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Mar 6th, 2008 at 01:20:13 - Gunroar (PC) |
GAMEPLAY:
The second time around, I tried out Normal mode a bit (Twin Stick and Double Play modes would have been awkward with just the keyboard). I found Normal mode a lot more difficult because you have to be facing in the direction you shoot, and if you want to turn, you have to stop shooting for a little while. Also, my keyboard control is still kind of shaky.
After that I went back to Mouse mode. I had several games that were about par for the course, but on the last game I played before writing this, I did much better. I had realised that since shooting in Mouse mode is easy, the important part where most of my attention needs to be is controlling the boat. With that in mind, I got past the first boss without losing a life, and breezed through waves of enemies before my game finally ended a little after the second boss (which I hadn't previously beaten).
That last game, I definitely experienced flow. I think this had to do with the fast, but not uniform, pace - there are often small breathers in between groups of enemies, and easy groups mixed in with the hard ones. Another thing is that the controls are pretty intuitive. Also, as I previously mentioned, as one keeps playing, the game gradually gets harder. Some aspects also seem to be randomized, so that while there isn't a lot of intellectual work involved, it never gets completely mindless. Rather, in order to play well, you really need to focus. So far no two games have been the same.
I had a blast playing this game, though it was very intense and I was often unable to play more than two or three games in a row. After that last game, I was shaking, so I just sat back and watched the replay.
DESIGN:
Rather than making the game set in stone, the designer allowed many things to change from game to game, including the difficulty - gradually one starts to see new kinds of missiles with different movement patterns, as well as bigger or more ships that weren't there the first time through. This has the effect of making the game very replayable, and of preventing players from memorizing how to get through a given section of the gameworld.
Another thing is the movement. Rather than scrolling continuously, the screen scrolls as the player move forward/up (but not back/down). The player can move in two dimensions within the boundaries of the screen as well, and the ship turns as they do so. If the player does no move up the screen, the enemies begin to descend to meet them, and it's also possible for the small enemy ships to push the player around. The movement confines the player to the intended goals of the game.
The graphics on this game are also very interesting. They look very flat at first glance - overlapping green or blue squares for land and sea, solid-colored ships and missiles with outlines around them - but there's some use of perspective, so that some structures look different depending on their position relative to the camera.
About the only thing I would change about the game would be to increase the contrast - it's sometimes a little hard to tell what's going on. I might also recolor the player's ship - it's only a little bigger and a little differently colored than some of the enemy missiles, so sometimes I find myself getting distracted and getting in trouble.
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Mar 5th, 2008 at 22:18:18 - Gunroar (PC) |
SUMMARY:
Gunroar is a vertically scrolling 2D shooter in the style of a space shooter, but the player controls a boat. There are four modes - Normal, in which the player controls one boat with the keyboard or a joystick, Mouse, in which the player uses the mouse and the keyboard, Double Play, in which the player has two boats, and Twin Stick, in which the player uses two joysticks or the keyboard to control the boat and turret separately. There is no real story - just shoot anything that moves. The game tracks the highest score for each mode and records a replay of the last game played.
GAMEPLAY:
I stuck to Mouse mode for this first session. At first I found the controls a little confusing. Though the readme informed me that in Mouse mode, the mouse controls the gun turret while the keyboard controls the ship, I kept expecting the ship to follow the mouse, so I died pretty quickly at first.
Once I got a hang of the controls and started to be able to made sense of the mess of bullets and ships on the screen, I really started to enjoy myself. The music is energetic, and speeds up as the action does, slowing down or stopping when no enemies are present. The graphics are simple, but kind of cool-looking in a stylized way. Collision detection seems pretty forgiving, or else I'm sure I would have died much more frequently than I did.
There seems to be a certain amount of depth to the game - I started to see different types of missiles appear after I'd played several times and was starting to get higher scores. In general it's not too hard to get some ways in, especially using the mouse, because that makes shooting easy. You have the choice of using either a narrow or broad spread of missiles, and there are bits of land that stop them (as well as stopping the ship). But of course the land stops enemy missiles as well.
The one time it did get really hard was a while after the first boss, in an area where there were suddenly quite a few enemies. Most of them were the smallest, easiest to destroy type, but not all.
Another thing I liked, and I think this is a pretty common feature of the genre though I have little experience with it, was that it moved pretty quickly. I could play for a few minutes, feel like I'd gotten somewhere, and then I'd die and I could go off and do something else if I wanted - not that I always wanted.
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Feb 21st, 2008 at 01:07:07 - Super Mario 64 (N64) |
GAMEPLAY:
This time I tried several of the stages again. I had a bit more success this time, finding another couple of stars, but still failed many times (enough to have to go back to the start screen more than once), which was frustrating. I began to feel that I wasn't getting good enough fast enough. Part of the problem was that I went into the game not so much wanting to win or relax or have fun, but play for a set amount of time. Also I think that the atmosphere (the game lab at the library) contributed to this mindset, which is very different from the one in which I approached Super Mario Bros. Deluxe back in the day. However, I experienced that same frustration back then, which is what kept me from ever beating the game.
Several times I raced down another sort of slide against a penguin. I would catch up quickly, but lose control and plummet over the side. After a while I changed my goal to just reaching the bottom intact, but wasn't able to accomplish it.
DESIGN:
One of the most interesting aspects of the design, to me, was the way in which the game funnels the player down a specific path to the goal. In spite of the apparently fairly open 3D environment, there seem to be one or two ways to reach each goal. The game does this by limiting Mario's movement options - he can run or walk on flat surfaces or slight slopes, slide down steep slopes, jump a limited height, swim (but only hold his breath a limited time), and fall. Then there are obstacles that Mario cannot surmount, and thus must work around. In one level, for instance, the player has to get Mario to a floating island. There are a couple of cannons on the level, and by getting into one of them, I was able to shoot Mario to the island.
In this way, the player's options are not really very much greater than they were in the earlier 2D games, though they seem to be. The danger, of course, is making it difficult to tell what is a useable route and which was is the destination. The levels are relatively small, which limits this problem.
It was also possible to play the game in a variety of orders and replay stages multiple times. Some doors were locked, but beyond that, no set story order was established.
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Feb 20th, 2008 at 18:49:51 - Super Mario 64 (N64) |
SUMMARY:
Super Mario 64 is an early 3D platformer for the Nintendo 64, the first 3D installment in the Mario series. It was groudbreaking in that it showed what a good 3D platformer could do more than any previous game.
GAMEPLAY:
Having never played Super Mario 64 before, I spent the first few minutes figuring out the controls. Then I explored the castle a bit and got a bit lost. I ran into a lot of walls and railings. The first few stages I tried I screwed up pretty badly, repeatedly falling down the same pit and such. I began to get really frustrated - the basic controls seem a lot harder than the main other game I'd played from the series, Super Mario Brothers Deluxe for the Gameboy Color. The main issue of course was the 3D, which makes it a lot harder to tell where one will land, though fortunately the collision detection is pretty forgiving (you don't have to land perfectly on a mushroom to smoosh it).
After that I played through a section in which you slide down a big ramp, collecting coins, until you get to the star at the bottom. I enjoyed that so much I played it twice. I have to say that sliding is one of my favorite things about this game in general.
Later, I tried a stage where I mostly got lost and couldn't figure out where to go, though it was nicer to not die as much. Eventually I did get through, finding the star, but it was not entirely obvious to me what I was supposed to do - another change partly thanks to the 3D.
In the room with me were some quiet people (at first) then some people loudly playing a multiplayer game, which contributed to my annoyance.
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BadWolf has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 10 days |
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