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Feb 8th, 2008 at 16:04:01 - Team Fortress 2 (PC) |
SUMMARY:
In Team Fortress 2, you can choose between one of nine different classes to play as in an attempt to kill the members of the opposite team while keeping the members of your team (most importantly yourself) alive, while attempting to accomplish some small task at the same time. Each of the nine classes has only a few possible actions, or as whitehead would say, verbs. At any time in the game, however, players are allowed to switch classes from the one they were currently playing to any of the others bar none, but in doing so they lose whatever they may have worked to accomplish while alive, such as their physical position (they must run back to the location they were at previously, from the closest safe zone).
Even though the majority of the game is focused and balanced around a player's ability to kill the other player, the way for one team to actually beat the other team in a level is centered around the small tasks that players are attempting to carry out during the relatively short period of time that they manage to stay alive. Some of these goals, like capture the flag, can be carried out simultaneously by both teams without them ever being encumbered by the other team until the game is over, allowing a pacifist version of the gameplay to degrade into a game of footrace. Others, like king of the hill, are designed to force players to fight each other over specific areas of contestion -- both teams cannot be winning at the same time, either one is winning and the other is losing, or they are both losing.
GAMEPLAY:
The graphics were fun and interesting, but this gamelog is not supposed to focus on that, so I will ignore it from this point on. When I first got into the game, I did not have fun at all. The classes that I chose and their nuances did not matter at all to me, no matter what class I chose I pretty much got blown away. It did not matter what kind of weapons I had and what kind of unique attacks I was able to use if I did not know what exactly these separate attacks could do for me. This game really could have benefited from a tutorial mode to slowly introduce me to the moves of each of the classes and showed me specific situations where I would want to use them. Instead, I was forced to teach myself in between periods of being blown up, which did not make my teammates happy with me.
Even though the game was incredibly un-fun at first, I had heard far too many positive reviews to give up at the game. Having played various first person shooters repeatedly before, I could tell that the game had great potential, and I just had to get used to the players and classes before I would be able to enjoy it. In the end, I ran around as both a medic and a heavy. As a medic, I would simply follow other players around healing them, watching what they did in certain situations, where they went on different maps, and attempting to learn everything I could about how I was supposed to react on different maps and as different classes. As a heavy, I simply ran around trying to kill as many people as I could. The heavy class gave me the benefit of a profound amount of health and armor, so that I could run around without as great a fear of being killed instantly, giving me more time to learn before being destroyed.
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Jan 25th, 2008 at 04:29:59 - mario 64 (N64) |
GAMEPLAY:
As the game progressed, I gained the ability to attach a pair of wings onto my hat, allowing me to fly. The flying control scheme was a bit awkward and I found it very hard to master. I ended up just trying to avoid using it as much as possible. In fact, in one of the levels I found that I preferred loading myself into a cannon, shooting myself off into the air towards my target, and running back to the cannon if I missed much more than trying to grab my target by flying to it. Besides that incident, though, the gameplay stayed very much the same throughout the game. Of course, there was that one awkward water level that every game designer seems to HAVE to add, that no gamer seems to actually enjoy, but besides that the game stayed the same old Mario that I had come to enjoy for my first writing. As previously predicted the only bar that I ran up against was that set by my own skill level as the levels progressed, rather than that of Mario's. This is a gamestyle I greatly enjoy, which many other games, such as RPGs, simply cannot have. I am a great fan of a player's individual skill being directly translated into the character's abilities in the game, and Mario was able to do that for me.
Oh, I almost forgot... Mario's attack command. Basically, after I finished exploring the controls, I promptly forgot about it. The range on Mario's attack was far too ridiculously short to do anybody any good -- if I was THAT close to an enemy, I was more likely to run or jump away from him so that i could re-approach him, rather than get knocked over. His punch did no more damage than just jumping on somebody, and jumping on their heads or just flat out avoiding them seemed so much more natural anyway.
DESIGN:
I touched on the controls a lot in my previous update, so I won't mention it much here, but I have to say again that Mario was designed EXCELLENTLY, and controlling him really was a pleasure. Flying through the sky and swimming around in the water was a bit awkward, but thankfully I didn't have to spend much time doing that. As for as the story goes, I believe that the story in Mario 64 was pretty thin, but because all the worlds that you visit are intended to be painting worlds not related to the main story, and you spend most of the game inside of the painting world, it makes the game seem like the plot was fleshed out perfectly, even though it doesn't hold up to inspection.
The concept of painting-worlds was also a great way to introduce vastly different zones and situations without having the player question the situation he or she is thrown into. I can understand why the developers might have added the permeabile, metal, and flying mario powerups, to help keep the game fresh as it progresses, but I can't help but question if flying mario didn't just detract from that amazing feeling of control the player usually has with Mario. These powerups were not even really implemented in more than a few places, and based on how little the appear and how difficult it is to play with metal Mario, I can't help but feel that the developers decided to throw these in at the last minute, and did not devote to these powerups the same amount of time that they did to the bulk of the game.
It just goes to show you, even if you find a new and interesting idea you can throw in with a game to help keep the game from getting too monotonous, if it ends up just feeling awkward or if you are unable to devote enough time to its implementation, it's probably best just left out. Sure, the game may be a bit bland without it, but really by leaving it in you don't achieve your goal of making the game funner anyway, you just end up detracting from it. Besides, if the only complaint that your players can come up with is that the game was too long, you could be doing a lot worse.
Having said all that, though, the game's flaws are very overlookable. I would recommend Mario to anybody who has never played it, regardless of how old the game is.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 25th, 2008 at 04:35:32.
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Jan 25th, 2008 at 03:52:37 - mario 64 (N64) |
SUMMARY:
You play as Mario, who gets a note from his girlfriend requesting his presence at her amazingly huge castle, where she happens to have paintings with a liquid-like permeable surface, which allow you to jump through the painting into a world loosely based off the painting that you jumped into. Peach is captured however, and you must enter her castle and explore the worlds within the paintings in an attempt to recover the 'power stars' scattered throughout the painting worlds, Once you get more power stars, you gain the ability to enter more complex and dangerous... erm.. paintings.
GAMEPLAY:
Mario 64 is a simple platformer. Your only abilities consist of crouching, running, punching, and jumping, but you can combine almost each and every one of these abilities to execute even more powerful abilities. Jump on most enemies to severely damage them, crouch while in midair to fly towards the ground and pound anything below you, crouch while running and then jump to execute a 'long jump' and fly great distances. The game is very responsive, due to this ability to combine moves and Mario's incredible responsiveness, you can tell that any failure you may have is purely your own fault, and you have only yourself to blame. Because of this, whenever you often feel more encouraged to try again, as you know that the obstacle you encountered can be passable with practice, and that the reason you failed previously was not simply because of some arbitrary game rule or unresponsive control scheme. It makes it a joy to play. This is one of those games that withstands the test of time.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 25th, 2008 at 03:53:39.
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Jan 12th, 2008 at 17:35:00 - Shenmue (DC) |
GAMEPLAY:
The second half of the game was more of the same. When I finally found something remotely fun to do, at the arcade, it turned 11:00 and I was teleported back home, so I had to run all the way back to the spot I was at previously. The areas opened up a bit more so a bit of the claustrophobic feeling went away, but the game got even duller. The game went from being incredibly linear, to far too expansive. I found myself wandering around the same town over and over, looking for some random person to talk to that gave me some clue about the next area. I also found often that, once I finally got to the place that I needed to go to, I had to wait 7-20 minutes for some stupid shop to open up, so that I could talk to people. The character control was poor, every time I tried to turn around I found myself bumping into things and fighting myself just to turn a corner. The funnest part about the game was playing tho arcade game 'Space Harrier', but if you really want to play that it would probably be easier to just get out and GET space harrier.
DESIGN:
One thing I noticed about the game is that it seems like the designers put way too much detail into a few minutia in the game -- phone calls, arcade games, soda machines, miniature toy vending machines, and so on. The problem is, it feels like they didn't spend any time at all making the game actually... fun. The game did have its funny moments, but most of the jokes come at the expense of the main character. Watching Ryu kneel in front of a machine blowing all his money on miniature toys, declaring how much he loves them and how he feels like he should buy more, as well as forcing him to call directory assistance to make him flounder because he has no idea why he called can be extremely funny for a short period, but after a while it just gets stale.
There was no complexity to this game, and no challenge, outside of finding the people that you need to talk to. You only fight once, and you beat that by pressing 'A', then 'X', then 'Y', and then it's back to finding people to talk to. Basically, this game fails almost every test of being a 'game', based on our lecture last Friday. In the future, I would only play this game if I were being paid.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 14th, 2008 at 15:33:44.
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gfuller23 has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 12 days |
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