Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=150https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1407Last Minute Gradius Gamelog Zwei! So, Gradius is still hard. I've gotten better at it, though. I've now experienced all of the powerups, and made it through level 1 without dying once. Still havn't beaten level 2. However, a lot of my playing this game feels like it's less "for fun" as it is "showing the game who's boss" (which, in this case, is the game. But it beats me and I come back for more, so what am I to say?) So, the last two powerups, the "Option", and the "?". Option adds a second (or third, if you get it twice) point of fire from your ship in the form of an energy ball following it. These balls seem to follow your movement directly, so if you move forward or backward, the balls will fire in the exact same area as you, which is rather useless. I prefer the more modern convention of "stays on either side" or "circles around your ship". And then there's "?". I do not know why it is called "?", but it is a shield. With it active, your ship can actually take a hit. Several in fact, although I couldn't really count how many. Useful effect, if expensive. I didn't get far enough into level 2 to see the boss, but the level design is a lot more interesting than level 1. You have to go through different tunnel like sections (instead of one large tunnel), and destroy blockades in your way. Also, something I did not quite get the hang of fast enough was some kind of bonus level after beating stage one without dying once. It consisted of speeding up incredibly and dodging outlines of easter island heads. It was a challenge, and too much for me (so I failed and it sent me to stage 2). All in all... the game is not incredibly fun. It is, however, incredibly challenging (but beatable). The level design for the second stage was interesting, but otherwise... eh. It isn't my style.Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:08:07 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1407&iddiary=2998https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1407Last minute Gradius write-up part one! So, for this week I've chosen to play Gradius. And I learned something incredibly important right off the bat: I am terrible at horizontal shooters. Vertical ones, too, but there's kind of a difference. Most of the time, I can't dodge for beans. I suppose I might just have the wrong kind of reflexes for it. That being said, I beat the first level. Not the second, no, just the first. Not even five enemies -into- the second, in fact. I took five or six tries to beat the first stage, and then died to the power-up enemies in the start of the second. But let's take a look at what I encountered, why don't we? First off, the power-up system.: I don't exactly have a manual (got the game from a friend), so I may just be mis-interpreting it, but it involves collecting powerups that drop from enemy groups, and for each powerup you collect, the slot on the powerup bar moves forward one. You can then press B to select that power-up and gain its effects. The only ones I actually managed to get were "speed up", which speeds the character up allowing for easier dodging... and crashing into things, "missile", which causes the ship to launch a missile towards the bottom of the screen, and if it hits "land", it will slide along it until it hits something, "double", which causes a second shot to come out of the ship towards the ceiling, and "laser", which changes the regular shot into a faster and possibly piercing laser (I did not get much of a chance to experiment). It should be noted that both double and laser will overwrite one another, so the player cannot have a double laser from their ship. As for the enemies, they follow set patterns that the player can memorize and exploit, while firing slow moving bullets at the player's ship. I, of course, would lose track of these bullets while focusing on dodging and shooting enemies, and wind up dying. One part that I do not like is that at some points, enemies can come from behind you, which is something I don't see much in vertical shooters (which I play more often). The first boss confused me a bit. It has a core that changes color when taking enough damage, while it moves up and down and fires four lasers. Now, it has a hole in the front between the laser cannon things, so I figured that I might need to shoot it there in order to kill it, but one of my "double" shots that came from below it was the thing that did the trick. I suppose the limits of the NES are why this wasn't more precise (and hard), or perhaps it wasn't a convention to have specific boss weak points until after Gradius. I believe I might discover the answer should I ever reach the second boss, but I do not see that happening, even in my second play session.Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:07:20 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1407&iddiary=2973https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1183Twilight Princess Part Two-eth. So, I finished the Water Temple, got some story segments, and went through the Sacred Grove forest maze. What, you want more? Okay. So, the Water Temple continued pretty much as normal (Clawshot, Water Bombs, Zora Armor, etc.) up until the final two bits. I needed to find the boss chamber key, and in order to do so I needed to navigate my way through a complex water-filled room. It may just be my feelings caused by a friend telling me to check elsewhere (he had beaten the temple), but the area to continue was simply too hard to find. The minimap did not help at all, and that area simply felt like poor design. The final bit, however, more than made up for this frustrating part. The boss was simply cool. The idea was to use the Clawshot to get a floating ball out of a gelatinous thing and attack it. If my memory serves me correctly, this is how it was in Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past as well. Then things got interesting. After three iterations of the simple task... the creature came out of the ground. It was a giant monster eel. I then had to take off the Iron Boots that got me nicely on the ground to use my sword and swim alongside it, to Clawshot the eye that was now embedded into the creatures back. This brought up a section where Link rides the creature and slashes at the eye. Gamplay wise, this was kind of boring and repetitive (Clawshot, swing the wiimote a bit, rinse, repeat). Cinematically, however, these segments were -awesome-. It just filled me, the gamer, with an intense sense of "cool". So then, having beaten the boss I was transported to a light spirit's grotto (in the story, these were locked away by Zant, a shadowy wizard, plunging the land into Twilight. Before now, this was all we really knew). Then, as the three items I had spent the time collecting were finally going to be used... Zant appeared and smacked around both me, my partner (Midna), -and- the Light Spirit. There was, for the first time really yet in the game, some plot exposition, and I was transformed back into a wolf (Link's form in "Twilight"). The story itself seemed fairly generic before, incredibly similar to most of the other Zelda games, but here it started taking a twist. As a wolf, I then had to sneak past the citizens of Hyrule Castle Town to the castle and reach Princess Zelda, both to restore myself and to restore Midna (who was wounded in the plot confrontation). Then something shocking happened. But, as it is a major spoiler and I am not sure how to do spoiler text in GameLog, I will refrain. Suffice to say, it's more interesting than anything that's happened in a previous Zelda game. Since Zelda could only help Midna, I was told to seek out the Master Sword to transform myself back into a human. To get there, I had to go through a forest maze. Personally, these have always been my least favorite parts of Zelda games, be it Ocarina of Time's or Link to the Past's, it always feels more frustrating than it is worth. You have to run through several areas looking for the proper area where the creature you're chasing is playing music (you can only really tell by the noise), and then eventually track it down to a boss fight. Here was also frustrating, as you can only damage the creature when it is playing music, but nothing actually gives you that hint. So, I spent five minutes swiping at a teleporting creature. Afterwards, I had to do another puzzle, probably the most annoying one so far in the game. You have to navigate two statues that go in opposite directions around to reach two specific squares on a grid. But, you are also on the grid, and as it is weirdly shaped you cannot always move. I was trapped accidentally twice, and once straight up crushed by one of the statues I had to guide. Afterwards, I got the Master Sword and gained the ability to transform back and forth between human and wolf forms at will. Aside from a fun Clawshot based minigame (you had to pull yourself around a cage to collect glowing orbs) which was fast paced and amusing, I stopped to write this. I suppose the one thing that I haven’t even mentioned yet is the controls. Controls are always important, and this is no exception. The player moves, locks on, and looks around using the nun chuck, while they use the trigger button on the wiimote for items and swing the wiimote to attack. The central "A" button puts things away. In all, it's pretty intuitive and fun, as well as easy to use, but as I am used to button based controls after so many years of gaming, I often find myself mixing the controls around. Sometimes, I put away my sword when I should be using it, for example. However, I feel that someone not as immersed as I (and more willing to use the wiimote) would not have this problem as much. In fact, my aforementioned friend does not have this same problem I do, so I suppose it is personal preference. It is also fun to use the wiimote to aim, as well as attack. It feels natural. In any case, after these two hours of play (despite some frustrating bits at the end), the game still feels incredible, and is a great example of what the Wii can do.Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:10:38 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1183&iddiary=2560https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1183Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess GameLog One-eth. Today, I will be examining LoZ:TP. It is a highly rated game for the Wii, and it pretty well deserves it. I've been playing the game for almost a week now, and was about fourteen hours in when I started today. I started today having gotten the Zora Armor, which allows link to breath and swim well underwater. This was after some important plot stuff involving freeing the Zora from ice, but that's all prior to this. I then freed a Goron from a lava rock for a third bomb bag, then did a boating minigame on the path to the Water Temple (the next story segment). In completing the minigame, my bomb bags were all upgraded to large bomb bags, doubling my carrying capacity. I then went into the water temple and fought (as well as puzzle solved) my way through to the mid-boss, beat it, and received the Clawshot. I am now paused a few Clawshot puzzles afterward. In looking at the gameplay, let us first look at the Zora Armor. Normally, water is an obstacle to Link. He cannot properly swim underwater, and when wearing heavy iron boots to walk on the bottom he cannot breathe. With the Zora Armor, Link gains the ability to dive underwater and use a full 3-D set of movement. As well, it allows you to swim quickly, thus lowering travel time. However, I have been having some trouble swimming upwards or downwards properly, and so I feel that the mechanics there could be slightly improved. Next, there is the boating minigame. In this, you must alternate paddling against current to avoid walls and shooting at targets with Bomb Arrows. The Bomb Arrow itself is an interesting item in TP, as Link literally ties a bomb to an arrow and fires it to hit faraway bomb able objects. Its unique versatility makes me enjoy its addition in this game (as such an item never appeared in previous Zeldas). And now, onto the Water Temple. At first, the player has Bomb Arrows, Water Bombs, the Zora Armor, and Iron Boots at his disposal, and thus the puzzles are centered around these. The entrance to the temple itself is a puzzled, as the player must water bomb open an underwater air-jet, and then let another bomb rise with it to blow open the temple's entrance. In the temple itself, the player needs to alternate swimming and walking (with the Iron Boots) underwater. Then there are puzzles involving stalactites that must be blown off the ceiling to create platforms to continue. Along with pulling switches and finding keys, as well as the occasional jumping puzzle, the temple continues mostly like this until reaching the Mid-Boss. Part of what makes Zelda interesting is the enemies. Unlike some games, where you beat everything by smashing it over and over while some are harder, often defeating enemies themselves is a puzzle. For example in the Water Temple, there are clams underwater that cannot be defeated by vertical sword slashes, and must be taken out by a horizontal slash while the mouth is open. There are armored boars that the player must dodge and then slash from behind. There are invulnerable gel-blobs that need to be blown up to take out their riders. And the Mid-Bosses are no exception. The Mid-Boss of the water temple is a giant enemy frog. It can launch piranhas (or Skullfish) from its back, which Link must defeat. It then leaps into the air and attempts to squish Link. The first time it did this, I was too slow and was momentarily crushed, and then had to defeat the Skullfish all over again. After dodging the frog drop, the player must attack its weak point, the tongue, in order to do damage. After enough hits, the frog gets back up and roars at the player. If the player simple watches, the pattern repeats. But the player has another option: shoot a bomb into the frog's mouth while it roars. It then collapses and can be attacked on the tongue again. After repeating this a few times, the frog coughs up the Clawshot and dies. The Clawshot is a fun item to use. Its main purpose is to get through area puzzles by grabbing onto targets or climbable vines and pull Link to them. However, it can also be used in battle. Against most enemies it simply pushes them a bit, which in itself is really only useful if there is a gap to knock the enemy down. However, it provides alternate ways to defeat some enemies. The armored pigs can have their armor torn off. The gel-blobs can have their rider pulled out. It is also the only way to defeat underwater jellyfish, by pulling out their cores. So far, all of these elements have come together to form a superb adventure game, full of fun action AND fun puzzles.Thu, 08 Feb 2007 23:28:15 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1183&iddiary=2531https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1057Kirby's Adventure GameLog part the second. I apologize if this is coming in a bit late, I've been sick. So, I spent my second playtime getting through the third level and partway through the fourth level. In way of new powers, I came across the Hammer, Mike, Hi-Jump, Back-Drop, Throw, and Laser. The laser is hard to hit things with, the Mike is powerful, but has only three charges, the backdrop and throw are both relatively useless against bosses, which is where it really counts. The high jump, upon first inspection, seems useless. Kirby -can- fly after all, right? I will elaborate more on this later. Through the third level, the different stages are set on a "tower climbing" backdrop, with some pretty interesting effects for going up the spiraling tower from the outside. The tower itself seems to spin as you go along its side. This was rather interesting and well done. The third boss, however, was incredibly frustrating. The player is supposed to fight a sun and a moon, which alternate going into the sky and raining things on you. You need to grab one of these stars raining from the sky, and turn it into a power to use against the boss on the ground. However, between the attacks on both ends, I could not manage to evade well enough to not die, making it the first non-mini boss I had lost against. The fourth level had several interesting level elements, in that some sections had a strong wind blowing which would push Kirby around, which the player would have to deal with. As well, level four had icy floors at some points, which Kirby might slide along and fall into a bottomless pit. However, as Kirby can fly, this is rather trivial. Were it not for me wanting to check everything out, I doubt I would have noticed and not simply flown on ahead. In fact, Kirby's ability to fly makes for a rather poor platforming character. There is almost no good ways to make jumping puzzles. As for the fourth boss, the player fights on a set of clouds traveling ever upwards, with a boss constantly destroying the platforms, and moving far to well to be hit by most abilities. This is where Hi-Jump becomes interesting. The player has to eat enemies on the stage that give Kirby Hi-Jump, then use the otherwise seemingly useless ability to flying straight up and damage the boss. I, however, realized this too late and lost. I think that, after the second playthrough, my opinion of Kirby's Adventure may have dropped. The ability to fly, which I had not really used the first time, really makes many of the puzzles simple.Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:11:57 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1057&iddiary=2376https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1057Kirby's Adventure, entry the first. I'd never actually played Kirby's Adventure before, and this copy I got from a friend, so I was interested in how it would play out. I finished the first two levels (five stages each), and had a chance to experiment with many of Kirby's powers. Immediately off, the level design doesn't seem as intricate as, say, Mario 3. However, it soon became apparent (to me at least) that the levels weren’t the focus of the game; the focus was Kirby's powers. The powers I encountered (and can remember vividly enough) were Spark, Sword, Tornado, Wheel, Freeze, Cutter, Needle, Crash, Fire, and Beam. Certain abilities, such as Spark, Wheel, Tornado, Needle, and Freeze, seemed to make Kirby invincible to all but boss/mini-boss collisions, making them rather powerful. However, Freeze, Needle, and Spark have relatively short range, balancing them, and Wheel and Tornado cause Kirby to move uncontrollably, making them balanced in a way as well. Some powers, like Sword, felt relatively useless. It had a very short range aerial attack, and a merely okay ground based attack. Another, Crash, had the ability to destroy everything on the screen, but could only be used once, making it not particularly effective as well. The first boss did not seem very interesting, as I spammed him to death with Spark, and he died in moments, but the second boss was rather fun to fight against. It did not seem to take as much damage from powers as it did from simply spitting objects that it painted back at it, making it a game of waiting for it to attack and then countering, which was rather fun. So far, aside from some frustrating mini-bosses, the game seems pretty good.Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:38:27 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1057&iddiary=2260https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=757Super Mario Brothers 3! The return, second post! After a break to write the first log and do some other stuff, I picked Mario 3 back up. This time, I had several of my friends watching. As it turns out, I do not game well under peer pressure (and mocking), and lost to the first stage again. After they wandered off though, I beat the first three stages without incident, and got both the warp whistle in 1-3 and the castle, skipping ahead to the eighth and final world. The first level of the eighth world is a scrolling stage, unlike 1-1 through 1-3, which means I could not blaze along at my own pace. It also is swarming with enemies, be they bob-ombs from cannons, or crazy ninja wrench throwing moles. As well, there are heaps of cannons that appear slowly from the side of the screen, trying to catch you off guard with their cannonballs. It is a tough stage. Unfortunately, beyond my skill level, and thus I lost. Twice. After deciding that I could not adequately explore the game and its features with only a single stage on the final level, I restarted instead of continuing, and warp whistled to world four: giant world. This world is incredibly interesting from an aesthetic standpoint, with enemy sprites, tubes, even blocks and clouds at four times the size. This massive size actually allows for some shading, and the giant piranha plant almost appeared to be an enlarged sixteen bit sprite. The blocks, from a game play standpoint, were so large and powerful that raccoon-Mario could not break them with his tail, and required a koopa shell in order to accomplish this feet. When destroyed, they split into four “regular” blocks when breaking, something I considered aesthetically humorous, but incredibly fitting. It may just be a minor point, but I enjoyed the makeup of these giant-world blocks. Wishing to further test the game, I warp whistled to world 6, the ice world. Immediately off the bat, I noticed Mario sliding on the frigid surface. The lack of traction (as Mario only took a short distance to stop after running before) added an immediate changeup to the game play. The player (me) now has to worry about running into enemies or off of edges completely by accident. Despite this, it is not unbeatable and provides an interesting challenge. These new themes each world make it more and more difficult, yet interesting for the player. After beating the first level, I skipped ahead thanks to a group of hammer bros. to the first sub-castle. It goes to show that there are interesting secret paths and tricks, even on the world map. However, in the sub-castle, I proceeded to repeatedly lose to a tight series of required jumps on a moving platform, and by the time I ran out of lives, I had already played for quite some time. But, despite its oft-frustrating eight-bit level of game play, Super Mario Bros. 3 is superbly designed, and well deserving of its status as a classic in the annals of gaming history.Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:25:11 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=757&iddiary=1712https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=757Ah, Mario 3... It has been a long, long time since I had last played you... Today, I picked up Mario 3 for the first time in years. I could not have been more than a few years old back when I played it on my brother's NES. Which is why I'm so disappointed in myself now. I had played this game in my youth, and as with every other child who had, I remembered all the secrets. Yet, I got a game over on the very first stage. I do not know if my skills have deteriorated, or I am simply tired, but I do know that older games have much more brutal difficulty. No life bars, no halfway points in stages. Then, of course, I got myself together and beat the first three stages, got the first warp whistle and then proceeded to lose the rest of my lives in the first sub-castle. But enough about my play experience; let's talk about what makes this game a classic: the game play. Each of the first three stages all have hidden sections to explore, often by flying at the proper time while using raccoon-mario, or by dropping behind a white block, or even by uncovering hidden blocks. What I'm trying to say is: the level designs are ingenious. There are multiple ways to go through them and, unless you, like me, have played this game since childhood, there are so many secrets to discover. The game play is simple. There's the four-directional D-Pad and two buttons, run and jump. For the most part, this makes for easy to pick up, low learning curve game play. Despite this, I find now that I get frustrated by there only being two buttons, as run is also everything else except for jump. You want to shoot a fireball? Press the run button. Spin with the raccoon suit? Run button. This makes it at least a little frustrating when trying to run and attack at the same time, as one is forced to stop running to use any of the other abilities. This, however, is a fault of the hardware, not the game, and is something the programmers were likely forced to do to accommodate these things into the NES controller. Modern Mario games like Super Mario Sunshine do not have the same button for shoot and run, although my memory does not recall if Super Mario World and its SNES four button controller had the same fault or not. What I'm trying to say is: it's something that needed to be improved and was improved in later games. And what about the story? It's an NES game. It did not have the storage capacity for a detailed story. Yet, despite the lack of an overarching plot (aside from save the kings who were transformed and rescue the princess), does not detract from it when compared to other older, similarly impaired games. As such, its superb game play and level design make it a great game.Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:26:42 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=757&iddiary=1699https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=359Gamelog Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation part 1B: Time for the second post, eh? I picked back up SRT:OG again, this time getting through chapters 6-8. The game has gotten significantly harder, though I have yet to get a gameover. Each level has more and more enemies, and more times they come in as reinforcements, as well as one or more (much harder) bosses. Aside from simple “destroy all enemy” missions, there has also been a mission (segment) in which I had to keep a carrier from getting destroyed by a mob of enemies around it. I would have most certainly failed to protect it and had to retry had I not gotten a tip from a friend on the same level. As well, there were two segments in which I had to prevent enemy forces from entering a 3x4 or so area of the map (the base) while destroying them. These segments throw in a nice change of pace (though they are a bit more nerve wracking), and show some thought put into the design process. The story is a bit confusing at this point, as it draws on what I assume is a pre-established canon that people like me in America do not really know of, due to the fact that every other game in the series was kept in Japan, likely due to legal issues dealing with the rights to certain non-original characters in the games which are owned by different companies here in America. All in all, though, still a pretty well designed game, if a bit text heavy.Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:47:44 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=359&iddiary=1054https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=359Gamelog Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation part 1A: I had played this game for about twenty minutes before this session, but not much aside from the opening missions happened. I started on mission 3 and went to mission 5. This game is, first of all, a Turn-Based Strategy RPG. The player controls a squad of pilots flying giant robots. It may just be a personal opinion, but I find the premise awesome. Now, onto the gameplay. The battles themselves go similar to other TBSRPGs such as Shining Force and Fire Emblem. It goes on a grid-based system, the player’s characters maneuvering around the enemy planes/aliens/giant robots and attacking. It differs from Fire Emblem in that, should a character “die” in the battle, they are not permanently gone, they simply retreat and the player is docked money at the end of the battle for “repair costs”. Meanwhile, unlike Shining Force, the player has a series of weapons to choose from, most of which have limited ammunition (although, these refill after each battle, meaning one can use weapons without fear of them breaking). There is also a “Will” value that, upon reaching certain values, the player can use to activate the character’s mech’s super attack for massive damage. The pilots for the most part can be switched between vehicles, both of which can be “customized”. For the pilots, the player accumulates points in battle that they can then apply to the characters’ stats to raise them, or give them skills. The mechs are also customized in a similar way, applying money earned in battle to raise the stats of certain aspects, defense, HP, movement, energy, as well as each individual weapons instead of piecing together the mobile suit from different parts in other giant robot games such as Armored Core or Front Mission. Aside from the slight disappointment in the way the vehicles are customized, so far the game has been interesting, with lengthy story segments and well designed battles.Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:33:08 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=359&iddiary=1052