Sunday 13 January, 2008

First Entry

I did my game log on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Multiplayer). This is a fast pace first person shooter. The goal of this game is to team up with other players on your team and defeat the enemy team. The exact methods of play and defeat depend on the game type being played.
The characters of this game are very general and impersonal. While playing you are a male soldier. You cannot customize your character at all, except for the weapons he carries. Along with lack of character customization the multiplayer also does not have a story line.
As stated above this is a fast paced first person shooter. When playing online there is no storyline you have to follow. There is one goal, and that is for your team to win. Winning being the only goal and having the game be fast forces you to become engrossed in the game. You cannot multitask and play this game.
With winning as the only goal you can experience a lot of trash talk and anger from the losing team. This can be caused by cheating, dying, getting camped, and other annoying things like grenade spamming.
In my book this is a good game. It is very fun to play and you do not need to play it for a long period of time to have fun, like an RPG. I would recommend this game.


Second Entry

My second round of game play for COD4 was just as fun as the first. This is a game that I find very fun. There are many different levels with different objective types. Playing different levels keeps you on your toes and the new objectives break the monotony of a first person shooter.
I think one of the strongest points of this game is the customizable weapon layout. When playing multiplayer you can tweak your weapon kit extensively. You have five or so different classes of weapons and anywhere from two to six different weapons within each class. Once you pick a weapon you can add perks and modifications to it, such as a red dot sight, or deep impact (so you can shoot through walls), extra damage, etc. This allows you to experience many different types of combat play in one game. An example would be using a shotgun versus an assault rifle.
Another strongpoint of this game is how it creates conflict and forces its players to engage. One of the game types is Headquarters, this is essentially king of the hill. One team captures and defends a base while the other attacks. The attacking team has more than one life, they can respawn, while the defending team only has one life. This makes for constant firefights which are a lot of fun.
With older first person shooters you would find yourself getting bored very quickly. That is not so much the case with COD4. The reason COD4 is entertaining for such a long period of time is their reward system. You get to level up your character. Every time you kill an enemy player, or capture/destroy an objective you get experience. You use that experience to level up and unlock new weapons and perks. This gives you some objective to aim for other than just owning the opposing team.
I feel that between the different weapon kits and the ability to level up and gain access to more weapons makes this game much more fun than most first person shooters. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who likes first person shooters.

A good initial entry. In future entries try to ask yourself why these games are making you do the actions or feeling the way it is and ask if it makes the game better or worse from a design perspective. Try to stay away from a play by play entry of what it was like to play the game.

The chances are we have played the games you choose, especially very popular games, and you should spend that space writing more on design opposed to wha tthe game is about.