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Jan 31st, 2007 at 17:50:07 - Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64) |
Okay, so my second session of playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time consisted of working my way through the Great Deku Tree toward its boss, Gohma. I was relieved to find that the Deku Tree enemies (like the Deku Baba) didn't terrify me like they did when I was little; I still had to take a few tries to get used to the realtime fighting (I'm more used to turn-based fighting games), but I didn't freak out and turn the game off, either, so I'd consider that an improvement. (Obviously this game wasn't designed to be played by little kids or wussies, of which I was both those years ago. Ah, me. The fighting and varying levels of scary enemies definitely mark this as a game for slightly older children, if not quite so much as Twilight Princess has shown itself to be. In particular, I recall the ReDead and the Wallmasters, and the Shadow Temple as a whole, to have been particularly eerie when my brother played it through the first time. Something I'm quite looking forward to reaching, the Shadow Temple. Ugh.)
Anyway, after some practice the Deku Baba are dispatched with easily enough, as are the Skulltula (especially if you can pick them off with the slingshot right away). These fairly simple enemies are good to practice fighting with in order to get more adept with targeting and attacking and blocking with the shield.
Other than the enemies, I liked the puzzle-type aspects of several of the rooms in the Deku Tree, where you have to figure out to step on a raised area of the floor or set something on fire with a Deku Stick or shoot the eye with your slingshot. I vaguely recalled some of this from my brother's gameplay experience and thus probably saved myself some time (since I didn't want to give in and use an online walkthrough as the easy way out). It was very rewarding to look at a situation and figure out on my own what I had to do and then get it done in the right way--the designers had a good idea of what was an appropriate middle ground between complete babying of the player with obvious directions and leaving them completely on their own to figure everything out. This makes the game a challenge but not hair-tearingly difficult.
I ran around taking care of the various rooms in the Deku Tree, and after some time finally got to the first boss of the game, Gohma (or, if you prefer, Parasitic Armored Arachnid: Queen Gohma). Even with the advice from the Deku Scrubs about her eye as her weak spot, I apparently wasn't on-the-ball enough and ended up dying for the first time. Friends I've discussed this game with seem to agree that Gohma is relatively difficult to fight for a first boss, but until I turn the game back on and find I have to fight her five or six more times I won't call her unreasonably so. For now I consider it all part of the challenge.
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Jan 31st, 2007 at 17:24:29 - Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64) |
When told I had to choose another game from the classics list for the third gamelog assignment, one game came to mind immediately--Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. My brother bought the game for our N64 when it first came out and over the course of several weeks or months (the length of time has since faded from my memory) I had the very enjoyable experience of being able to watch him play from start to finish. In those days, I didn't like playing video games too much myself, and when he encouraged me to give OoT a whirl, I got as far as the Deku Tree, freaked out, and refused to play any further. (I was in middle school, what can I say?) It's been quite a while since then, and although our N64 is currently in the possession of one of his friends back home, I managed to acquire my best friend's (at least temporarily) and eagerly sat down to play. I had strong memories of great graphics, amazing music, and truly epic gameplay (from a spectator's point of view), and I wanted to see whether all that still held true several years later.
I can truthfully say that OoT is almost as good as I remember. Admittedly, compared to the new Zelda game (and most other games of today) the graphics are a little clunky and rough, but it looks just as good as the other games I have from the same timeperiod and it isn't anything that detracts from the gameplay. The music has held up quite nicely--OoT has one of the best soundtracks of any game I've ever played, and even my mom, who's never picked up a game controller in her life (except to maybe play a few rounds of virtual golf on the Sega Genesis), quite enjoys the orchestral OST I picked up a few years ago to listen to while studying. I know I always keep coming back to music in these gamelogs, but darnit, music is really important to a good game experience and the designers of each game I've played so far understand that. Really great music can make an otherwise average game (which OoT most definitely is not) really stand out, so it is definitely something that takes careful consideration when one decides to design a game.
My first session of playing the game was mostly running around the Kokiri village, becoming familiar with the controls and talking to the villagers to understand what my goals were. (I'll admit that I went into all the houses and smashed everyone's pots in order to get the rupees inside. If only this worked in real life.) The controls aren't anything too difficult, but it's good to get familiarized with the lock-and-target technique and practice with the shield and sword you acquire before heading out to the Deku Tree, which is your first real task. (The game designers force you to arm yourself before you are allowed to leave the village by blocking the pathway with the rather annoying leader of the Kokiri people, which is a good way of making sure you don't get caught unawares and unarmed when you first enter the Deku Tree.) Finding the sword was slightly more difficult for me than I remember it being for my brother, but it's interesting that the designers make you figure it out for yourself rather than just handing the weapon over. It adds a small bit of challenge to the tutorial-style setup of the village and makes things interesting. In any case, I ended my first session by heading off to the Deku Tree as planned, hoping that I wouldn't embarrass myself by getting scared this time, so many years later.
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 14:13:44 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
The second half of the gameplay proceeded similarly to the first; Katamari Damacy is a very easy game to learn how to play, and much of the challenge is strategizing so as to be able to complete the various levels by building an appropriately-sized katamari within the time limit. Both my classmate and I agreed that, for whatever reason, Star 4 was especially hard in this respect; we both had to try to complete the level several times, and in the end she had to play three times straight through to beat it by a narrow margin. As the levels progress, different challenges are presented in building one's katamari; the constellation-building levels are especially interesting in that they may ask you to collect as many as you can of one particular item (such as crabs or swans or twins) or the biggest and best single thing you can find of a particular item (such as a bear or a cow). These challenges keep the gameplay fresh and allow one to choose a different type of difficulty to try if one is getting frustrated with a particular level. The variety of play, along with the strange entertainment of the cutscenes, was enough to keep us engaged for a full three hours (with small breaks), at any rate.
One thing I have to agree with that all my friends who had played previously had told me: the music is absolutely great. Each level has a different but equally catchy song playing in the background that it takes a while to tire of; even the music of Star 4, which we tried to beat at least five times, had yet to start annoying me when my classmate finally beat it. Along with the music, too, the sound effects are really amusing--when one's katamari is built up enough that one can start picking up people, some of their screams are extraordinarily funny. It's these small things, along with the sheer weirdness of being able to pick up leaflets, hardhats, and cakes all along the same street, that culminate in a game with a lot of staying power that doesn't fade and get boring after a few hours of play. More than that, the game makes you start to see everything differently; I was walking to class earlier today when I saw a small cluster of sparrows pecking at the ground, and my first thought was to wish that I had a katamari big enough to roll them all up.
All in all, the unique gameplay and the absolute bizarrity of it all make playing Katamari Damacy a very memorable experience, and I look forward to playing it frequently in the future. (You know a game is effective when you want to go out and buy the console it runs on just so you can play the game yourself...)
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 13:57:18 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
So a classmate brought over Katamari Damacy with the intent that we could both play since it's on the classics list. I had only heard a little bit about it before that point--everybody I know who'd played it seemed to love it without giving any specific reasons why, and I had been curious about what was so wonderful about it. As we started playing, though, I quickly learned what the reason for all the hype was.
As a first-time player, I went through the little tutorial that showed what the controls were and allowed one to test them out. Move forward, stop, roll sideways, jump to change position: all fairly easy to remember and get the hang of (other than the weird charge/dash action that requires one to work the analog joysticks back and forth alternately in a way that I haven't managed to master yet). The idea of the game is simple enough, but the enjoyment is far increased by the sheer bizarrity of everything that goes on. The cutscenes are brightly colored and incredibly surreal (especially the opening one), and while some players may find this alienating, I found it quite entertaining. The weird speeches made by the King of All Cosmos and the strange bits of cutscene plot in between the gameplay are intriguing in their oddness ("Oh! I feel it! I feel the cosmos!" echoes through my head even as I type this) and motivated me and my classmate to play straight through for several hours just to see what would happen as a result of making a new star.
We would have played two-player mode to compare it with one-player mode in terms of entertainment (we'd both heard that it was inferior in several ways), but unfortunately with only one controller between us we had to be content with alternating the one-player mode in attempts to make new stars and constellations. In any case, the game is very visually appealing with its bright colors and uniquely stylized graphics, and was almost as fun to watch as to actually play. Both players and watcher get involved in the game very quickly, and as we played we found ourselves cheering the other on or yelling animatedly at the screen when something went wrong (like being attacked by the cat and having the katamari break up). This, I think, is one of the marks of a really good game, when it involves one so completely in the play.
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Eegriega has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 10 days |
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