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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by ajg993 (May 18th, 2013 at 21:53:42) |
Super Columbine Massacre was interesting. It is remarkable that someone actually recreated the event and made a video game out of it. Although the graphics are pretty low, the game was far from simple. I noticed that many random objects have deeper meanings. For example, when I was in the basement, I saw a pizza box and decided to walk up to it and hit “enter”. The pizza box took me through a flashback to explain how they were getting ready for the “big day.” The creators really wanted to show the players the entire story.
I went into playing this game without much knowledge of the actually shooting. I knew it was 2 boys, who were mad at society, who killed their fellow classmates and teachers. I was going to do a little research to find a little more background information on the even but decided to just play the game without that information. I felt like the game would do a good job in telling the story. I only got passed the cafeteria part where I have set the bombs and grabbed the guns. That mission was really annoying, it took me over 10 tries to fully infiltrate the building, and right when I finally did, I got caught again and had to start all over again.
This game obviously has a lot of ethical hazards. The idea of the game itself seems a little immoral, since it is based on a true story. I think if the situation never happened, it would lack any controversial opportunities against it. However, since it actually did happen and innocent people died, this realism truly makes the game open for discussion. I also noticed how the creators of the game were implying that the killers’ ideas of the attacks were enhanced by media. Because in the game, when I was in the basement I saw a movie that seemed like it was motivation for them. As if the media inspired the killers actions.
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Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC) by dkirschner (May 18th, 2013 at 07:44:04) |
I'm just making this to chronicle my efforts to play Ultima 4 and 7 today. I gave both games a good-hearted run but they are so. very. old. These games are always on 'best of' lists so I finally downloaded 4 since it was free with my GOG.com account, and bought 7 because it was on sale and is usually the one people cite as the best. Surely these games have been influential to the fantasy genre in games, to RPGs, perhaps especially of the open-world variety. But I had forgotten what games were like when I was a kid I guess.
Playing Ultima 4 was like attempting to read Chinese. I haven't played a text-based role-playing game in such an unbelievably long time that I've forgotten how they work. Moving north, south, east and west, pushing T to talk to an NPC then typing north to talk in that direction. The NPC greets you and says nothing else until you ask him about specific things: "job," "look" and so on. I had to look these interaction words up in the manual because I couldn't figure out what I should say to him. Then I couldn't figure out how to disengage from the conversation, so I was stuck. Oh, maybe "bye" would work...
Anyway, I couldn't deal with that, so I installed Ultima 7. Ooh, point and click, sort of. Uses mouse, plus 10 points. Ooh, inventory screens and character panes from 1992. The first thing you have to do is investigate a murder, which was surprisingly gory. I figured out how to pick up items (hold right mouse and drag & drop them onto your character), so I guess I investigated the crime scene. I was supposed to go talk to the mayor, who was *just* at the crime scene before I went in, but he seemed to have disappeared and I wandered all through this city looking for him. Dunno what he got up to.
When I talked to the NPCs this time, they have the interaction words like "job" and "look" as options to choose, like a dialogue tree. I noticed the "murder" option and thought I might see what happened if I murdered a citizen. Alas, I could only *ask* about the murder, not murder anyone. I retract my praise about this open world! Anyway, I never did find the mayor and the text really hurt my eyes. It's in yellow, on multicolored background, so it's kind of like reading a highlighter. Also ye olde font and olde English style of language really bothered me after a short time.
I'm sure these early Ultima games were amazing decades ago. I'm sure some people can enjoy them today. I appreciate them, but cannot play them. And that's my uncritical review. Oh, but all the manuals and extras from GOG.com were neat to browse.
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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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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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1661 registered gamers and 1787 games. 5594 GameLogs with 9913 journal entries. 4329 games are currently being played.
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Halo 3 (360) by DDiZZiBBL |
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most recent entry: Monday 14 January, 2008
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GAMEPLAY
So, I ended up playing Halo 3 with my friends the whole weekend, since they really didn't give me a chance to play any other games. After playing for a while, I learned how to achieve double kills and killing sprees. This helped me to rank higher the more I played. Leveling up in Halo 3 is a very rewarding achievement, and is enough to get me addicted to the game as I move up the ranks. I still have that lofty goal to get a 10 kill streak, which I have not done yet in the game. The more I got used to controls, naturally I was able to put together a good amount of kills each game and be a productive player, meaning having more kills than deaths. There were times where I had bad teammates, which ruined my game experience. They would either betray our team by killing teammates, or simply not be able to kill anyone. Failure to communicate in a Team Deathmatch would often result in a loss for my team.
In addition to playing online, I also played the single player campaign. Objectives were simple, which was usually just to eliminate all the enemies. There was nothing complicated to figure out in the beginning, as the game did not really have any puzzles. My job was to point and shoot at the enemies, and move on to the next stage. The game had an excellent presentation and it was nice to watch the cut-scenes. To me though, the science-fictional story of Halo 3 was not as amusing to me. I will probably finish the campaign someday, but there was a lot of repetitiveness as I was forced to backtrack levels a lot and end up killing the same enemies over and over again.
DESIGN
In the mutliplayer part of Halo 3, the maps for the game play a big part of the game experience. Several levels were too big. I would end up walking around searching for an enemy for a long span, wondering where everyone is. One level had up to four floors, and it was annoying having to go up the air shoots and back down and not find anyone. I enjoyed the smaller maps which were good for 3 to 8 players. There was more action and it was more fast paced which kept me into the game and hungry for more kills, rather than exploring a large map.
Each team deathmatch I played had different rules as well. The common rule for all games was the team with the most kills wins. Sometimes you were limited to only a shotgun and a sniper. This Team Deathmatch was called "Shotty-Sniper." This type of game forced players to approach the game differently and to think of a new strategy for each game. Therefore no match felt the same and repetitive. Another game was limited to only rocket launchers which was a very intense game and fun to kill multiple people at one time, but hard to survive more than 30 seconds.
The game keeps the player interested by giving the player an opportunity to rank up. This is common in a lot of war games today, but since this game adds the element of science fiction, it is much different with the addition of alien weapons and vehicles. There are not too many other games where u can blast people with alien weapons. I guess what makes the game so fun is that there are so many strategies to each game, depending on the map and what weapons you are able to use.
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