Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=653https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3171Gamelog Entry #2: GAMEPLAY: I must say that after playing it for a couple days (read as 15+ hours), I definitely have a much better grasp on the game than in the beginning. The fast paced zones that were just murderously hard in the beginning have become less difficult –still a challenge though– and I have even made several top score boards. I have figured out that I can spread out ‘fins’ and capture the blocks on all the tracks at the same time by holding down the left mouse button, and I have also figured out that in particularly difficult and/or cramped situations I have the ability to jump and thereby avoid blocks that I need to. I still have not tried out all of the puzzles and mostly stick to Mono Pro (edit for my previous post: it was supposed to be Mono Pro not Ninja Mono). DESIGN: Naturally the levels of this game are very varied, since each level is based directly on a particular song; so unless you play the same song each level will be different. Meaning that if you have a lot of music you would, potentially, be able to play a different level each time by playing a different song from your collection. The game world, or each track in this case, is very colorful, most of the time having the color change depending on the intensity of the song that you are playing. This game’s main challenges are sensorimotor (hand-to-eye coordination), spatial reasoning (seeing the blocks and knowing how to react to them based on your position), pattern recognition, (grabbing up blocks in such a way as to get the highest amount of points), and sequential reasoning (planning ahead to either grab certain blocks or not to). The last three you pretty much get dumped into one because you have to look ahead at which blocks are coming up, be able to decide if you can grab them, and also plan ahead to obtain the combo and/or bonuses you want. As I said in my previous gamelog, this is an online game so there always exists a social challenge that is backed up by a performance conflict of wanting to score higher than your friends and every one else playing the game and/or your favorite song.Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:24:17 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3171&iddiary=5905https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3158Gamelog Entry #1: SUMMARY: Audiosurf is a puzzle racer that adapts music into a race track; it’s like being able to interact with musical visualizations. This race track gets filled with blocks that the player has to either collect or dodge depending on which puzzle he or she is playing. The speed on the player’s racer is determined by the instantaneous tempo of the song being played. GAMEPLAY: There are three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. The difficulty setting determines the amount of blocks that are on the race track. In all of the different puzzles there is some sort of penalty for either hitting blocks that are not supposed to be hit or overfilling one or more of your collecting lanes with blocks. Hence, when there are a lot of blocks and you are going through a particularly fast zone you really have to watch what you collect or be penalized. Blocks disappear –and turn into points– when there are three or more adjacent blocks in the collecting lanes; however even if this condition is met the blocks don’t instantly disappear, but remain there for a little while giving you time to collect more and receive a higher bonus. This game really ropes you in because you are able to enjoy all of your favorite music and solve puzzles that are dependant on your favorite music. While this game is available both offline and online, it is much more fun to play online since you can compare your top scores with everyone else’s. At the end of each level as you wait for the statistics to load you hope that you scored high enough and obtained enough bonuses to make it into the top scores list. I haven’t tried out all the different puzzles, I mostly prefer playing Ninja Mono in which the player has to collect all the colorful blocks and avoid the grey blocks. DESIGN: I think this a very innovative idea, but more importantly it is completely original (or at least I haven’t seen anything like it before). I like how the designer allowed for the game to be controlled in many different ways: the mouse, arrow keys, ASDF-keys for direct lane switching, and even being able to hook up an X-Box controller. The learning curve is a little steep though especially if most of the music you have is very fast paced. There isn’t too much documentation, but the puzzles are described enough that the player has a general understanding of what each one is before playing it.Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:55:46 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3158&iddiary=5860https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2420Gamelog Entry #2: GAMEPLAY: Since I’ve been playing Morrowind for several years I’m going to discuss what happens after you’ve played the game once through and are starting a second character. Something I should mention is that Morrowind has two expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which I have also played through. I didn’t mention these in my first entry, but I will be commenting on them here. WARNING: There will be SPOILERS. In terms of character creations you will likely choose the one with the best bonuses for later in the game and you will create a custom job class so that the skill you used the most the first time around will be either major or minor. You will also know that at around level five you will be attacked by assassins as per Tribunal’s start, thus you tend not to worry about buying, finding, and/or stealing armor for your character. You will know that spells are the most powerful attacks in the beginning of the game; that being the case choosing a character race that has more mana is favorable. Overall, game play tends to be more rushed when you already know where you need to go and what you need to do to complete certain quests. When I was replaying Morrowind several parts of the main quest that I remembered taking a really long time I managed to do really quickly. Also you tend not to interact with the NPCs that much anymore, since you pretty much know what they are going to say and you know what the background story is. Let’s talk about the two expansions: Tribunal and Bloodmoon. Of course, there are new items, new NPCs, a ton of new side-quests, and all-new monsters. There is a new storyline in each of the expansions, in which Tribunal’s storyline lightly builds on Morrowind’s while Bloodmoon is completely stand-alone. One thing you don’t see, which could have been really good, is new dimensions to quests. Like maybe have more puzzle-type quests rather than the straight forward “go kill a certain monster and reap the rewards” type of quests. Both expansions add a degree of difficulty to the game. The enemies are stronger than they are in the original game and there is a lot higher chance that they appear in mass. A short-coming of the original was that 99% of the time you would fight enemies one-on-one and while this continues to hold true for a large part of the expansions there are a lot more times when you are forced to fight groups of enemies (this applies more to Bloodmoon). DESIGN: I don’t know whether this is a short-coming in the design of the game, but it is very easy to exploit several features and elements (training, enchanting items, corpus disease stat boosters, finding powerful unique items, and getting millions of gold) of the game in order to make your character very powerful in the very beginning and then just breeze through the game. On one hand this makes the game too easy and less fun to play, but on the other it makes several tedious factors (for example, walking with the speed of a snail) go away quickly. There is a certain amount of satisfaction to be gained from being able to exploit some small developer over-sights (like making yourself a second Wraithguard; if you know what you’re doing). One thing I found that is definitely a short-coming is that if you have the best items (enchantments of items included) you’re practically invincible. Resist magic 100+% really does make you impervious to all magic spells along with many weapon enchantments. Thus, interaction with the game heavily depends on whether or not you have played it before or not. If you haven’t then in the beginning of the game you spend a lot of time exploring, which is probably exactly what the developer wanted to happen. However, if you’ve played it before then you tend to skip many things and go straight for things and quests that you know are the most fun and/or will give you the best experience. Traveling via walking pretty much goes out the window, if you can help it, unless it’s to find a really good item. If you get particularly lazy and/or bored you start to travel using the console (pretty much cheating). In that sense, the exploration and interaction elements of the game are dulled and one could argue that the game is less fun to play, but I would disagree with that. I think that the variety of races, skills, and different low-level character builds (I say low-level because in the end all your skills are maxed out and it doesn’t matter who you started out as) make the game fun to play; as long as you don’t keep doing the same character build over and over. The fun and attractiveness of the game really starts to wind down once you’ve become a “god,” done everything there is to do, and been everywhere interesting. While you will probably never completely dissolve the fog-of-war on the map, you have to realize that more than 50% of map is just terrain with nothing on it, no caves, dwellings, tombs, ruins, or strongholds; and personally uncovering a lava pit from the fog-of-war is pretty god damn boring. There are just no more accidental finds or small nifty features that really make you stop for a moment and think, “hey, that’s cool, I never knew…”Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:51:19 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2420&iddiary=4599https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2420Gamelog Entry #1: SUMMARY: Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind is a single player RPG in which you control a character from a race of your choice (Argonian, Breton, Dark Elf, High Elf, Imperial, Khajit, Nord, Orc, Redguard, and Wood Elf). In the huge game-world, there is a main story and quests that you must go through to beat the game as well as many side quests. Even after playing the game for four years I haven’t explored everything in the game. GAMEPLAY: Morrowind is a first-person RPG, though you have a choice to switch views to third-person, but it’s a lot more intuitive and comfortable to play in first-person. The basic WASD control schema is used for moving around with keys around it for auxiliary functions; some of these include jumping, drawing a weapon, using spells, and the like. The game begins with a race selection (each race has different bonuses to skills and attributes), birth-sign selection (each giving a different bonus; mostly in the form of a spell), and job selection (here you can either choose from a list of preexisting ones or create a custom job; this defines your major and minor skills). If playing the game for the first time you will likely go for a preexisting job class that you think will suit you best. After this you are told to go visit an NPC in another town, who then tells you to explore the world. This sequence provides a good introduction to many elements of the game like traveling, talking to NPCs to get extra information as well as background story, and starts you off on several side quests that help you explore the world more. The giant game-world really sucks you in because you want to explore, do quests, and get new and better items. Once you start the main quests, you get even more into the game as a whole new segment of the game is opened up and you learn that many things aren’t exactly like how the NPCs have told you. Overall, the story is interesting though some of the quests become tedious at times; especially if you are going through the game for the first time. I will say that the game is very fun to play, even after three years of playing the game I keep finding new places that I haven’t been to, some of which aren’t even in the walkthroughs. It’s not exactly a social game, because there are no multiplayer options, so unless you are playing it in the same room with a friend or two there is no real interaction between you and other people. DESIGN: As you go through the game your character improves his or her skills by using them and gains attributes when leveling up. However, in the beginning when you have low stats for skills you tend to want to choose the race that has the best bonuses to the skills that you think you are going to be using the most. Since Morrowind is a very open-ended game you are pulled to explore the world before starting on the main storyline. Exploring allows growth in your character’s fighting skills and as well the fact that you find some rare and unique items. I don’t know about you, but I get a certain sense of satisfaction from clearing as much fog-of-war from the map as I can. Also there are many features and elements that you discover as the game progresses that improve the game play and make certain previously tedious actions very simple. These include, but are not limited to: water-walking, water-breathing, attribute boosts, and damage boosts. You find that just because your character is a warrior-type by job doesn’t mean that he or she can’t use spells; in fact, spells can be quite helpful. Overall, Morrowind does a good job of drawing you into the game-world. The designers did a good job with the travel system such that you don’t have walk all over the map to get to large cities, but you do have to walk if you need to get to small cities. This really promotes the notion that you need to explore the game-world. On this note, I should mention that while you are out in the wilderness a lot of the creatures will attack you on sight and while this is a realistic element of sorts it gets annoying after a while and I wish the developers had put something in such that when you are a high level that doesn’t happen anymore. The fighting in Morrowind isn’t very innovative (I think they could have done a better job) all you have to do is just chop at the enemy and eventually it will die. There is the notion that if you prepare the attack it will do more damage, but you end up not really using that very much. Another interesting element of Morrowind is that you can read all the books that are present in the game. Thereby learning more about the background of the game story and also specific books can increase one of your skills (this can only be done once per certain skill). On the subject of books, your character keeps a journal of everything that has happened to his or her; quests and details about them are also recorded in here. A feature was added in one of the expansions to allow you to search the journal by topic or quest. A major downside is that the game has a tendency to crash or glitch, though you tend to get used to these things; so falling through the floor (common glitch) becomes almost part of the game.Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:50:54 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2420&iddiary=4590https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2135Gamelog Entry #2: GAMEPLAY: Practice definitely makes perfect, after playing for a while longer I started getting the timing down a lot better and also figured out several other things that I had missed before. For example, in bowling being able to spin the ball before you release it; makes strikes a lot more likely. Another thing is that in golf you can tilt your view and also on the green you can find out the topography of the green. With a lot of the games you just have to be patient and calm not jerking the motion as if you’re trying to press the button on a controller as quickly as possible. I haven’t played much Wii boxing or baseball, so I will not comment on those. DESIGN: I think the little nifty features mentioned above make the game more realistic. Having to perform the same motions as in real life is probably the biggest innovative element of Wii Sports. The fact that you have to stand up and go through the motions in order to play the game makes it very fun to play with friends because, as I’ve said above, we can help each other and just generally have fun. The main challenges in this game are to get used to the controls and timing of when to swing the remote, and making sure that you swing the hard and fast or slow and easy depending on the situation. For example, in golf, you can’t hit the ball too hard or the ball will just fly in an unpredictable way. One thing that always frustrates me is that sometimes the controls are very sensitive and practically have to not even swing the remote to get the desired effect, and other times you try to do an action and it just doesn’t go through (like punches in boxing) or you have to perform a very specific movement with the remote in order to make it do what you want. Another feature that might have been good to add is some sort of prize system because while simply placing first among your friends is fun, it wouldn’t hurt to also get some sort of prize or maybe be able to unlock some items or something. This game definitely proves that in order for a game to be fun it doesn’t have to be really complex or have some absolutely outstanding graphics. A simple game that brings together fun, new, interesting element can be just as, or even more fun.Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:28:58 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2135&iddiary=4098https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2135Gamelog Entry #1: Summary: In Wii Sports the player has a choice of several sports: bowling, golf, tennis, boxing, and baseball. Each of these sports is played in basically the same way as you would play them in real life; the only real difference being that you don’t have to go anywhere or have any specific sport oriented equipment to play. Gameplay: When you first start playing each of the sports you need a bit of time to get used to the controls; more specifically the sensitivity of the controls, since there are no actual “controls,” but instead you have a remote that mimics the real life actions that you would have to perform if you were playing in real life. Timing is also something that takes practice to get used to. For example, in tennis you have to know to swing right before the ball reaches you. I’ve actually never played Wii Sports in single player it has always been a social event with my friends. We have lots of fun, help each other with certain aspects of the game, and make fun of each others screw-ups. There is no story to this game; players simply compete with each other to win the game. Players can gain titles (like expert or professional) depending on how well they do in the game, but there no bonuses associated with these titles. Design: I really liked you actually have to perform the same motions in the game you would have to in real life. As much as the developers of the game tried to make it as close to reality as possible there are still some things that still remain unreal. For example, in golf there is a bar that shows you about how far the ball can go depending on the strength of your swing. Another thing is the wind indicated by an arrow using which you can account for it pretty well (with practice).Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:50:36 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2135&iddiary=4078https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1847Gamelog Entry #1: SUMMARY: Rappelz is a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that has three character races: Deva, Gaia, and Asura, within each of these races are three classes. For Deva there is the Holy Warrior, Cleric, and Breeder, for Gaia there is the Fighter, Kahuna, and Spell Singer, and for Asura there is the Strider, Dark Magician, and Sorcerer. Each class basically has a warrior, a mage, and a summoner; respectively for all races. Initially each race starts out with a basic character which you can later choose to become one of the classes for that race, meaning you don’t have to make a decision about your character until after you’ve played the game for a little while. About halfway through the game you can “job change” the aforementioned classes into their next evolution, so to speak, at which point you gain another skill set to go with the new sub-class. For the fighter and mage type there is a choice of two job changes to narrow the specialty of your character, while the summoner type only has one possibility. GAMEPLAY: As I said above initially everyone starts out on the Trainee Island with the basic characters for each race and has to run around doing several quests that teach you the rules, controls, and several nifty features of the game. As in any RPG you have to gain a certain amount of experience to level up, this is done by killing monster and doing quests for NPCs in the towns. (Note: Quests give a lot of experience, so it is definitely worth doing them). In Rappelz, along with experience, you get what are called Job Points these are used to get skills or to level up your Job Level. The job level, not the character level, is what dictates which skills are available for you to use. Hence, you don’t have to worry about messing up your character build by getting or upgrading a skill because you can just gain more job points by killing monster, in effect giving you unlimited job points. One interesting feature of Rappelz is that your character has stamina. What this does is that, as long as you have some stamina, the amount of exp (experience) and jp (job points) doubles for each kill. On that note, the leveling in this game is really quick (at least for the first 25 levels or so); playing the game for an hour will likely get to level 10 at least. There really isn’t much of a story for the game, I mean there is a quick background story to the three races are how they came to be, but there’s nothing to follow that and there is no final goal that you have to achieve. The game is definitely fun to play. The quick gaining of levels and abundance of quests makes it so that there is always something to do. The social interaction aspect really depends on the type of character you have. A mage character will need to be in a party to fight higher level monsters, whereas fighters are able to fight higher level monster on their own. Gamelog Entry #2: GAMEPLAY: The style of gameplay doesn’t really change for higher level characters; you just get new skills and equipment. Though at the same time new areas of the game will become accessible to you, by this I mean that you will be able to go to new places on the map and fight higher level monster thereby exploring the world further. One of these places that you shouldn’t even attempt to go to without a strong party are the dungeons. These dungeons house monsters that much stronger than the ones you fight elsewhere in the game. DESIGN: I have mixed feeling about Rappelz. It’s a fun game to play, I certainly enjoy playing it but there are certain things that really bug me about it. Let’s start of with the good elements. One element I really like is the amount of hot-keys that are available. Unlike most RPGs where you are limited to just the F1-F12 keys, Rappelz has F1-F12, Alt+F1-F12, Ctrl+F1-F12, and Shift+ F1-F12 be the hot-keys which really helps when you have a lot of skills, potions, and actions to map such that you don’t have to open your inventory in the middle of battle. On that note, items stack so the amount you can carry is only limited by how much weight you can carry, which is dependant on your items and your character’s strength. In Rappelz, the stats are automatically allocated each level with emphasis on certain stats depending on character class. A feature that I’ve already mentioned before is the stamina effect that doubles the exp and jp received. Also, there is are two items called Force or Soul Chips, which can be used on monsters to double the physical or magical, respectively, damage dealt to them for ten seconds; these items are quite abundant and pretty cheap to buy. I also like how each spell has its own cool-down time, so while one skill is cooling down you can use another one. Now that I’ve covered good parts it’s time to talk about the bad parts. First and foremost, I really hate the fact that the developers are making this a game in which if you want to have better equipment and a more enjoyable playing experience you have to spend real money. There are some items that they sell in their online shop that simply don’t even have a minute chance of dropping in-game and if you want them you have to buy them; and these items aren’t cheap at all. This really ruins the long-term playing experience because even if you play for a long time you can’t get some of the best items in the game. Another thing that bugs me is that some monsters have a very low spawn rate, so sometimes finding the exact monster you need to complete a quest takes a really long time.Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:47:44 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1847&iddiary=3631