A person who is seriously interested in games, game studies, and game design should play a lot of games.
To the right you will see the latest GameLog (diary)
entries I have recorded for the games I'm currently playing and my thought and feelings on the game, the experience of playing it, and so on.
If you want to see all the games I'm playing, or the ones
I'm no longer playing you can follow the "List of Games I'm Currently Playing" and the "
List of Games I've Finished Playing".
During the summer of 2003 I started a little project to keep track of the videogames I had been playing. I also wanted to keep track of my thoughts as I played them.
Thus, GameLog was born as a blogging tool for gamers. If you are interested you can hop on over and register. I personally enjoy reading about other people's thoughts
on the games they play and the more the merrier! www.gamelog.cl
This was sort of what I was expecting, but also not. I mean, I knew this wasn't farmville style farming, but I wasn't expecting as much technical detail as I found. Different machines, different phases, needing the right equipment, etc. It's pretty interesting and I was most surprised that you can (and probably should) hire people (NPCs) to do a lot of the "menial" labor - here mostly driving your machine down the field to either harvest, plow, etc. You kind of need to do this to save time, because with, say, three fields to work on you need to be moving from one to the next.
What I was most surprised by is that there's a whole town with locations you need to (slowly, AFAIK) travel between to deliver your crops (and buy stuff you need)! Driving my FIAT tractor at 25 mph down a lane, waiting for a train to pass, and trundling on, was not something I imagined would be important to this kind of game.
To be fair, there's a lot MORE to it that I have not experienced (livestock) and I stopped playing before delivering my first harvest - and I'll blame the tutorial here because it absolutely fell apart. I think I figured out a bunch of things, but this is definitely the sort of game you need to be reading guides/the manual/etc. in order to get the most of it?
I don't know why I had this one sitting on my shelf for so long...but, I guess it was a good a time as any to try it out.
So here you're actually a vampire - but no powers (yet?), other than that it's a regular 2D Castlevania with items, and equipment, also levelling up, and backtracking and so on. I only recently unlocked the double jump, which helps - but overall I'm not super enthused by the game. I feel like the character takes too long to change direction, and that I get hit a lot in ways I felt weren't easy/possible to avoid. I don't mean when it's a boss and you're just learning what it's attacks are.
According to the savefile I'm over 20% though, and I'm pretty tired of it already. I'm maybe 5 hours in or so? It's hard to tell because when you die...well, all that time prior doesn't count.
The powers are pretty strange - so, sometimes, when you kill an enemy you get like a "spirit orb" or something that you can then equip as a power. They're all different - I like the ones that summon a monster-pal the best, but overall the system seems under-utilized? Maybe I just haven't been lucky enough to get any of the really cool monsters?
Touch screen interaction seems minimal - occasionally you'll run into a sealed room that shows a design and sometimes, after beating the boss that's usually behind that room, you have to trace the design yourself.
I did think it was funny that two NPCs set up "shop" in one of the early areas - so you can teleport back to their location (from special teleport rooms) to basically buy supplies and things. I should stock up on lots of health potions, but I'm probably not going to continue to play the game, so not seeing much point. I think I got the gist of it.
From the back of the box this game looks like a "western realistic" Trauma Team game - use the touchscreen to do medical stuff like bandage a patient's arm or give them an injection. And it is...sort of? Weirdly every single "case" (mission) I played began with (and sometimes also ended with) a driving section - an ambulance of course. Here you have to dodge other vehicles and obstacles to avoid damage as you travel to a location where something happened or back to the hospital. Roads are full of other vehicles that have no qualms with suddenly changing lanes in front of you and such. You can collect "energy" (not what it's called in the game, but I don't remember the name in the game), and when you have enough you can turn on the siren - and this causes other vehicles to get out of the way (sometimes not fast enough). It's kind of a bizarre gameplay addition - and it doesn't help that the controls are kind of wonky and, from my experience, it really out stayed it's welcome even as the background locations you're driving through change.
I even unlocked a better ambulance (better driving stats)...and there's more to (eventually) choose from. I mean, the game's basic structure is pretty standard, there's cut-scenes with stories (everything so far seems to involve college kids of some sort). It makes me really wonder who the intended audience/age group for this game was. The name of the game would imply children (it's aspirational!) but the story seemed a bit more "grown up" - i.e. adolescent, but the gameplay was also quite simple..skewing younger again in my mind.
The more games of this kind I play (not top-tier first-party DS games), the more I wonder about the conditions in which they were made. Was this a game that was knocked out by a small studio in 6 months?
Decided to quit suddenly because I realized I was just starting to grind for achievements and not actually having fun or enjoying the game. Which, in the grand scheme of things sounds like a bad thing other than I think that I quit in time BEFORE I got super tired and bored. So, leaving on a (little past) the high of the fun experience.
I was grinding the Dream Doors - and apparently there's a nice monster at the end that can be a real challenge - but, I didn't have a sense of WHY I'd want to do that. Here I mean motivation within the game's story. I was hoping for a nice story payoff if anything? It seems like there isn't, it's just a grind for resources and stuff and so...time to bail!
I have been keeping track of this information for the past 22 year(s), 9 month(s) and 8 day(s).
