A person who is seriously interested in games, game studies, and game design should play a lot of games.
To the right you will see the latest GameLog (diary)
entries I have recorded for the games I'm currently playing and my thought and feelings on the game, the experience of playing it, and so on.
If you want to see all the games I'm playing, or the ones
I'm no longer playing you can follow the "List of Games I'm Currently Playing" and the "
List of Games I've Finished Playing".
During the summer of 2003 I started a little project to keep track of the videogames I had been playing. I also wanted to keep track of my thoughts as I played them.
Thus, GameLog was born as a blogging tool for gamers. If you are interested you can hop on over and register. I personally enjoy reading about other people's thoughts
on the games they play and the more the merrier! www.gamelog.cl
Is it weird that the first hour or so of this game had me thinking of God of War? (the remake not the old PS2 games) It might just be the tribal costumes and the snow? Anyways, this game is certainly not that - probably predates the remake as well, but I've been having a lot of fun so far.
I think I'm past the tutorial and prologue parts of the game where things have opened up and we've hit Ubisoft-Open-World design levels of "icons on maps for you to follow up on". I am torn between trying to focus on the main quest quickly and exploring the world and environments which takes time...and I also get distracted by inconveniences like running out of inventory space so I have to hunt wildlife to get the resources to upgrade that!
Is it weird that I really enjoy hiding in the tall grass and taking down robot dinos? I think it's the same pleasure I got from Ghost of Tsushima.... I guess it's the pleasure of appearing skillful while not really being skilled? Ha!
I played the first chapter of this way back when. (it looks like I never wrote a gamelog about it either, oh well)...and this semester I thought it would be a nice game to play in the context of "tactile" thinky games since it has a real sense of physicality to the puzzles and the manipulations - sliding switches, pressing buttons, spinning wheels, etc.
I thought it was interesting how, while playing the first chapter, I vaguely remember some of the things I had to do - it was familiar in a way I did not anticipate (it's been, what 15 years at least?). It's not like I knew the solutions - it's just that I remembered, "oh, there's a secret switch I need to find" and "oh, this thing rotates".
I love how self-contained the game is, you're mostly rotating a giant puzzle table and looking out for changes, etc. - and it's also reasonably linear in the sense that you don't have multiple puzzles going on with bits and pieces that might be required for one but not the other. One of the chapters is a giant puzzle table - and the game does tell you to focus on the sides if you start poking around on the top. So, I appreciated that!
I don't remember the ipad version having a hint/clue system - this one does and it's rather surprising how quickly it "dings" to let you know you can get a clue if you need. From what I can tell there are three levels of clues - with I'm guessing the third one telling you what to do (though you probably still have to do it yourself, which can be a bit tricky in the viewing-puzzles, the ones where you need to rotate stuff and adjust your view to form/create a picture).
I'll admit I was a bit worried going in to the last chapter (the Epilogue) since it seemed like there would be music-themed puzzles. Uh, oh! There's an interesting tension in these kinds of games which has to do with the amount and kind of external knowledge you required (or expect) the player to have. I'm thinking of stuff like escape rooms where you're supposed to go "oh, this is in morse code!" and then use that knowledge to decipher something. I was worried that reading music might be something required. Thankfully that was not the case - at most there was some pattern matching which was pretty easy and the musical thing happened to be more of a theming thing than a gameplay thing. Phew! (I'm sure there's an extra layer of meaning to the music in terms of the game's story - but this wasn't something I was paying any particular attention to to be honest.
Overall I was done in less than 2 1/2 hours, which was perfect. Bonus is this might be the only game on Steam for which I have ALL the achievements? (simply by virtue of finishing the game...)
Really enjoyed it, got to the end - only to learn, there's MORE!
So, I've been slowly whittling away at the game - I still don't have the 8 keys, so who knows what THAT will unlock, but I've been doing the red birds.
I think what's so amazing - especially in the context of the red birds, is that the carefully tuned puzzles sometimes serve more than one purpose! So, tuned for the puzzle within it's world/area, but there's a 2nd puzzle on top (is there a secret red bird here?). I think that's pretty wild!
Really, really enjoyed it. So much that I decided to go for the "all items and secrets" trophy just because that would scratch the exploration itch this game had been scratching for me. I'm also thankful for the "easy mode" - which was, as advertised, easy - but like I said, I was really into exploring the levels, finding secret stuff and just enjoying the places.
I was reminded of Bungie's level design for Destiny - more precisely Bungie's art direction for its levels. Destiny levels tend to be super, super linear (which is fine) even if they twist around in interesting ways. This games' levels are much less linear - Zeffo in particular is a nice version of a contained sprawl... I even had fun trying to remember how to get to different parts of the level I wanted to re-visit because I was missing a chest or secret.
The only thing I wish I had was, once you've finished it, some indicator of whether you had all the Jedi memory things - I'd sometimes stumble across ones I'd missed (and some were secrets) - but a counter for that would have been nice. I get that you may want to hide them away - since many are about the game's story - but once you beat the main story, why not give people the chance to know what things were missed where? (you know which ones you're missing, because of counters in the encyclopedia thingie - but you don't know in which parts of which map if that makes sense).
I'm now genuinely excited and interested to play the next one!
(not so much for the story/characters to be honest - the addition of the night sister at the end felt odd and forced, but the action was great, and the environments as well)
(ok, now that I think about it, and because of the surprise appearance of one Lord at the end...what happens in the sequel? I also forget when in the Star Wars timeline the game takes place? I mean, I know it's before Return of the Jedi...but is it before A New Hope? I think so?)
I have been keeping track of this information for the past 22 year(s), 2 month(s) and 18 day(s).
