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Jan 25th, 2008 at 04:53:15 - The Legend of Zelda (NES) |
Gameplay
Well over two hours into the game, I managed to find a second temple and have beaten neither, collect one extra heart, a raft, a ladder, a candle/flamethrower, and no sign of a storyline to date. I know the general goals but only because I have played other Zelda games and actually been able to progress through a temple. In reality this feels like an arcade game designed to eat your quarters rather than provide entertainment. This feels like beating myself with a stick and this comes from a slightly obsessive completionist.
The only social interactions that this game offers is buying and collecting items from old men and old ladies who speak in nonsense to you. Unless monsters count as part of the social interactions, which would boil down to a mutual desire to mindlessly kill one another, the strange humans living in walls and caves seems to be the extent of all social interactions within the game. There is an interesting interaction between the player and the game though. The player tries to progress through the various areas and levels with the goal to make a net positive effect on their score. The game prefers to be hell bent on killing the player at every possible turn.
I easily died close to a hundred times in the few hours that I’ve played it but for some reason that only seems to simultaneously frustrate me and drive me to keep playing. Death isn’t a motivation to stop playing but to play harder and get killed more often. It is therefore fortunate that the game does not run on quarters and that the player can eventually get more advanced at evasion and blocking.
Although the game is not exactly fun it is irritating enough to drive the player for further completion. This is an interesting approach to making a game but not particularly good for sales. The ability of the player to advance in the game depends almost entirely on how fast they grow and develop evasive and offensive techniques. Unfortunately this ability is not something that is common in all players and for a large portion of the audience this would just be an exercise in frustration.
Design
Although such techniques are regarded as archaic now the side-scrolling grid layout of the game was probably innovative at the time of its original release. Also the idea of a collective inventory would have been a novel concept at the time of Zelda’s introduction to the gaming world. (This is where someone with a detailed and extravagant knowledge of gaming history would correct me or confirm my assertion) The multiple attack method of the Zelda games would also be new to an audience that would have been rooted in jumping on the enemy’s head or throwing a tiny fireball at them (Mario).
The level design seems to consist of the idea that as you move further away from your starting screen the more powerful and harder to beat the enemies get. This makes the progress slow and difficult to move quickly from one area to another as is possible in later games. The terrain changes from forests, to mountains, to deserts, to oceans within the span of 5 or fewer grids. This is particularly challenging the first time you encounter certain enemies and obstacles.
As the player continues to move through the levels, they acquire more items to add to the inventory and weapons array. Defeating bosses yields greater rewards and more crucial items for the greater goals. Game also rewards clever puzzle solving such as moving across a small moat with a ladder, pushing blocks to access secret areas, or quickly lighting a room with a candle.
The conflict for this game arises from the same general source as the Mario games: that which is not your ally hurts you upon contact and may actively try to kill you. Beyond that the game is adamantly unspecific as to what grudge everything bares you and why. Usually the most challenging aspect of any particular enemy is the large groups of 4 to10 that they always appear in and the combined random movements that make a sword less than a practical weapon for combat.
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Jan 25th, 2008 at 01:09:44 - The Legend of Zelda (NES) |
Summary
The original Legend of Zelda game acts as the basis for all (or at least most) other Zelda games. The objectives are, as always: collect your various items and pieces of equipment, collect the Triforce pieces, defeat a number of bosses you really have no right to beat, and rescue the princess. This is pretty straightforward except that the game quickly conspires against you and makes itself excessively difficult and unintuitive.
Gameplay
The game starts in medias res by sticking you into the middle of nowhere with nothing but a shield in your inventory. The game gives you no introduction, no clear objectives, no overarching goals, and no weapons. This is an unhelpful and unintuitive start for any player and it couldn’t have been helpful to any player who had never heard of the game before (which would have included the entire release audience). Really the game never gives you a specific objective or even a target location.
The map for the game uses single block areas with preset boundaries, terrain, and enemies. The area map is composed entirely of a single gray block that has a small green dot to indicate where you are. The individual bricks are often difficult and sometimes treacherous to navigate especially when there is a swarm of enemies to attack you. The only safe locations are homes and shops, which are set into the walls of the terrain. Even the occupants of these houses are mostly unhelpful people who sit there and either ask you to buy something or do nothing. The map yields no target location or even a layout of the terrain so you are sent off to wander aimlessly until you either find something or die.
If you are lucky you enter the first hole on the starting screen and get the wooden sword from the old man there. The only way to use this is in straight thrusts except that en you have full health the attack also projects a flashing sword that flies across the map like an enemy projectile. You are almost always in combat (excluding homes and shops) and it often takes multiple hits to kill an enemy if you even can kill them. Often you will lose half of a heart (1/6 of your starting hit points) from even touching an enemy and lose your projectile ability.
The control scheme has the limitation of only having 4 buttons and a direction pad. This eliminates many of the options that 3D games allow for but eve with that limitation the designers made the selection screen controls unintuitive and difficult. Aside from the problem of a large majority of deaths occurring because of limitations of movement and large groups of enemies there is no way to access the save screen without dying and once you’re there you must use the Select and Start buttons to navigate instead of the direction pad. This unintuitive setup makes the game frustrating to deal with.
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Jan 14th, 2008 at 02:29:32 - Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) |
Gameplay for second round
The ability to continue to utilize new techniques extends further into the game. This keeps the movements from becoming overly repetitive and allows the game to become more complex as it progresses. Instead of a singular use for any given move the game includes multiple uses for each new attack. To reinforce the continued use of these techniques there are often enemies that are only vulnerable to a certain attack.
This does not apply to boss fights. Often the bosses will have only one weakness that doesn't take much reasoning to figure out. Almost the entire level before a boss fight involves training in the method for defeating the leader (who is usually just a larger version of their subordinates, or in certain cases vulnerable to their subordinates being hurled at them).
This system of methodical training for the boss makes the bosses extremely predictable. Once the boss fight is over the pattern becomes completely obvious and the only challenge left is the special circumstances created by the Prankster Comet. This special event starts you directly at the boss battle with the condition that any hit is lethal to you. This keeps the fight interesting (or frustrating) for a few inconsequential lives. Then the boss becomes repetitive and almost laughable despite your lack of health.
The larger galaxies have five or six stars that you can earn through 3 different maps. These variations keep the levels from getting overly repetitive while the wide variety of galaxies maintains individuality of separate themes. The independent puzzle galaxies only appear when you have experienced a certain skill set and seek to test you understanding of those skills for no particular reason beyond that they can.
Design
The game's system of changing gravity and the various means of transferring from one planetoid to the next make this game innovative and interesting. Each planetoid miraculously maintains its own gravitational field while managing to remain static despite all the equally strong forces around it. More miraculous still is that the entire region maintains an atmosphere as a whole and the gravity for each planetoid is about equivalent to earth despite the fact that most of the galaxies could fit inside a football stadium.
The most challenging aspects of this gravity system is the suspension of disbelief. Aside from this, the minimal player control over the camera angle is frustrating and occasionally detrimental to the player as they try to judge angle. Worst of all is the inconsistency of these gravitational sources where jumping can transition you from a floating disk to a meteor, empty space, a black hole (of which there are more than there are pipes), or simply to the other side of the disk.
The galaxies seem to be populated entirely by creatures that either want to hurt you or beg for your help. The easy differentiation is between things that stand still or sit there looking cute and fluffy and anything that looks at you funny or pursues you. Conflicts basically arise because things are trying to kill you without any provocation and everything that isn't begging for help is begging for a senseless death.
The most challenging portions are usually the boss battles although after a certain point the bosses need to get more difficult just because the player's skill set has increased dramatically. Still, the use of the gradual learning curve keeps the levels interesting while you work to unlock more levels.
The reward system relies pretty heavily on the incremental growth of player ability to collect power stars. As you finish more levels and collect more stars you unlock more levels and more galaxies. once you collect enough you can do a regional boss battle, usually with Bowser or Bowser Jr., the former of which is considerably smaller than he was in Mario Sunshine. After a regional boss battle you unlock another region with more galaxies and new skill sets to learn.
This is a very funny review for this particular game, courtesy of The Escapist.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/2768-Zero-Punctuation-Super-Mario-Galaxy
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Jan 13th, 2008 at 05:28:17 - Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) |
The game follows the standard plot for any Mario game to date (with the exception of games where you play as Peach and Bowser): Save the Princess and stop the over-sized, spiky, fire-breathing turtle. This time you're traveling from "galaxy" to "galaxy" looking for power stars. You play through different maps that have you jumping from planetoid to planetoid, squishing enemies, running from explosives, collecting stars, and generally making a nuisance of yourself to everyone on Bowser's side. And as always the overall objective is to rescue Princess Peach... but this time you get to do it from a Space station.
The story only seems to differ from the standard Mario setup by virtue of the levels consisting of many independent "planets" instead of the normative linear system of ground and pipes. Speaking of which: There is a surprising lack of pipes in this game compared to most other Mario games, where pipes play a heavy role in the various puzzles. To make up for this the designers introduced localized gravity, where each planetoid has a gravitational field that prevents you from randomly falling into the void.
This localized gravity feature makes the gameplay interesting and difficult at the same time. While the player has a greater freedom of mobility the control scheme randomly switching when Mario is upside down is difficult to adjust to and can be detrimental during a boss fight. The gravity also gives rise to new and strange modes of transportation, namely three different types of catapulting stars.
This system of Jumping from one planetoid to another arbitrarily starts as an inspiring sense exploration. This quickly degrades when the only reason to see these planetoids becomes finding your objective and none of the secondary planets last more than a single level. The fundamental flaw with the gravity system is that any sufficiently large planet only has a gravitational field over the top.
The characters include the three basic characters required for any Mario game (Mario, Bowser, & Peach), the toads of Mushroom Kingdom, and Luigi (just for the heck of it). Then the cast of new characters is introduced with the "cosmic guardian" Rosalina who looks like Peach got transfered to "Stardust" (title, not sarcastic or quote) and back, and her family of star children, several dozen of them.
The seemingly-random gravity and the sense of exploration make the game entertaining for several hours. The gameplay stays interesting because there are random occurrences (more specifically the feature called Prankster Comet) and the intermittent introduction of new skills that the player wouldn't have known about. The major downside is the completely arbitrary camera angles that don't lend themselves to the exploration theme.
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Trinity Dragon has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 10 days |
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