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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by MMammose (May 17th, 2013 at 00:44:39) |
For my final session of Columbine I decided to play out the Hell level. This part was very strange. Unlike the rest of the game, I'm not entirely sure the purpose of this level.To add insult to injury these levels are particularly difficult. I died multiple times without making much progress. Never the less I continued to push through the levels until I eventually found Eric. At this point I was so frustrated with the gameplay and nature of the game I desisted.
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Beat Hazard: Ultra (PC) by dkirschner (May 16th, 2013 at 10:49:27) |
Veeery entertaining music game. It's a twin stick space shooter that thumps along to your music. Be warned: there are a lot of flashing lights. Luckily I don't have epilepsy because this game would surely trigger fits. It took some getting used to, keeping an eye on my ship, being able to track all the various enemies and missiles amidst the utter chaos on screen. But once you get used to it (start with some slow tracks on easy) you become able to keep track of 100 things on screen at once and it is a really good feeling.
Along with the visual and mental training to keep up with everything, you also need to be able to identify at a glance every enemy ship type. Some just sort of hover around you. Some shoot red bullets which are unkillable. Some shoot golden bullets of various types which are killable. Some drop red flashing mines. Some pull you toward them while others push you away. Some meteors fall in a straight line while others seem gravitationally attracted to you. Some ships launch about 15 missiles when you blow them up. Other ships move in unpredictable ways. Then there are all the boss types and you have to know all the variations on all the different types.
Then you need to know what all your weapons are, what each pick-up does, how to monitor your ammo and score and multiplier and track length and everything all at the same time, without dying. It becomes absolute insanity at times and it is awesome to be able to find your way through it.
There are two meters with related pickups that increase them. One is power, which makes your guns stronger, and the other is volume, which makes the music louder. The stronger and louder stuff is, the more enemies come flying out and the more visual effects, explosions and auras and things, start going off everywhere. Doesn't necessarily make it harder (harder to keep track of, yes), but you're stronger and more pickups drop and you rack up the score with tons of multipliers. You really do fall into a groove playing this. I kept finding myself nodding along to the music because lights and things will pulse and burst and explode in time.
Different types of music don't seem to do a lot to change what happens on each song though, which is a bit of a letdown. There's some variation but nothing like, say, Audiosurf. For example, I think every single song starts off with hardly any enemies, and then a few asteroids float around, then the easy small ships float near you...then depending I guess different types and amounts of other ships start. But it always starts slow and easy no matter if the song is reggae or death metal. Then the enemies always pick up and there are always faster crazy parts, no matter what happens in the song.
Case: I went to go play Rotten Sound, a grindcore band, for some super fast music. When browsing my folders, I found Robert Jordan just above them, the author of the Wheel of Time fantasy books. Out of curiosity I played an audiobook chapter. Even though it's just some guy reading a book, the enemies varied, it was fast and slow, easy and harder, boss fights happened still, and so on. Less frantic overall, but it didn't really diminish the flow that every song seemed to have.
Also, I am proud to say that I completed the 18-minute first chapter of the first Wheel of Time book! I was on my last life. Do you know how hard it is to not make more than a couple mistakes for 18 minutes? Hard! I was focusing and then my roommate came in and was talking to me and I was like 'cant talk, focused,' and he's all like 'oh, what's that? what are you playing? what's going on? oh, you died? this game looks boring' and I was like 'omg will explain later, dying, busy focusing.'
Anyway, then I played Rotten Sound and it wasn't a whole lot different. I had remembered playing some technical death metal a while back on this game and it being insane, and I tried that particular band I remembered, but it wasn't insane. Maybe I had turned the difficulty up. There are 5 difficulties: easy, normal (which I was playing on), hardcore (which I did a few times), then you can unlock insane and suicide, which are probably a lot of fun. There are also some other game modes and an extensive leaderboard system.
There are also perks you unlock as your overall score increases. You rank up, and I thought I had hit max when I got an achievement for reaching "Elite." That was after the 18-minute Robert Jordan chapter that netted me something like 55 million points (usually i would get 1-2 million per song), and I leveled up an unprecedented 4 or 5 times from one song and it boosted me all the way to elite. Anyway, I ran to look at the leaderboards, and turns out about 20,000 people were still ahead of me. Since Elite still had a point value attached to the high end, I wondered if anything was after it, or if you just hit that high cap and points stop accumulating. So I played a little longer and reached...Elite 2. Huh. So I went back to the leaderboards and went to the beginning. First place person? Something like Elite 24,000. Whaaat. Yeah, people are all in the thousands. They must have played this a hell of a lot. So apparently there is no cap. You just keep going, Elite XXXXXX. And you keep getting money too, so there is one category on the boards, like "Rich Kid" or something, that ranks peoples' money. It's in the millions. I have like $60. You use money to buy perks, and you pick it up in levels, by the way.
Anyway, since Elite was the last named level and it was just neverending from there, I consider that I have beaten the game. The achievement means I won right?! This has proven an excellent way to listen to some music and play games and be visually overstimulated. Since I 'beat' it, I doubt I'll play much more on my own besides to show it to people.
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Columbine RPG (Arcade) by mtagliola1 (May 15th, 2013 at 23:59:48) |
Again, I spent another thirty minutes just running around the small portion of the game your allowed access to without finishing the objective. I can not being myself to plant the bombs in the cafeteria and commence real events even if they are played out in a video game. Because the events of this video game did actually take place, my vivid memory of them, and the social setting (College Student environment) I can not forgo the given objective and therefore am happy to be done playing or walking around this game endlessly. It was as immoral as the initial game (GTA) however because of its reality based story (narrative) there seems to be an added immorality built into the structure and framework of the game that make it not conducive to me completing its objectives.
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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by vpaz2 (May 15th, 2013 at 14:25:46) |
Today I decided to kill everyone I saw within all the levels. The process of killing everyone got to be repetitive and boring after a while. The emergence of group battles made the event more entertaining due to the use of big bombs. I felt the ammo also lasted forever. Some of the people were real easy to kill while others took longer, but the fact of the matter is that there was a lot of people to kill.
I would go into each room and see if there were any secret messages or objects I forgot when I first played the game. The traveling was easy because the character moved fast. That was something I liked about the game. It didn't take forever to go to one place from another.
The library and parking lot had to many people in it. Those places took forever to clear. I also speak at least 20 minutes trying to figure out how to kill one girl, but I guess there was a glitch in the game. There were chairs and tables surrounding her and no way to get to her. It possibly could have been part of the game though. Maybe that girl created a barrier and I wasn't suppose to ever reach her. This time around I also played with the sound. The music was actually descent. Most of the songs were familiar to me, but I didn't know why exactly they were appropriate to the game. I imagine its due to the violent nature of the song, but at least for me the lyrics represented something else to me. Those songs were not at all a fuel for rage to my ears.
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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by MMammose (May 15th, 2013 at 13:51:08) |
I picked up Columbine again and this time I tried to play through the game without killing anyone. That was extremely difficult. It took me like an hour and a half of restarting and restarting until I finally managed to get through to the library without killing anyone. That was an extremly frustrating and difficult proposition. The problem is its like trying to get 100% on anything. One mistake and its all over. That presented me with no end of trouble as I would bump into the enemies left and right while trying to nvagate the tight parking lot and hallways.
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1661 registered gamers and 1786 games. 5591 GameLogs with 9911 journal entries. 4327 games are currently being played.
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Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time (PS2) by ETA |
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most recent entry: Sunday 13 January, 2008
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Entry #2
GAMEPLAY:
After taking a day long break and coming back to play this game again I feel its not the easiest thing to pick up an play again. In any given level its not to clear where you are suppose to be going, so if you don’t remember what you were doing and which direction you were progressing in the last time you played the game (like I me) you spend a little while wondering around trying to figure out where to go next. But once things get rolling along it’s a nice experience once again.
Having spent more time with the game, I can safely say that the combat is starting to wear on me. Not to the point where I want to quite playing the game, but it definitely feels like a chore more than an enjoyable experience. It is what I will call “skilled” button mashing (meaning it requires some timing and skill to avoid death), but it is still button mashing nonetheless and it begins to wear out its welcome rather quickly. Repetitiveness aside, it does still look pretty cool but I can’t imagine that carrying the combat for the rest of the game.
The story in the game is nothing particularly special either. It does provide you and your character with your motivation from hacking down all these enemies and solving all these puzzles, but its not very engrossing. I can also appreciate the fact that the game wants to be cinematic, but the constant barrage of cut-scenes after every little thing (after every battle you are greeted with an unskipable cut scene of you holstering you weapons for example) actually breaks up my gameplay experience instead of enhancing it. There are occasions where they do actually enhance the experience however. The main one being the short cut-scene following every save point that shows you what you will be doing in the “future”. These scenes keep with the games theme of time and give you nice little hints about what you should be doing in any particular level with an annoying HUD display or pop up message that would ruin the atmosphere.
DESIGN:
SoT is actually an odd mix of very good design choice and some that makes me ask “what were they thinking”. Thankfully, there are more of that former than the latter.
The level design with respect to platforming is superb. All the levels I have played have had a natural progression in regards to where I should be jumping/climbing/running to next. Each level is also very well “timed”, that is you characters ability to run on walls runs out at just the right moment that you need to jump off a wall onto a near by platform for example. Everything flows very nicely in each level.
The same cannot be said for the actual navigation and progression (i.e., “where do I go/what do I do next?”). Once the platforming is done and you have to get to the next area, the way is not very well indicated. Unlike when platforming, the level design doesn’t do a very good job of seamlessly “telling” me where I should be going to next through the layout of the level (as you find games with excellent level design). I often found myself stuck because I was not clear that I had to push a bookcase out of the way to access a door way or I would miss a switch to open a door because it was not clearly marked. No visual or audio clues were given so I simply had to wonder around until a tip popped up telling me what to do when I finally got close enough to an object (as is the case with the bookcase) or I died and was respawned at the location of a key item or switch. Maybe to help get around the limitation there is a cool little design concept that shows you your “future” (which is basically a little tutorial that shows you how you are suppose to get things done), but you are only shown key actions and often those are just how you should navigate the platforming which doesn’t need to be explained as it is very well designed.
As mentioned above, the game is very cinematic and cut-scenes do add to the game’s atmosphere and presentation. But the fact that they happen so frequent and in some cases seem out of place is more of a hindrance then a plus to gameplay (see above for more of my feelings about that). I don’t know if so many were included because of technical limitations (that is it is nice to see a cut-scene than a load screen) or because they wanted your character to look like a bad ass and the game to feel like a movie, but either way they are for the most part a major minus.
Some of the nicer, little design touches include getting hints from in game characters rather than from pop up text boxes (like during a puzzle a NPC would basically yell that you were doing it wrong or to “Think about what you are going” if you were going about collecting a series of pillars in the wrong order for example), the ability to regain health by drinking water from fountains or lakes (rather than just collecting hearts or turkeys or magic red orbs), and the use of the rewind time feature to give you character extra lives without having to have a little icon of your head with a “times n-number of lives” next to it (like on a Mario game for example).
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