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Mar 5th, 2008 at 22:55:19 - Crackdown (360) |
SUMMARY
Crackdown is an open-world third person shooter/driving game, similar to Grand Theft Auto 3. However, it also has strong platforming elements, because the protagonist has the ability to jump great heights.
GAMEPLAY
Crackdown has almost no plot. The player is a super-agent in a city overrun by criminals. The goal is to kill all the leaders of the various gangs terrorizing the city. That's it. Almost the only person who speaks in the entire game is a disembodied narrator. At first this bothered me, but after a while I got used to it. Playing Crackdown is like playing Space Invaders or Pac-Man; the lack of a story just means there is nothing to get in the way of gameplay.
The jumping mechanic is really fun in Crackdown. You jump around the city to travel quickly, you jump in fights to hit enemies behind cover or to quickly get behind some cover yourself. Jumping really is a core mechanic of Crackdown, and it is the main thing that distinguishes Crackdown from other third-person shooters. An odd consequence of this is that I found myself almost never using cars, because they're just plain slower than jumping around the city.
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Feb 21st, 2008 at 02:19:01 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
GAMEPLAY
This play session I noticed that although the game comes with a multi-player mode, it is actually more fun to just pass off the controller in single-player. I don't think this is a game that lends itself well to competitive gamepley; when I see a big object on my friend's screen, I want to root for him to collect the object, not try to impede his progress. The game is just too fun and silly to take any kind of competition seriously.
The single-player campaign has a really nice flow because the objects you roll up just keep getting bigger and bigger as the levels progress. I started out rolling up thumbtacks and legos, and now I'm rolling up cars and houses. It really makes me want to progress in the game because I am really curious what the biggest objects in the game are going to be. I think this is a great example of a game that may not have had the biggest budget, and certainly doesn't have the best graphics, but the designers still find ways to make the player feel constantly impressed because of the way the challenges are structured.
DESIGN
The core gameplay mechanic in Katamari is very innovative; I can't think of another game where the core mechanic is rolling up objects. I think the mechanic succeeds because there are always constant small goals the player is trying to achieve, like getting big enough to roll up an interesting object or the barrier to a new area. The core mechanic provides a very natural way of segmenting the levels based on your progression. In first-person shooters the player occasionally finds doors that will not open until they have killed every enemy in the room. This is an unnatural way to segment the level because it doesn't seem to make sense. But Katamary's segmentation based on rolling up the barriers to entering new areas seems very natural.
Another thing Katamary does well is set and stick to a consistent tone. Although the game always has a surreal feel to it, it also has a light and silly feel that keeps the game fun. Every level sticks very faithfully to this tone. I think the designers realized that the core mechanic of the game is somewhat silly and nonsensical, and so decided to make the story, characters and levels the same way to keep consistency.
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Feb 20th, 2008 at 22:47:01 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
SUMMARY
Katamari Damacy is a game where the player controls a tiny intergalactic prince who is rolling a sticky ball, or katamari, around various parts of the world in an attempt to stick as many things to the ball as possible in a limited amount of time. The primary mode of the game is single-player, but it also has a multi-player mode.
GAMEPLAY
Katamari Damacy is a weird, weird game. It is obvious that the game was translated to English rather poorly; it almost seems to be intentionally poor at points. The story is utterly ridiculous; basically the King of the Cosmos (god?) destroys all the stars in the universe on a drunken or possible just insane binge, and as his son the player must roll up items to make replacement stars. The crazy story, characters and levels actually manage to create a fun and funny mood, especially if the game is played with friends. I think the game does a really good job at being charmingly odd without ever crossing into jarringly odd.
The gameplay is simple but incredibly fun. Basically as you roll up items the Katamari grows in size. Items are different sizes, and if your Katamari is smaller than an item it is trying to roll up, you simply bounce off. However, if you roll up items much smaller than your Katamari you don't grow fast enough, so you have to constantly be rolling up items that aren't too small and aren't too big. The interesting thing about the gameplay is that the player is always setting small goals for themselves inside a level. I might see something funny like a bear balancing on a ball, and decide that I want to grow big enough to roll up that bear.
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Jan 26th, 2008 at 02:21:36 - Super Smash Brothers (N64) |
GAMEPLAY
This time I played single player, and I had a lot of fun playing with familiar characters from other Nintendo games. Although perhaps not a proper narrative, I still felt more connected to the characters in this game than other fighting games, because I have fond childhood memories of most of them (I admit, some of the characters are too obscure even for me to recognize).
One nice thing about the game is how trivial death seems. There is no way to die on screen (most fighting games have extreamly gruesome on-screen deaths where one character pulls out another character's spleen and feeds it to him or something), you only die by being thrown off the platform. When you die, all that happens is that your character losses 1 "life" and then reappears with full health at the top of the screen. I feel that in this way the game sends the message that mistakes are ok, everyone losses sometime, and that you can still continue playing and having fun after loosing a battle. I can't really stress enough how comfortable and friendly this game is compared to every other fighting game ever.
DESIGN
I think the friendly mood this game sets is a really cool innovation in fighting games. One of the ways that mood is set is by having cartooney, fun characters that video gamers associate with their childhoods. The items are also generally funny and friendly (poke-balls, flowers, paper fans) instead of traditional "weapons".
The reward structure also contributes to the friendly mood. When a player wins a match they are treated to a nice victory screen where the other characters applaud them, but that's about the limit of their reward. When you lose a match it doesn't seem very bad becasue you basically forget all about it as soon as the next match starts.
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AngryBob has been with GameLog for 16 years, 3 months, and 5 days |
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