow for little strategy. I've never been a fan of games where you have to run around and collect as much stuff as possible before a timer runs out. There is no room for exploration or strategy. Although each progression to the next level brings presents a greater challenge and demands a bigger ball to roll, this is essentially a game of emergence. Furthermore, getting good at this game essentially consists of memorizing routes. The minigame levels (pick up the biggest bear you can find!) are so frustrating that I didn't dare go near them, as they are entirely optional and require absolute perfection. The challenge of picking up a big bear is a matter of avoiding smaller bears, but the game's camera simply won't allow for such controlled navigation. I managed to complete the level "make a star 6" before giving up. I wandered around the unorganized world map looking for "make a star 7", couldn't find it, and turned the game off. I have no urge to finish this game, whatever that means. As I recall it doesn't really have an ending in a narrative sense, as all the cutscenes depict characters and situations that are *very* loosely related to the narrative presented in the gameplay. There is always some higher score to attain, and completing all the levels takes no time at all, so it is very hard to reach any satisfactory sense of completion in this game. This is most definitely a game of emergence. Katamari is a cute game, but it is more novelty than innovation. Contrary to what some claim, I don't think it comes anywhere close to making up for the majority of drab and unoriginal movie-wannabe titles that characterized the PS2 and its generation of consoles. Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:31:33 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=756&iddiary=1702https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=756First session. Well, that was an entertaining opening. The kitsch-factor, however, feels a little disingenuous. The marketing and translation of the English version even may even be an attempt to cash in on America's fetishization of Japanese culture as a source of cheerful and weird media. The premise is simple and novel: by guiding an orb that picks up objects, the player produces a snowball-effect that leads to quite large wad of junk. This wad must reach a certain size. Crashing into objects that are too large to pick up results in some junk falling off the wad. That's it! The design is very innovative in several areas. The control-setup almost reinvents the PS2 controller by forcing players to use the dual analog sticks in a way that is unfamiliar to them. In order to roll your ball in a given direction, both control sticks must be aligned in that direction. Unfortunately, this leaves you with no stick to control the camera, which, quite frankly, can be a pain in the ass. By clicking both sticks you can change the angle by 180 degrees, but that's hardly the camera control you need to avoid frustrating situations. The game has a dynamic sense of scope. A ball that consists of a few paper clips and walnut shells can grow big enough to pick up skyscrapers. When you are working on a small scale, the detail in the objects is fine enough to make out the labeling on a package. As you grow too large to appreciate such details, the game re-renders your environment to depict it on a different scale. This creates the illusion of a single mind-bogglingly intricate world when in fact it is a series of environments that blend seamlessly together. It also uses an extensive catalog of seemingly everyday objects to create the aesthetic of a virtual parallel (albeit surreal) world. The graphics wisely sacrifice complex shapes in order to support more polygonal clutter on screen. The game's physics display a good amount of thought. A lopsided ball will have a bumpy trajectory. However, the exaggerated traction used to climb walls feels sloppy, as it seems completely random whether it will let you roll up some incline or smash your ball to bits as it repeatedly runs into some invisible gravity-barrier. Not so fun. The levels have gradually been getting bigger and bigger in scale. In the first level I could scarcely pick up anything larger than a thumbtack. Things begin to get more exciting in later levels once I am able to pick up larger things. In fact, I just picked up my first human being! Funny how this game transcends such a blatant act of violence with its cheerful aesthetics.Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:02:28 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=756&iddiary=1695https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=452 So, having played through the second portion of SCMRPG is just as amusing as I remember. And just as tedious as well. I spent over an hour fighting the same enemies over and over. As with the first part, this grind causes me to forget that I'm playing a Columbine game. The fact that I'm in Hell fighting the demons from "Doom" doesn't help much either. There are multiple levels of irony to this part of the game. First of all, "Doom" the very game used as a scapegoat for the Columbine incident by reactionaries and censors, as it was the killers' favorite game. Secondly, as living out their favorite game, Eric and Dylan deem Hell a paradise. The sequence begins with the player controlling Dylan after he awakes in Hell, which is a huge winding dungeon filled with hundreds and hundreds of dangerous enemies, and very little opportunity to restore HP. Eric is gone, as well as all of your handy items (with the exception of an extremely weak pistol and Nietzsche’s "Ecce Homo"). To make matters worse, the player must now face zombies and demons, which are naturally capable of dealing dozens of times the damage of the high school victims you face before. The only security the player has is the ability to save anywhere, anytime. In terms of level design, things have gone to unbearably easy to unbearably difficult. Morally speaking, perhaps it's a great deal easier, since the player isn't asked to kill human beings -- if you can think of 2d sprite characters with the proportions of smurfs as human. However, after locating Eric, and several powerful weapons (not to mention leveling up a great deal) Hell became as tedious and unchallenging as the high school shooting, which I had long forgotten about. When reaching the end of the Hell dungeon, the game is essentially over, and disintegrates into comic relief. Much like another pair of boys who visited Hell during a certain "Bogus Journey", Eric and Dylan take on the role of two irreverent, wisecracking children of the 90's, and any remaining pain and suffering awakened by the game's subject matter instantly begins to fade beneath the comic relief as Eric and Dylan converse with Nietzsche, who trades you devil's food cake -- later used by the boys to get on Satan's good side -- in exchange for his book. Finally, Nietzsche directs the boys to Satan, who appears here as he does in South Park. The player must fight him, but he is fairly easy at this point, especially with the "BFG" weapon gained by this point. After defeating Satan, the final battle in the game, he sends you on a rather boring quest to find his Wiccan bible. At this point you are given a flying dragon to ride on, thus exempting you from random battles as you search Hell for the pages of the bible. While searching for the book, I came across a hidden area of Hell called "The island of lost souls". This is a small area where you can interact with Hell's various celebrities, including Ronald Reagan, Bart Simpson, Mega Man, Mario, Pikachu, Darth Vader, and others. At this point, any scrap of seriousness clinging to this game goes out the window. Some game scholars consider this aspect of SCMRPG to detract from its integrity, but I consider it a powerful triumph over tragedy. When you retrieve Satan's bible, he adopts the boys as his apprentices for eternity and the game ends with a cut scene that recreates the press-conference held outside the school after the shooting, with various people using the tragedy to advance their own agendas. One student gives a few unassuming words as a plea for sanity. And so the game ends, leaving the player to reflect upon the what really motivated the incident, hopefully having given the player a defamiliarizing experience to inspire deeper thinking on the subject. Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:53:02 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=452&iddiary=1526