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Nov 20th, 2006 at 12:53:55 - Zelda: Windwaker (GC) |
Frustration...After the first time of trying to get across the obstacle course in the pirate ship, I had almost made it then lost it on the last jump. The second time I made it, only to be foiled by button smashing. The next 10 minutes were spent trying to get back to a treasure I already had access too!
Finally I made it across and progressed onto the "stealth" mission. This is the first time I have ever experienced Zelda with a "stealth" type mission. I thought it was a really interesting twist to the game and made it a bit more dynamic. There were even barrels around the environment which you could pull over yourself and then walk around in so as not to be noticed. Too cool.
Another aspect of the stealth part is that you loose your weapon when you first get to this area. So you have to sneak around and smash the bad guys over the head with a vase in order to find pieces inside to use against them. But this is not so easily done because if they have a weapon then you have to shield yourself from them, make them drop the weapon, pick up the weapon before they do, and then attack them with it. This adds a whole new complexity to the game but can also become a vary long and tedious process.
Another interesting tidbit about this level is that it is the first place where i realized there is no JUMP! You can't actually jump just to jump. It sucked. Really limited my options and continued to annoy me throughout the rest of this play.
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Nov 20th, 2006 at 12:21:25 - Zelda: Windwaker (GC) |
The last time i played a Zelda game was on the NES, so I wasn't really sure what to expect from a new fangled 3D version of one of my favorite childhood games. But when I heard that lovely music, I knew it would be ok. The first problem I ran into was the length of time it took to read the story (around 10 minutes)! Although the story was very intriguing, the fact that I couldn't button smash my way through it somewhat annoyed me. Fortunately, this annoyance was quelled by the o' so cute little characters that awaited me on the other side of the opening narrative. However, I soon realized that if you don't pay attention in this game it could make your life much harder. For instance, when it was finally time for my game-play to start I was to go to grandmother's house. My friend assured me they had shown me the location in a camera shot but there was no other way to tell the direction you needed to go. No indicating marks on the map you could see in the bottom left corner, nothing. So the game effectively made you wander around until you found the right place. I guess since the world really wasn't that big for me to explore this wasn't too much of a hassle. But if the worlds get bigger (which I imagine they do) I hope I get a map or something!
The interactions with the player are all a text based, walk over and push the button to hear them talk. I think something I would have liked to see was the ability to choose different answers. For this game however, I don't guess that was the premise, for you just keep tapping until they are through. Either way, after approaching several characters, I realized there were different tasks that you could either take on or ignore. Of course, there were some that you really had to do, such as finding the sword. But others, like trying to catch a pig, were just fun exercises.
I ended this round of playing after I went onto the pirate ship. All in all I'd say that so far the game captures my interest but it does have some quirks about it. I guess I'll get used to them.
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Nov 20th, 2006 at 12:05:15 - John Conway's Life (PC) |
My final round with "Life" was more interesting than I thought it could be after playing the first time. I started testing out scenarios, not necessarily identifying with the abstract little blocks but creating my own social experiments (if you will) to see how stable populations would react when faced with an outsider. Or what would happen when 2 stable populations were mixed. Would one absorb the other? Or would they both die?
I connected 2 stable populations of 6 cells together. This ultimately resulted in 10 stable populations. i connect one population of four by a single line to another. They died. Creating a block with six double squares and 2 hanging off one end created an interesting pattern of life movement where one piece breaks off and becomes stable while the other moves around the board like a bunch of gypsies.
It turned out to be a rather interesting game because it ultimately drew me into trying to determine what would kill or populate cells, and thereby allowing me to create my own little game. I don;t think I could play it for an extended period of time by any means. It was very abstract but very interesting none the less.
engulf a stable population then reform a stable one in a different shape. then some
populations were never "stable" they constantly fluctuated in an and out of the same shape
. interesting
sometimes trying to connect one population to another stable population would inturn kill them
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Nov 20th, 2006 at 11:57:09 - John Conway's Life (PC) |
The second time I played "Life," i decided to try a systematic approach to the game. After all, it is based on mathematics right? So this time I started playing the game by looking at all of the pre-configured examples: glider, small exploder, exploder, space ship,tumbler and gospel glider gun. This process proved to be the best way to ease my brain into connecting with the abstract dots that were living and dieing before my eyes. In the glider example, the cells move around until they hit the bottom of the screen, around 59 generations or so were the population becomes stable but, in my opinion, stagnant, because it quits moving all together. The small exploder only takes around 17 generations to create a stable population. The regular exploder produces a stable/unstable pattern because the pieces are constantly rotating around 3 different patterns. Therefore they are stable in their instability. The coolest was the space ship because it really started to illuminate the "life" the squares can take on as a population. Once it starts it moves across the screen bouncing around quite a bit before becoming stable. The tumbler was nothing much, as far as being able to connect to it, the blocks just sort of moved around in the same space over and over again, hence the name tumbler. Finally, the gospel glider gun. Whoa. Three of the starting squares move upward across
the board and "infect" the other square. then then produce "stable" pieces and
constantly move back and forth. It is really the best of the pre-configured patterns and really got me thinking about how to create a game out of this "game." The articles I read about it described it as a solitaire game, but even solitaire has a game, whereas this one does not. The game is sort of you creating your own game in the game. To this end I started creating geometric shapes or writing in numbers to see which created more stable populations. A square is more stable than a circle or triangle. And 1 becomes stable before 2 or 3. Interesting...
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vanGhost has been with GameLog for 18 years, 0 months, and 1 day |
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