Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=667https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3067GAMEPLAY: Hooray! I get to play the game now! I can finally make decks and collect skills. The available skills were very limited when I first was able to make a deck, but the number of skills has steadily increased as I’ve completed missions. This game is really a collectable card game in disguise. I get money from completing missions which I can use to buy a group of five random skills(equivalent of a booster pack in Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh!). Skills even have rarity which affects the chances of getting them, means they are worth more, and roughly correlates to how good they are. My deck requires a large proportion of aura particles which I need to use skills(like land in Magic or energies in Poke’mon…not that I’ve ever played or heard of Poke’mon cards). Constructing a strategy and seeing how it plays out on the battlefield are the biggest draw for me. Unfortunately, there are few reasonable strategies and different ones usually play the similarly. By similarly, I mean all the decks are really bad. Almost every attack has a crippling draw back. Some are cheap but are only one-time use or they deal good damage but have a horrible trajectory that makes them almost impossible to hit with or they aim fairly well but do little damage for high cost. The fact that they are all bad does make them balanced but it also makes battles tedious and long as ever, a result I hoped to avoid when I could chose my skills. That said, there are some skills I like, they are just few and far between. DESIGN: Phantom Dust tries to create a complex set of skills to allow for many unique strategies, but it falls short in most respects. The large amount of skills with many attributes is designed to give the player the freedom to choose whatever strategy they want. This works to a degree. By using melee skills and others that hinder the opponents defense such as preventing them from using skills for ten seconds, I created an effectively aggressive deck. Conversely, by have more aura with more powerful defenses, I made a deck that stalls until it can use expensive skills. So it is possible to make completely different strategies, the big problem is that the way the game is designed to allow these strategies also creates side effects. For one, some of the variants that the designers put in to increase the variety of skills make those skills useless. A good example is the various trajectories attacks have. Some shoot straight ahead, some arc at different angles, and some fall from above. The ones that arc are supposed to give you more choices such as allowing you to hide behind a wall and shoot a blast that arcs over the wall. In practice, most trajectories besides plain straight almost always hit something in the way. When you are inside a building some are impossible to use because they hit the ceiling before coming back down. Later in the game, missions have rules that change the gameplay. The designers probably did this to create challenge and promote the use of specific strategies certain skills use. This works to a degree as well. One level doubles the cost of all skills, promoting the use of cheap skills and one-use skills which are more powerful for less cost because they can only be used once. The unintentional downside is that I now have to make a specific deck for each mission and I usually have to lose a mission several times before I can see what deck I need to make. It also makes my other decks useless because the rules are so crippling. The double cost rule, for instance, makes almost all decks unusable for having anything of medium to high cost. The designer’s intentions for these game elements are obvious and are achieved through these methods, but the detriments to gameplay they make are greater that the benefits. The designers didn’t consider the side effects of these choices and the gameplay suffered. This game had potential and it was that potential that got me to play as long as I did. It’s too bad the designers left the game so unrefined.Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:21:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3067&iddiary=5899https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3067SUMMARY: Phantom Dust is a mix between a shooter and a strategy card game. You live in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are forced to live underground due to evil dust that now covers the surface. All the remaining humans have lost their memory including the character you play, a talented young psychic who was found on the surface. Oh, did I mention the dust made some people psychic? Well, it did, and you now battle to find out what happened. GAMEPLAY: I choose this game because it was shown in an in-class game demo in my game design class. Being a fan of customizable strategy games, the deck-making aspect looked appealing. As always, the game starts by making you do a bunch of tutorial missions. Each tutorial mission focuses on one aspect of the game. The game is fairly complicated, but I’ve been playing for more than an hour and I’m still going through the tutorial. Personally, I’d rather they leave most of it for me to figure out and make the tutorials optional. Battles start by collecting skills from orbs that appear at your starting point and equipping them to any of the four buttons X,Y, A, or B. Once equipped, pushing the button again uses that skill. Skills have many attributes like an optimum range, energy cost, attack or defense, and more. The wide variety of attributes each attack has opens up a vast range of possible skills. I am hopefully this is an indication of what is to come later on. The battles are pretty slow-paced so far. I spend a lot of time waiting for new orbs to appear. Also, every time I use a skill I have to wait for my energy to regenerate. Coupled with the fact that enemies are very good at dodging attacks, battles can get down right boring. The game does seem to be building up though, with each battle introducing and unlocking new skills. Eventually, according to the in class game demo, I should be able to put skills I want together into a deck, so I’ll reserve my judgment until then.Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:34:04 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3067&iddiary=5728https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2887GAMEPLAY: After my second session I am still impressed with this game. I’ve heard before that this game is the closest thing to a work of art in games and I’d say that’s a fairly accurate description. Every colossus is like a level, and each one has something different. The environments, for one, are unique and beautiful. One “level” is themed around ruins half submerged in a lake. Another takes place in a field of grassy hills. It was a pleasure discovering what was around the next corner. It wasn’t all good though. For one, it was sometimes confusing as to how to kill the monsters. I realize they are puzzles and the fun is figuring out what to do but once or twice I spent a long time doing something completely wrong. It seems like the game sets up wrong paths, which I can see the benefit of having. It makes the game feel less linear that way, but it did cause me to think I was on the right track and lead me to continue to try doing something I couldn’t because of it. Another thing was that some monsters required you to think of something really strange that most people wouldn’t. For instance, the third monster(spoiler alert!) required you to stand on a metal disk and make it hit the disk with its club, causing its wrist armor to break, allowing you to climb up. I did not think of that at all and kept trying to climb its club and jump over the wrist when it raised the club back up. It was sheer luck I happened to be on a metal disk one of the times it attacked. These are not major flaws, though they do take you out of the mood somewhat. It was important for me to mention the downs to be fair, but I hope I don’t deter anyone for playing this game, I’d definitely recommend it. DESIGN: It’s obvious that a great deal of work was put into creating the atmosphere of this game. The appeal of the game comes largely form the curiosity the game instills throughout. The developers designed the game to draw on the player’s desire to explore and discover. Other games do the same but in a different way. Other games give you shiny things to collect, upgrades and points but Shadow of the Colossus does it much more covertly. The game almost seems like it wants you to like without noticing. Breaking the game into 16 “levels” was a nice touch. I remember playing Ico and feeling like it just went on forever there’s no distinguishable break points aside from save points. Have the game segmented gives you a sense of accomplishment throughout, and makes feel like you are actually progressing. The developers did a lot of unique and interesting things with this game. The monsters, for example, are bosses, but they’re also levels in themselves. You can get more life and more grip to on to things longer, but for the most part your character stays the same. I think they did this to keep your focus off of the character. This is a game you recommend to people not because it was really fun but because you feel you it will better them in some way, not that it wasn’t fun. The game clearly tries to touch you on a deeper level than most. All the aspects work together to that end. The I can see how this kind of thing may not appeal to some people. This game requires you to be drawn in by the atmosphere. If the mood doesn’t grab you, there’s little chance you’ll like this game (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:18:59.)Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:17:08 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2887&iddiary=5395https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2887SUMMARY: Shadow of the Colossus is puzzle/platformer. You run, jump, grab, climb, slash, and shoot. You play a young man who has traveled to a strange land to ask a god to resurrect a girl you brought with you, I assume me loved her. The god tells you it will bring her back to life if you kill 16 monsters that roam the strange land. You have a special magical sword which has the power to kill the monsters. With your loyal horse, you ride off on your quest. GAMEPLAY: I’ve played Ico, which is made by the same people as Shadow of the Colossus, and it shares many qualities. The scenery is, as with Ico, very important to the experience. The land is vast and riddled with huge chasms, wide open plains, and ancient structures. It makes you feel tiny and isolated. Also the scant, mysterious story is similar to Ico. All you know is you are trying to bring some girl back to life. You have no idea where you came from, what happened to the girl, or what the land you’ve gone to is. The physical abilities of your character emphasize that you are an average human, which adds to the feeling of being small and insignificant. The game consists of two main parts: getting to the monster, and killing the monster. The first part you do so by using your sword to reflect light. You hold the sword to the light and beams come off it. Then you turn in any direction and as you move in the direction the monster is in, the beams of light focus to one point. When you are getting close, you’ll come to a place where you have to leave your horse and traverse an obstacle course of ledges, walls, ropes, ladders and so forth. When I reached the first monster, there was a short cutscene showing it walk into view far away. As I ran up to it, it becomes increasingly apparent how gigantic it is. I really enjoyed the sincerely daunting scene as I stood in its shadow, wondering how I could possible kill that.Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:16:07 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2887&iddiary=5392https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2350GAMEPLAY: My second time though I tried the arcade mode and then later played some more with Alex. I chose a character that I liked from playing with my brother before. The matches started out fairly easy and progressively increased in difficulty. Unfortunately for me, the difficulty surpassed my skill before I was even close to the end. After some frustration, I started arcade mode again on easy. This setting proved quite accurate until the last fight which took me many tries to win. This brings me to one of the most annoying aspects of the game, the AI. Its not particularly humanlike. To make the game harder, the AI becomes amazingly adept at combos and special moves. It then lapses into stupidity to allow some possibility of winning. The frequency at which the AI is stupid instead of a pro is the difficulty. This can be very frustrating as sometimes there is a disproportionate amount of time when the AI is amazing which often leads to it winning nearly flawlessly. I still like this game though. I just don’t plan to play the 1 player modes again. So I quickly beckoned Alex to come play. This time I used some of the characters I had before and started getting used to them. Once I was somewhat familiar with a few of them, it became clear that each has a particular strategy. For instance, there is one character that is very defensive and has traps and long range attacks. Another character does a lot of her moves right after blocking and has a complementary move which allows her to run forward while blocking. Another character still can charge up and relies on hitting with a few very powerful attacks. This allows players to choose a character that suits them best. When I was playing with Alex he had characters he liked and I had mine. I liked having a character that was “my” character and fighting one that was “Alex’s”. There is also a colorful array of places to choose from. You can fight in a fancy lobby, or a magical forest with gnomes and giant bettles, or perhaps you’d like to fight in Hell ankle deep in a river of blood, why not? Though the background you choose has no effect on the game, they’re all very well drawn and add some variety. DESIGN: The style of the game takes a lot from anime. The art itself is anime but also the design of the characters is reminiscent of anime. Their appearance and moves are often way over-the-top like anime is a lot of the time. The personalities of the characters are similar to those you see in anime too. For example, there is a cute spunky petite girl probably around 16 who fights with a giant anchor. The kind of gung-ho attitude she has is something anime uses frequently. The fact that many character fight with huge and/or strange weapons, an anchor, giant swords, a giant key, a giant scalpel, fans, a yo-yo, a pool cue and billiard balls, a guitar,…hair, is another kind of thing I expect in anime. The over-the-top feel of the game is emphasized in this game, more than most fighters. Giant blasts are a part of most characters’ arsenal. Every character had a instant kill move and these are especially wild. Whether they’re blowing the opponent up with an atomic bomb or sucking them into another dimension, the instant kill moves are the pinnacle of this game’s active imagination. This adds to the excitement and energy of the battles. Also, as I said before, the changing of the commands for special moves in this iteration of Guilty Gear is important design choice. The designers decided it was more important that players be able to use the moves effectively than to make them harder to do. I believe it is more satisfying to do a move that requires more than just a button press, but there is a point where this causes more frustration than fun. I’d say they got the balance just right. Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:08:30 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2350&iddiary=4829https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2350SUMMARY: Guilty Gear XX AC is a 2D fighter. There’s really no intelligible story, like most fighting games. The emphasis is on game play. There are several modes to choose from like arcade, training, survival, and 2 player VS. The characters range from normal, samurai and ninja, to completely weird, a girl with a giant living key, a guy who is possessed by a demon, a girl who fights with her hair…there are a lot more characters in this category. GAMEPLAY: I decided to start out with 2 player VS with my brother. We went slow, choosing characters and trying all their moves. The first thing I noticed was the improved commands to do moves. The button combinations are much simpler than on Guilty Gear X on Dreamcast which I‘ve also played. Though seemingly a small improvement, this can make or break a fighting game. In Guilty Gear X’s case, the commands were so hard to pull off that button mashing was the only way to win unless you wanted to spent hours practicing and memorizing the buttons. This time the moves consist of simple d-pad quarter circles, half circles, and “dragon claws”(toward enemy, down, diagonally down toward enemy). These are common in fighters and easy to become consistent with. We continued to play 6 or 7 matches trying various characters and I was very impressed with the look of the game. As 2D fighters go, and 2D in general, this game is top-notch in the graphics department. Every character has a plethora of animations, all drawn with stunning detail. Half the fun for me is watching the animations when you pull off special moves, which are usually particularly dazzling. In this age when almost all games, even on handhelds, are predominantly 3D, I’m glad to see a 2D game done well.Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:37:30 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2350&iddiary=4757https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2143GAMEPLAY: As I progress though the game, new aspects get add every level or so to make the levels fresh and increasing hard. For instance, new types of elebits appear in later level that act differently. Blue ones are fast and make smoke to hide them, Pink ones teleport, red ones have a siren that wakes up other elebits nearby, orange ones fly and so on. The variety of elebits is welcome and keeps the game from becoming repeatative. There are also new rules in farther levels like breakable items that cause you to lose if you break too many. Though this doesn't add to the gameplay it makes the game more challenging and adds more variety. To my surprise, there was a boss stage. The boss stage was different then the other level because I didn't have to hunt it down. The boss was fun and exercised my aiming skill because he kept teleporting and turning almost invisible. The appliances took a odd turn in farther levels too. In early stages once I had enough watts I just pushed a button on the appliance and got elebits. Now some of the appliances are like minipuzzles That require more than just enough watts. some require you to insert something like toast in the toaster, coffee pot in the coffee maker, and a DvD in the DVD player. Then there are some that require a special action. The laundry machine had to be openned, then dirty laundry put in, shut, then started. Its good to see a game that teaches kids how to do chores. And on that note, this game is a great kids game. It's simple, colorful, clean, and no violence(well except for the capturing of helpless, little elebits.) Design: Elebits does a lot of things right(it wouldn't be on the classics list if it didn't, would it?) First, the house feels very real, mostly because its full of stuff. The drawers are full on clothes, the closets full of boxes and tools and vacuums, the kitchen has pots and pans and dishes and a refrigerator full of food. All that makes the game more immersive. Second, the elebits are funny and odd. sucking them up just never gets old. Just the fact that the point of the game is to catch these innocent little things is offbeat and original. Third, The game has a lot of replay value. You can play levels again to try to get higher scores and faster times. Theres also a level editor thats allows you to put anything anywhere and you can add properties like zero gravity. From the couple levels of that I played with, it looks like theres a lot of crazy levels you can make. Oh, and there's even multiplayer. There's not much to say thats bad about this game. The story is silly and slim but they intended it to be that way. There's not much of a goal since the story is so insignificant, you just go from level to level, though you do get a cut scene every once in a while. well that was a short paragraph, I'm gonna have to get a really bad game for my next log.Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:38:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2143&iddiary=4344https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2143SUMMARY: Elebits is a werky first-person shooter for the Wii. Its style is not unlike katamari damacy. You play a little boy in a world that is normal in every way except for the fact that there are strange little critters called elebits. You hate elebits because your parents, being elebits researchers, pay more attention to them than to you. You wish elebits didn't exist because if they didn't, your parents would take you to amusement parks appearently. One day you are home alone and the power goes out. Your favorite show is going to come on soon so you decide to go catch elebits using a laser gun so you can power the TV. GAMEPLAY: When you start the game you have the option of taking a tutorial, which I did. The tutorial's not bad, it shows you all the controls, and gives you a lot of tips. The gun you have can catch elebits bit it can also pick up objects, open doors, and turn on appliances. Each level is a different part of your house and you are given a time limit to collect a certain number of watts which you get from elebits. Watts are also needed to activate appliances and open certain doors. The appliances and doors show you how many watts you need to use them. Appliances are objects that, when activated, let out yellow and pink elebits which allow you to pick up heavier objects instead of giving you watts. Back to the elebits. Your house is completely swarming with them. They're on the beds and shelves, in the closets and cabinets, on the floor, under everything and in everything. It's a good thing elebits are cute little puff balls because if they were cockroaches or something your house would be suitable for a horror film. collecting the elebits is very satisfying because they run and scream and hide and cry. I particularly like their cute little screams. It's also fun to ravage rooms by madly flinging everything, which usually exposes a lot of elebits who prompty run for their lives.Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:05:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2143&iddiary=4107https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1861GAMEPLAY: After the initial action-packed sequence, the game slows down a bit with puzzles. The puzzles really don't add much in my opinion as to solve them you just go anywhere you currently can which will probably lead you to unlock the next place to go and so on until the all the switches have been activated to open the big door. It's really not much of a puzzle and just makes you spend time running back and forth. The areas now seem to hold a lot of little secret prizes here and there which I found fun and rewarded you for looking around thoroughly. There are also many things you can scan such as special objects and creatures. From my experience with Metroid Prime 1, I think you are rewarded with unlockable extras for the more things you scan. This gives you another reason to search every area you go through. As I mentioned before, you aim with the wiimote, you also look around by moving the aimer to the side of the screen in any direction. I found this to be a little annoying as I would try to aim at something near the side of the screen. Looking around in this way is not as fast and easy as with an analog stick either. Though it is fun to aim with the wiimote, it is not as effective as analog sticks. DESIGN: Metroid Prime 3 does a good job of immersing you in the game. Visually, it looks great, and the thing that really pulled me in was the attention to little things like the way the visor fogs up when you go through steam and how you can sometimes see the reflection of Samus's face on the inside of the visor. The environment also sets the mood well. The spaceship rooms look high-tech and sophisticated and the ancient ruins are crumbly and overgrown. The cutscenes work well in progressing the story and showing you what to do. They are evenly spaced and not too long. The game keeps you interested thoughout by giving you more than just your mission to do. While your trying to get the the next area, there are secrets to find and things to scan. This always gives you something to do as you go. Some of the secrets you find tell a parts of a story about how the civilization you are exploring fell. The more pieces of the story you find, the more you want to keep going to find the next. The game also keeps you motivated by occationally upgrading your armor with new guns and gadgets. The game is pretty easy as you have many bars of life and the enemies deal little damage. On the first boss I missed hardly any of its attacks but still won with plenty of life to spare. The enemies are sufficiently difficult, they don't just stand still and they have good aim, but it doesn't matter because you can get hit by all of they and still win. This, to me, is too easy. I would rather die and be forced to get better then have such little challenge. I am playing on normal and there is a harder difficulty available, so perhaps I will switch to that. I haven't gotten very far either so it may get harder as well. Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:39:25 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1861&iddiary=3762https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1861SUMMARY: Metroid Prime 3 is a first person shooter set in the distant future. As a bounty hunter it is Samus's job to blast the heck out of space pirates. At her disposal is your array of weapons and gadgets: a chargeable arm cannon, rockets, a plasma lasso, and various visors. Samus can also transform into a ball that can roll around and drop bombs. GAMEPLAY: From the 90 minutes or so that I've played so far I'd say the gameplay is good overall. The game owes a lot to the abilities of the wiimote. Aiming with the wiimote is perfect for shooters and makes the game feel more exciting than if it was played with analog sticks. The motion sensors in the wiimote and nunchuck are also used in interesting ways such as flinging your plamsa lasso or opening gratuitously latched doors. The tutorial and story introduction are well integrated and concise. The story is simple but not bad: pirates have infected the good guys' biological supercomputers with a virus and you have to deliver the vaccine to each one of them in the galaxy. The action comes soon and is alien-explodingly fun(if you were wondering, alien-explodingly fun is pretty fun). Though the game is linear, it doesn't feel forced. The level disign is good and the surrondings are very active with walls exploding, ships flying around, nameless allied soldiers flailing. Why is it that whenever you see allied units ahead, you're almost guaranteed they are about to die from something such as a huge explosion? (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:45:31.)Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:38:01 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1861&iddiary=3658