My GameLog
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
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[ Games I'm Currently Playing ] -
[ Games I've Finished Playing ]
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Monday 22 July, 2024 // Assassin's Creed Chronicles (VITA)
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Sidescrolling platforming Assassin's Creed game? I've only played 30 mins or so - just part of the tutorial for the China section and I have questions: will there be a tutorial for each of the three locations? (China, India, and Russia) I hope not - but that's assuming that the gameplay and controls will be the same for all three. Or perhaps there's significant differences? (this would also make sense because you can pick any location and don't have to do them in order - so each provides it's own experience)
Anyways, so far I'm pretty impressed with how smooth the animations are and how they been slowly introducing new buttons/actions that - I'm sure - I will get overwhelmed by at some point because I won't play for a bit, forget everything, and then have to relearn.
So far so good!
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Monday 22 July, 2024 // Lego Legends of Chima: Laval's Journey (VITA)
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Finished!
I would love it if someone wrote something about the Lego games - especially the ones that are essentially variations on the same theme (gameplay-wise) because I have the feeling that they have little differences and innovations that go unnoticed. Or perhaps the changes are just improvements over the years? Either way I'm curious and would love for someone to do the analysis and publish it somewhere.
As for the game's ending itself? There wasn't anything out of the ordinary - there's a boss fight, some cut scenes I didn't pay too much attention to and...well, I didn't really want to go back to replay levels and such. However, I am curious because I didn't unlock all the abilities over the course of the game - there's a "crawl through small spaces" ability (I'm pretty sure) that is used in some places I could interact with. Maybe I should go back just to see?
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Monday 15 July, 2024 // Lego Legends of Chima: Laval's Journey (VITA)
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I started this YEARS ago. Never got too far, but started it up again a few days ago. Of course I don't remember anything related to the story, and it took me a little bit of time to figure out what I was supposed to be doing next - but, it's a Lego game with all the common patterns and gameplay that pretty much all the other games in the series have. So, once you've figured out what the special moves are, where to activate them and so on, it's pretty straightforward. I'm not familiar with the "chima" universe or whatever it is, but this game seems to skew a bit higher than the rest in terms of difficulty (not from combat, but the puzzles seem a bit more sophisticated)? I'm not saying it's hard - just that it's a little bit harder. There's some puzzles that have multiple steps - nothing too complicated, and it's also easier to get lost (less linear) in the sense of not knowing where to go next.
I've played enough of it at this point that I might just finish it to see what the few character types' powers are? But then again, perhaps not. I haven't decided yet.
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Sunday 23 June, 2024 // Stray (PS5)
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Ok finished the game!
The "down a corridor" linearity definitely let up once I got to the first "city" area...and while there are other sections that are tightly restricted, I would say that while the game is linear (it's a narratively-led adventure game where you collect clues and complete tasks for NPCs in order to progress), the experience of playing it does not feel quite as constrained as I had initially thought it was.
It's weird to me how I had a strong idea that this was a "cyberpunk" game set in a city - but it's just robots instead of people, and the game doesn't feel like that at all to me now. Yes, there's neon and such - but the major cyberpunk (as genre) themes aren't there. It does tell its own story, and it's really quite sad. It's post-apocalyptic in the sense that humans are extinct (or other wise gone as far as we know), but there's also the idea that this is a world that has recovered (in the nature regrowing sense) from whatever it was the apocalypse was about - it's not clear to me why humans holed up in the underground cities in the first place (and they then all died in a plague, oh, and then they unleashed something intended to solve problems but it mutated and has since run amuck - thus trapping all the robots inside the city). And through all this - you - a cat - have not only survived but made it through.
Overall, yes - I did enjoy it, and I appreciated the brevity. But also, in terms of it's game design, it's pretty "light" (by this I mean it doesn't stray far from expectations and it does everything right). So, no special highlights in my mind here - but the navigation and UI work as they should. I guess I could say that I thought I'd get lost a lot easier (there's lots of vertical navigation in addition to horizontal) but it helped that the game's spaces are small even if they are well "dressed" with objects and details.
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