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Mar 11th, 2007 at 22:58:51 - Lice (PC) |
“Lice” is a short but sweet platformer game by Natlie Barrett, Soloman Gonzales, created using the Game Maker.
I played this game expecting to play as a louse navigating hair follicles, so it was somewhat of a letdown realizing that I play as a guy in a white suit that runs through a valley shooting dinosaurs with arrows. However, the guy is wearing something on his back that resembles, a shell, as well as a helmet. I guess he’s a guy in a louse costume.
The controls were fair and the lack of distinction in terms of your character’s velocity made jumping incredibly easy. I reached the end in no time (less than five minutes), where I was expecting to find a boss. Instead, I was simply informed via pop-up window that I had won. Not a very rewarding ending. At this point, my score was recorded to a list. So I guess the reward is supposed to come competing with your friends for the highest score. Personally, the ending is where I was most disappointed.
What I enjoyed most were the graphics, which seemed to be cobbled together from various NES and SNES games displayed in different sizes and resolutions. The soundtrack did of good job of fitting this aesthetic, a piece of techno music using very simple synths reminiscent of an NES game. For all I know, it could be a remix of an NES game. Some sound effects would have been nice. Also, the transitions between levels were jerky and awkward, something resembling a belabored screen-wipe ala Star Wars.
I enjoyed the abstract, unspecified setting and how the non-literal title encourages the player to imagine what it’s all about. Although I still wanted to play as a louse and navigate some guy’s scalp.
NOTE: Due to the game’s shortness, reason demands that I only write one entry on it.
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Feb 22nd, 2007 at 23:41:37 - Kirby's Adventure (NES) |
When I arrived in the butter castle level, I was quite impressed by the game's graphics.The shading effects feel way more organic than your standard NES game: at one point, you come across a tower made out of butter with such complex shading and animation that it looks like a 3D polygon. The graphics make Kirby's Adventure feel more like a SNES game. I love the aesthetics of food and how the game evokes the sense of taste in setting the mood for each level. Vegetable Forest to Ice Cream Island might not be major departures from each other in their design, but the names evoke completely opposite feelings.
This game is a good example of how the player’s understanding of tropes informs the gameplay experience. For example, at several points you have to fight bosses that can only be defeated by spitting projectiles, but there are no objects available for ammunition -- or so it seems. In the end, you discover that you have to inhale things such as the stars that erupt from the dust clouds when your enemy hits the ground, or the notes that pop out of the enemy’s mouth when it sings. Normally, we understand stars upon impact and musical notes from the mouth as cartoon tropes that stand in for invisible physics that cannot be visually represented so easily. However, in Kirby, the symbol is a tangible
object in itself that must be seized and used as a weapon. The game designers were no doubt aware of this mental process of trope recognition and purposely designed these boss fights to challenge the player to think outside the box. Another trope they play around with is the exploding boss. In Kirby, when you defeat a boss, it starts flashing and prepares to explode as we would expect. However, instead of exploding harmlessly to yield a power-up or some item as a reward, as is the case with many platformers (Mega Man for example), the boss just creates an explosion that hurts you, and nothing more. Kind of silly, if you ask me.
After the twentieth level or so, I felt like I had seen all there was to see and turned the game off. Nonetheless, it was fun during that time.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Feb 23rd, 2007 at 14:19:16.
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Feb 22nd, 2007 at 23:41:13 - Kirby's Adventure (NES) |
Kirby is a fun little platform game. Coming into this game I had already played Kirby’s Dream Land on Gameboy, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. Compared to other platform games, this one has way more rules of affordance, especially compared with the Mario games. In Mario, you are confined by gravity and must risk falling to your doom as you navigate several precarious cliffs. Not so with Kirby, who can inflate himself and fly wherever he pleases. Floating down a gap and dying is possible, but highly unlikely. Another thing about Kirby is that he always has something to keep between him and the enemy, whether it’s a projectile, a bludgeon, or the vacuum created by his mouth. In Mario, if you want to defend yourself, you usually have to hop directly on top of the sucker and risk a harmful collision. Another thing is, in Mario, you are defenseless in the water unless you happen to have a fire flower. Not so with Kirby, in fact, you’re better off in the water because you have a water-spitting ability that you can aim in three directions and use as frequently as you like, unlike on land, where spitting a projectile can only be done in two directions and requires the player to first perform a sucking action. I was actually thrown off by this whole water business, as it was not a feature in the Gameboy game. At one point, you have to spit water in an upward direction in order to advance in the game, but I had just barely discovered the water-spitting ability itself, much less the ability to spit upward. Another thing omitted from the Gameboy version that took me while to figure out is how to absorb enemy abilities. Thankfully, the makers were smart enough to include tips and instructions on a screen that appears whenever you pause the game. I then remembered that in Super Smash Bros., Kirby has the exact same power, which is performed via the exact same input on the controller. I find it interesting that someone could theoretically be completely unfamiliar rules and control schema of the Kirby games and still instinctively know what to do by virtue of their experience with the character’s mythology in pop culture.
Another thing that really ground my gears was when I got stuck at one point because I had to walk through a white doorway placed on a backdrop of the sky, which featured several clouds that the door blended right in with. I paced back and forth across this level at my own peril trying to figure out what to do. I was even driven to commit virtual suicide a few times out of frustration.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Feb 23rd, 2007 at 14:13:59.
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Feb 8th, 2007 at 20:23:57 - Trauma Center: Under the Knife (DS) |
As I continue to play Trauma Center, I find myself stopping every now and then to read the dialog between operations. It’s interesting to know that the little monsters that are infecting everybody are from a disease created by some terrorist organization. I guess surgery in itself wasn’t exciting enough.
My first major challenge came when I had to perform the same operation 5 times in a row in 10 minutes! Or so I thought. Apparently, I was rushing and killing my patients for nothing, because this level (and only this level) won’t end the game when the timer reaches zero. Why in God’s name didn’t they tell me that? This game just went down a few notches in my eyes.
Finally, after performing some fairly easy operations, I’m faced with the final boss. For ten whole minutes I’m forced to scramble to fight this virus-monster while keeping the patient alive at the same time. Just when I’m about to finish the thing off, it goes into some kind of super-attack mode and becomes impossible to kill. So I consult the internet and discover that this thing can only be killed if you save your healing touch (which can only be used once per operation) for the very end. Again, how the hell was I supposed to know that? Maybe in a Zelda game this kind of thing is acceptable, but this in this situation, every second counts. Furthermore, each attempt takes up ten *very* stressful minutes of my time. Trauma Center gets the award for least considerate game of the year.
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lentilsonlent has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 13 days |
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