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Feb 9th, 2008 at 01:09:22 - Warcraft III: Regin of Chaos (PC) |
GAMEPLAY
I loved playing this game, maybe even too much. I love how you can completely build your base and armies to do completely different things. Also this requires you to think strategically and not attack with all your forces and leave your base undefended (I promise never to do that again), and that using the abilities of a hero is a good thing (it got so much easier, Resurrection for the win).
Another thing is I love the storyline with Arthas (this guy is intense) and it really does make me want to play this more. What did somewhat annoy me was the fact that the levels are beginning to get harder, to the point where saving in the battle is a good thing to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong. Also the more I play this the original thrill I felt playing it is starting to disappear, but this game is definitely still interesting. I just find myself pausing midgame to go do other things, like check facebook.
DESIGN NOTES
There a couple of things in Warcraft 3 that I found to be really useful, and just cool, the heroes and autocasting. The heroes were just fun in general, having a single person who could unleash special abilities and level up from killing enemies was incredibly fun. Plus many of the heroes had auras that would improve the abilities of those friendly units around them, making heroes necessary in order to create a good army. Also because of the many varied abilities of each hero, leveling up the heroes increases the emergent aspects of this game.
This game is heavily emergent, I myself have played through the entire StarCraft series and Warcraft 3 is very similar to the type of gameplay. Using many simple units, spells, and buildings these games make battles something like a game of rock paper scissors. For each unit or building there is a unit that can beat it for equivalent cost. And because of this there are many strategies with almost infinite variants. Someone who only built air units may find themselves hopeless against an army of archers, just as an army of archers would find themselves hopeless against heavily armored melee units, who in turn can’t hit the air units and find themselves facing extinction. Rock paper scissors. It’s as simple as that in concept, but in actual play the possibilities expand endlessly.
A great design feature of this game was its great use of cinematics in between missions. These movie segments are gorgeous and further the storyline a great deal. I really must commend Blizzard on their incredible use of movie segments in their games. What interested me though was that even in missions themselves the game would have movie segments that were completely made through the use of the games graphics itself. This made telling storyline fairly easy to do even in the middle of a battle. Also this never happened often enough to get annoying.
Overall I really did like this game and would recommend it to anyone looking for an rts.
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Feb 8th, 2008 at 20:05:30 - Warcraft III: Regin of Chaos (PC) |
SUMMARY
In Warcraft 3 the player controls the Orcs, Humans, Undead, and Night Elves through their respective campaigns. This game is a real time strategy game which puts you in control of the army of the race and makes you carefully manage resources to build up a base and army in order to defeat your enemies.
GAMEPLAY
The first thing that hit me was the storyline events that happen the instant you start a new game. The opening cinematic for this game is incredible, it firmly sets the idea of the world that you are living in and sets up the prophet for the conflict that is to come. This is immediately followed by the tutorial in which Thrall, the Orc leader, decides to play along with the prophet and follow him. The tutorial is well structured and does pass on the characteristics of the game very well. By the end of it I could use the heroes abilities easily and command the armies without too much trouble. This game was fun to play as well, the storyline actually continued to progress even in the game itself.
Another thing I liked about this game immediately was how you could build bases to support your army. With all of these options I am guessing that this game will be heavily emergent, and very fun because of it. I found that I actually started to care about what was going to happen next so it was difficult for me to stop playing to even write this (I plan on going back to playing as soon as I finish this post), which means that this game is doing something right. That’s the end of my first review, I’ll get back for the second part.
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Jan 26th, 2008 at 03:41:31 - Chrono Trigger (SNES) |
GAMEPLAY
And now we get to the second gameplay session. Well as I embark on another quest to save the princess (every game has one or doesn’t it seem like it) I discovered I kind of like the battle system that is implemented for Chrono Trigger. Instead of having random battles the enemies are always on the map itself so you can see them before you get into the battle. It proved to be much less annoying then those Final Fantasy games. Anyway it proved to be very satisfying to see the monsters fall to the low bit count attacks.
Another thing I found to be entertaining were the character interactions that go on. The princess, Marle, and Chrono, the main character, get into somewhat awkward situations while the scientist friend Lucca also has her moments when she interrupts the other two in the awkward situation. I must say I really do love the character development that is going on at this point. And I will probably keep playing to see the storyline as it unfolds.
DESIGN NOTES
I loved the way that the multiple timezones have overworlds that do really look like one is the past of the other. It creates a sense that the player is in a huge world that is farther than the ends of the Earth so to speak. Throughout the separate timezones many of the major cities and towns are mirrored albeit in a smaller scale, showing how the expansion of civilization happened over the years. Other then the fact that there are multiple gameworlds, each gameworld in itself is really not that impressive, they are typical for the games on the Super Nintendo.
The battle system is one that takes a little getting used to, it is based on the typical Final Fantasy 1 battle system, where each party member has the action bar fill up so when it is full they can take an action. Chrono Trigger does this and also incorporates area effects and line effects that can hit multiple enemies depending on how your characters are positioned and where the enemies are located. Because of this area effects sometimes it’s better to wait for the enemies to position themselves for a huge attack instead of just moving as soon as you can. And because of this, battles forced people to think hard about what they were trying instead of just attempting to pound the enemies as soon as they could.
Also unlike many rpgs, many of the decisions you make in the game do influence what end result you will get. This fact was found out after several failures on a boss to discover that a decision earlier would get me a better item to fight him with. And because of this the gamer inside me wants to try every possible combination of decisions to try and find out what happens in each different case. I would say this definitely raises replay value (and probably annoyance value).
Chrono Trigger is an rpg that I am definitely going to take the time to beat. I really like this old game.
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Jan 26th, 2008 at 03:04:31 - Chrono Trigger (SNES) |
SUMMARY
Chrono Trigger is a Super Nintendo game that is a rpg. Chrono Trigger is faintly reminiscent of the earlier Final Fantasy games for the actual gameplay, but the battle system was revamped and made timing as well as positioning very important to actually winning battles. Chrono Trigger is also an rpg where time traveling is allowed and lets you do some somewhat interesting stuff to the world map by traveling through time to the same spot in different times.
GAMEPLAY
What I found to be really entertaining early on was the sheer amount of minigames that were available at near the beginning of the game. Partially because of those minigames, I spent most of the first hour playing doing nearly nothing that was plot related. Some of the minigames that were available also had the tendency to be ridiculously hard, just to the point where it drives players nuts knowing that they can beat it, but also hard enough that it takes quite a bit of effort in order to achieve that goal.
But the minigames weren’t everything, and soon after I had gotten enough of the points to buy that costly sword I started to move around try and forward the plot. I found the rather cliché mad scientist and daughter who had built a complicated and doomed to failure machine. In this case it was a teleport device that would move the person from one side to the other. However when your friend decides to try it her pendent reacts with the machine and rips a hole in time, which you must then go through in order to save her.
Despite all of this being somewhat old for storyline sake the next part is what caught my attention. What had just happened is that I found myself in an entirely new area, but it started to look startling familiar until it was revealed that I was actually 400 years in the past. At this point I realized that I had been playing a very long time and decided that eating was a good option.
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Vayu has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 8 days |
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