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Feb 8th, 2007 at 01:51:25 - Trauma Center: Under the Knife (DS) |
Trauma Center is the world’s first surgery simulation game, and a perfect match for the DS hardware. Using the stylus on the DS touch pad, you’ll really feel like you’re holding the scalpel as you cut into the patient. One little slip and you hurt the patient. Trauma Center is most likely the first game to challenge the player’s ability to keep their body steady. Likewise, it is probably one of the more stressful games out there. You can’t just lean back on the couch to play this one. After playing, my neck felt a little stiff.
So, I resumed play on the large intestine level, in which I have to extract several aneurisms before they rupture. It took several tries, but in the end I was able to develop a strategy to deal with them. The motions here required are so precise, you can’t have them explained to you, but instead must figure it all out through trial and error. Not so much fun. Stitching up a wound requires that you draw a “zig-zag” across the wound. I’ve tried zig-zags, loops, squiggles, and yet it always seems to be a 50/50 chance of getting it right. DS is great and all, but I’d say these touch-based games till have a way to go.
In between every operation is a cutscene that consists of unanimated anime-style characters exchanging a few dialog boxes. I think it was a good idea to have the bodies you operate on rendered in 3d while the characters themselves are 2d. Also, the 3d bodies are placed on a grid background that makes it look like everything takes place in virtual reality. All this serves to make things significantly less creepy.
While the cut scenes are silent, the operations have bit of voice acting: at certain points, the nurse will shout something like “Doctor!” to grab your attention. This cues the player to look away from the operation for a minute to read her instructions. The music is appropriately tense, cliché hospital drama fare.
So, much to my disappointment, the next patient suffers from some disease in which tiny little monsters swim inside her body and I have to shoot them down with a laser. Suddenly, the world’s first surgery sim just became an homage to Space Invaders. At first this was cute, but it once it became apparent that this mysterious disease is what I’d be fighting for the rest of the game, I was rather disappointed.
To mix it up a bit, one of the levels has you disarming a bomb using your surgeon’s tools. Clever, but it wasn’t explained very well. I’m told that I have to cool the bomb with the gel, but I’m not told where to apply it. Blah. I had to go to gamefaqs.com just to know what was going on.
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Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:40:08 - The Legend of Zelda (NES) |
Continuing my LoZ adventure I was able to find the next dungeon. The boss was such a pushover that it went down after one bomb. As my great reward for this victory, I was sent back to the world map for more aimless wandering! The last thing I did that could be considered progress was finding a cave where I got to swap my crummy wooden sword for a metal one. After that, the rest was…you guess it, aimless wandering. While doing this, I come up with the brilliant idea of turning off the harsh, repetitive music and listening to something (anything) else on headphones.
I really hate having to return to the same spot every time I die. How am I supposed to discover anything like this? Link is a pretty lousy fighter in this game too. Instead of swinging his sword in an arc, he merely stabs forward, which severely limits your range and forces you to be directly facing your enemy if you want to hit it. Furthermore, he doesn’t have his spin-attack! There is really no way to guard your back or even you side in combat! So I just keep dying and not caring, waiting for my 45 minutes to be up. Yeah, I could look up a guide, but I don't swing that way: this game is getting judged on its own merits.
In the northeast I discover a man selling keys in his shop. Are these really the same keys that you earn in dungeons to advance to the next room? Well that’s just great. Now I don’t even have to bother completing the challenges and puzzles in the dungeons, I can just earn 100 rupees and give them to this guy! And how do I earn my money? How else? Killing enemies while aimless wandering! Either that or playing “money making game.” Why not? It’s more fun than this. Hell, they should have just gone and made “The legend of Money Making Game” instead.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:43:56.
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Jan 30th, 2007 at 01:08:49 - The Legend of Zelda (NES) |
The LoZ world is a big green and beige vacuum in which your only friends are couple of ubiquitous bearded men who function as nothing more than signposts, conducting single sentence conversations in broken English.
You play as Link, who is just about as complex of a character as the Quaker on the oatmeal box. Of course, this was the standard for video game characters at the time, so one can’t hold it against LoZ.
However, when one is forced to wander aimlessly for long periods of time, the experience sure feels empty without towns to visit, comrades to interact with, and so on. Furthermore, having an intriguing story gives the player motivation to keep playing in those tedious times of wandering aimlessly without any immediate goal. Also, a good story reduces the chances of such aimless wandering because, as Aristotle observed, a good story contains time and place within a logical structure. A well-written story in a game helps you know where to be and when.
I’m not saying that a game of exploration needs exciting characters or a brilliant story to draw one in. The SNES Zelda game, Link’s Awakening, certainly doesn’t have any compelling writing in it, but the story is nevertheless necessary for making the game compelling because it keeps things moving. Furthermore, the visuals weren’t limited to two colors and the music wasn’t limited to two songs looping over and over again. Of course, the reason why I am harsher on LoZ than other NES games in these categories because they are necessary in a game that doesn’t provide constant action like, say, Mario Bros. If you are made to wander in circles without making any progress, your boredom should at least be of the aesthetically pleasing variety, as experienced in lava lamps and new age music.
As for what I did:
The first dungeon wasn’t that hard to find. I managed to beat it. Some old man told me to go to the peninsula on the east coast. So I headed east and got some scrap of paper to show to an old woman. I eventually found the old woman and all I got was the “privilege” of purchasing medicine at outrageous prices. Great. So then I went east again and decided to “play money making game” with the old man for a while, which isn’t even a game, according to Costikyan’s definition. I walked around and killed some monsters, accomplishing nothing in the process.
Still, I give LoZ a 4 for its importance in video game history. Besides, I'm biased because I never played it back in the day like everyone else. I guess it was just one of those "you had to be there" things.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:40:50.
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 02:31:33 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
I'm beginning to remember why I don't count this game among my favorites. In addition to the problems with the camera and the shaky wall-climbing feature, this game gets old really quickly. Although each level presents a new arrangement of obstacles, they all have the same look and feel. And although the game has many novel concepts, the rules of the game are uninspired and allow for little strategy. I've never been a fan of games where you have to run around and collect as much stuff as possible before a timer runs out. There is no room for exploration or strategy. Although each progression to the next level brings presents a greater challenge and demands a bigger ball to roll, this is essentially a game of emergence. Furthermore, getting good at this game essentially consists of memorizing routes. The minigame levels (pick up the biggest bear you can find!) are so frustrating that I didn't dare go near them, as they are entirely optional and require absolute perfection. The challenge of picking up a big bear is a matter of avoiding smaller bears, but the game's camera simply won't allow for such controlled navigation.
I managed to complete the level "make a star 6" before giving up. I wandered around the unorganized world map looking for "make a star 7", couldn't find it, and turned the game off. I have no urge to finish this game, whatever that means. As I recall it doesn't really have an ending in a narrative sense, as all the cutscenes depict characters and situations that are *very* loosely related to the narrative presented in the gameplay. There is always some higher score to attain, and completing all the levels takes no time at all, so it is very hard to reach any satisfactory sense of completion in this game. This is most definitely a game of emergence.
Katamari is a cute game, but it is more novelty than innovation. Contrary to what some claim, I don't think it comes anywhere close to making up for the majority of drab and unoriginal movie-wannabe titles that characterized the PS2 and its generation of consoles.
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lentilsonlent has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 13 days |
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