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Feb 20th, 2008 at 03:53:13 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
SUMMARY
Shadow of the Colossus requires the player to locate and destroy a series of enormous creatures, the eponymous Colossi. In order to do so, the player must climb over their bodies, seeking "vital points," which may be stabbed in order to damage a Colossus. Climbing is limited by a timer, presented as a shrinking red circle in the lower right corner of the screen, which is replenished whenever the player is standing, rather than holding on or falling.
GAMEPLAY
Having defeated the first three colossi in a little more than an hour, my impression thus far is that Shadow of the Colossus is fundamentally about navigation. You ride your horse to the general vicinity of your designated target. Upon arrival, players are either presented with a brief climbing section (which separates them from their horse) before reaching the Colossus, or the Colossus simply strides onto the scene.
Once the Colossus is present, defeating is is once again a challenge of navigation. Thus far Colossi have provided feeble opposition to navigation - they occasionally shake themselves, which can throw the player off platforms or stop their movement while climbing. However, so far I've found that holding R1 while standing on Colossi platforms, which both crouches, thereby improving stability, and grabs the nearest handhold in the event that players are nevertheless thrown off their footing, is sufficient to all but guarantee that once you're on a Colossus, you won't fall off. The one true obstacle is finding a way to climb on - the second Colossi, for example, must be shot in the bottom of one of it's feet to be boarded, which is best achieved when it rises to attack.
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Feb 9th, 2008 at 01:55:54 - Raidem (PC) |
GAMEPLAY
Made a concerted effort to clear level one, best I ever got was close enough that the screen would scroll to where the boss starts after I died (when you die, the screen keeps going for about one full screen length before stopping). Didn't really learn anything fundamentally new.
DESIGN
Raid'em is designed to kill the player. Although the game is not made such that it is impossible to achieve victory, there is nothing in the game's design that guides you to that end. The documentation contains this illuminating passage:
DIFFICULTY
Difficulty has been implemented due to popular complaints. Don't
blame me if your experience is dimished because you chose to play
on the easiest difficulty.
It might help to know that only a 8x7 pixel box around the centre
of your ship is collidable, not the entire sprite.
The eye-candy level doesn't need to be so high you know.
An analogue joystick is strongly recommended.
As my Gradius III gamelog can attest, a shmup doesn't need to throw dozens of enemies into the first wave in order to bloody a new player's nose. Despite the subtle reduction in difficulty that follows from replacing extra lives with extra hitpoints (power-ups are not reset) the fact that most normal enemies also have extra hit points means that the high population of foes is only slightly diminished by the player's efforts, even once two or three power ups have been obtained. It's scarcely worth the effort of shooting at flying enemies, who generally fly off the screen only shortly after they would otherwise have died. The overall result is a shmup that takes weight off both ends of the draconian reward/punishment balance of the genre, while simultaneously tilting that balance even further towards punishment.
There may be a niche market of hardcore SHMUP fans who are only interested in the most rigorous content the field has to offer, but unless Richard Stallman is one of them this doesn't necessarily equate into an audience for Raidem - such fans are almost certainly more than willing to pay for non-free SHMUPS which offer similar, if not more severe, challenges with sharper presentation and player avatars that faithfully represent the underlying game.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 9th, 2008 at 01:56:43.
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Feb 7th, 2008 at 21:19:00 - Raidem (PC) |
SUMMARY
Raid'em is a vertical scrolling shmup by David and Peter Wang, released under the free zlib library. The currently available version, 0.3.1, contains three of the four planned levels. Unlike most scrolling shmups, in which a single hit costs the player one of their limited number of lives, Raid'em gives the player 10 hit points and a single life.
GAMEPLAY
From the fact that Raid'em uses enough hit points to give the player 10 effective lives, as compared to the typical 3 lives (or 9 with 3 continues of 3 lives each) one might suppose that Raid'em is easier than a typical entry in the genre. This supposition is very wrong: Raid'em's designers seem to have taken the hit-point system as a cue to fill every stage with a truly staggering number of enemies, nearly all of which take two to three hits to kill. Even the presence of a hit-point power-up (grants 4hp), or the fact that players aren't reset to base weapons whenever they take a hit, doesn't make up for the sheer quantity of enemies and their attacks. As a result, I was unable to make much progress in any of the available levels - even Gradius 3 wasn't so frustrating.
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Feb 7th, 2008 at 19:50:35 - Raidem (PC) |
First Session: Liveblog
4:31 - start game
4:38 - One life, 10 hit points before game over. I've had several game-overs already.
4:45 - There's an "eye-candy" slider in the graphics options. Pushing it all the way up causes dying enemies to fill the screen with scrap, obscuring other enemies and their attacks. No thanks.
4:53 - Give up on normal difficulty
4:56 - "easy" doesn't seem to be any easier than normal. On the other hand, there's a brief period from after you run out of health where you can still fire and move (can't hold still, though) and you can still pick up health. You get a little message after you finally die if you do that.
5:00 - The game lets you pick any of the three stages from the very beginning. Decide to see level two for a change.
5:05 - The space stage is actually more reasonable than desert. Mostly because the health power up appears sooner and more often, and your first attack power up is a secondary attack, which comes third in desert (health is fourth)
5:11 - Time to move on. Stage 3 is arctic.
5:14 - Arctic is harder than desert.
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ajrich has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 11 days |
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