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Monday 3 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
After getting the horse, the game got a whole lot better. I spent a lot of time just riding around out on Hyrule field. That really made the game for me.
Some of the conversations with other players were strange and out of place, which made the game humorous. The characters’ clothing complemented the setting nicely as well. It was good to meet characters who offered to sell things because then you could refill on items.
I experienced flow while playing the game in a slower way than I do usually while playing other games. Flow requires constant challenge that is not too difficult. It’s true that this game provided a constant challenge and that it is not too fast-paced or difficult overall. I think that because it was so slow-moving it may have had some gaps in time where not a lot happened. It was not quite boring though.
DESIGN
The game was innovation. The item equipping function was of particular interest. It was fun equipping various items to the C buttons. I found myself doing that often. Also, the dungeon design was very good. Its fundamental structure was copied from the original Zelda games, but the new graphics and 3Dness made it much more fun. There was a whole new strategy to it.
The tone of the gameworld was friendly and moderately bright, while having monsters appear sometimes. There was never a strong feeling of being threatened, however, even when the monsters appeared. In a word, the tone was lighthearted.
This game gave me the idea of uniformity for my own game project. That is something that I was seriously lacking in my game design. In terms of the setting, enemies, ammunition, power ups, and the ship you control, the whole thing is kind of a hodgepodge of different things that I thought would look good together, but none of them are actually what they’re supposed to represent. The spaceship is an icon that does not look very much like a space ship. The ammunition is a collection of randomly colored pixels. The background should be space, like a regular SHMUPS game, but it is a brown and black image instead. It is possible that will implement some kind of uniformity to create cohesion in my game like Zelda does so well.
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