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Oct 18th, 2009 at 16:42:42 - Luigi's Mansion (GC) |
GAMEPLAY
I played further into the game and found there were a lot of rooms to enter. This is one of those details that adds to the completeness of the world of the game. Each room has a lot of miscellaneous objects you can interact with that are added for aesthetic and other pleasure. Each room is designed like what one could have in real life (if one had a mansion with lots of space) and is what I alsi liked about this game. The themes the ghosts had with each room was detailed, although the fight process was usually one of three style, capture, disable and capture, or boss battle. I also like the idea of mini actions you can perform that will aid the side missions of the game. Like getting more money in the end for a bigger mansion (high score), where you can find secret treasure rooms or slightly hidden objects that give you a monetary boost. There is also the side mission of capturing all the boos that are hidden in each room, which will ultimately give you another monetary boost. I liked the fact that your vacuum can also control elements, but only three were available. There wasn't very much narrative progression except for between areas the mansion would change overall a little bit and effect your gameplay. The game was fun to play, but in this one it is hard to be a perfectionist because there are millions of possibilities to mess up. Like getting hit you have to recover all your coins, and there are minuscule amounts of money that can be missed in any of the tens of objects in every room. But you get a lot of money and you feel happy. Besides that I don't know how much better the game would be if it were two player, but this one was one player and I was fine with that.
DESIGN
So the main point I relish about this game is the core game mechanic. It could be grouped loosely with an FPS type game but the fact is it's different. I enjoy the fact that it's a different style of gameplay by sucking up the ghosts and there is a lot of an art in doing so. That was probably the most innovative element of the game and as the sole mechanic, there wasn't but else. But what else was there was the aesthetic design of the game. The careful detail that went into sculpting the objects and placing them in the mansion in various fashions was immense, creating the theme to each room. It felt like real rooms down to the small knick-knacks that can be manipulated for fun. Each room was built like that and that distracts you from realizing you have a very small action set in each room, but that each action you can perform has multiple and unique possibilities to each room. Lie you have an interact button which may cause you to bump a piece of furniture or open a door, but in some rooms it will make an instrument play or reveal a secret. That did all this and set a very definitive tone for the game world, which by adding only a light story to the game, completed the pleasing audiovisuals to the game. Now the game world was mostly linearly traversed, where you have opened rooms you can go back to later and reap new benefits. I responded well to the game's rewards structure, mostly by collecting the money which made little difference until the end of the game, so they were like little rewards. I did play carefully to I would not get hit and lose money or die and have to start back again. There weren't so many types of challenges except the same ones with different rewards, like instead of money getting Mario's items. The game was only as complex as the mechanic provided reactions for every one of your limited inputs. The games interactivity was a little lower than normal when you walk around and explore which may require memory, or fighting ghosts which requires reflexes. The game kept me interested by revealing a small portion of the plot here and there, and that is wasn't too big of a game, but also because each room could be totally different from the last with providing unique challenges. So overall it was a good game, it could have had a couple more unique side missions than expanding on the existing ones, and maybe more plot but with the present story I think it would be hard to develop any more.
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Oct 18th, 2009 at 16:16:18 - Luigi's Mansion (GC) |
SUMMARY
In this game you are Mario's brother Luigi who has gone to a haunted mansion and discovered that Mario has been kidnapped. He proceeds to try to rescue him by navigating through the mansion and gaining any information he can find. He meets with a lot of resistance with the ghosts that inhabit the mansion, but Dr. E. Gadd has volunteered the use of his Poltergeist 3000 to help Luigi defeat the ghosts. As Luigi sucks up the troublesome ghosts, he also collects money from random places, adding to a total for the side objective of the game. He goes through groups of areas capturing portrait ghosts, like bosses, to make progress and get to the bottom of the mystery.
GAMEPLAY
So to start off, it was nice to see another character have a more serious role in the plot although from a technical perspective this doesn't change much. I like how the game started off leading you into the story with a small cinematic and an easy room. The gameplay is not fast-paced most of the time so I can take my time and collect everything I want or explore some more. The story was nice a light through the game, somewhat present in between area transitions. The flow it created was good by inserting small movie animations to show you are performing a key action (no pun intended), like opening a door to a new room. It also keeps you aware that you are entering a boss battle by appearing in a different arena and seeing a different fight tactic from that particular ghost. This game was interesting to play mostly because of the aesthetic work done in it. It creates the whole world with very detailed objects that you would find in a haunted mansion, the actions of the enemy ghosts, and the audio creating a spooky ambiance. The fact that you suck up the ghosts and put them into pictures was an interesting bit to the story. One of my favorite parts is that you get to collect money, which doesn't have much use until the end, but it is still one of those rewards that keeps you going.
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Oct 3rd, 2009 at 19:28:06 - Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) |
GAMEPLAY
I'm playing further into the game and I just experience more worlds. Now you probably get a more wholesome experience doing this, but when you don't want a longer game there are some secrets implemented that let you skip worlds.
The game is long because there are eight world, and in them an average of 8 levels. Each level may take about 3 minutes to beat, but there is an inherent difficulty that keeps you dying and using up your lives to keep you going. Sometimes you can die and just be unlucky, or you haven't predicted your movements accurately and the enemies random intelligence has killed you. It's getting past this part that makes you restart the level, and sometimes the game, that you have to play through.
It takes a long time to beat it, and I've only just done this once recently because I've always stopped around the third world either I ran out of lives or interest.
DESIGN
Some good elements about this is that the graphics are improved on, while staying on the same system as its predecessors, as well as its music, and it has minor story sequences.
The level design as I said has been altered a bit in its own style. The levels are less a random bunch of challenges and parts of them are there so that you just walk around the uniquely built level. The makes the feeling of the game world a bit more seamless and fun to explore.
Parts of the level show complexity out of a unique object placed there created for that scene. But sometimes it's just he grouping of certain enemies in differently arranged terrain that presents a new challenge. Some levels are built so that you are following a path by similar means throughout the level like a moving platform or a new suit.
There weren't many rewards in the game except for the items you pick up. These which you can use before a level will change your characters state initially, which can be degraded upon being attacked. So it helps you until you lose it which is quite easy to do if you misuse the power. It's this which gave me a fleeting sense of the items which in turn made me not use them as often unless I had died a couple times at a level.
The game would keep me interested for the most parts until the later worlds because they were just more level to pass with an increasing level of difficulty. It's only when I decided to really make it to the end to play though them all.
And I did this once with a friend, where having two players effects the other, but in a very segmented way. One of you plays a level and when you complete it or die, the other plays the level or the next one. So the two players don't interact as much, but the effects do when the level is beaten the first player no longer has to do it. The two players do interact when one decides to challenge the other randomly. They step into a screen with a few platforms to hop on and you try to kill five or so enemies first, and you can hit a block that makes any extra life modifiers fly out which the other player can steal.
So in all it was a good game, the best part being the play style with the items, mini-games, and differently built levels with new enemies and bosses.
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Oct 3rd, 2009 at 18:58:45 - Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) |
SUMMARY
In this game, you are Mario or Luigi, trying to save the princess from Bowser who has captured her again. There are a series of worlds to go through, and many levels in each. You run through these levels passing or defeating enemies and getting powerups to help you. You can also use items you collect or play mini-games from the world map. You get to the next world by defeating the boss in the previous one at the last level.
GAMEPLAY
So as another installment of a Mario game, the story is pretty much the same. As with most of the characters, one or two like toad have new roles in your adventure which is a nice change than him telling me I got to keep going. One amusing sidenote was that each mini-koopa-boss has stolen a wand and transformed a king of a castle into an animal and beting the world turns the monarch back.
The quality that brings people to play this next game is the mechanics. The levels play similarly to Super Mario Brothers 1, with slight differences makeup differences. More like the levels aren't just totally randomly placed blocks to present the same or different challenges, they make more of a contiguous scene. In addition to this game, the levels are grouped in world with distinct themes, where in SMB1 they were just abtract numbers resetting the levels. This give me a sense of what to expect and an aesthetic pleasure of moving around with a couple choices of levels to play and other elements only present here.
So with slightly improved graphics I take a greater liking to this game. I also enjoy the freedom of movement that is more accurate, and with the new powerup items, gives me more choices to traverse a level.
The flow of the game was created with similar environments between levels, connected with the world map movemnet, and the simple narrative segmentation between worlds.
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Pysis has been with GameLog for 14 years, 8 months, and 1 day |
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