Sunday 13 January, 2008

Entry #2

GAMEPLAY:
After taking a day long break and coming back to play this game again I feel its not the easiest thing to pick up an play again. In any given level its not to clear where you are suppose to be going, so if you don’t remember what you were doing and which direction you were progressing in the last time you played the game (like I me) you spend a little while wondering around trying to figure out where to go next. But once things get rolling along it’s a nice experience once again.

Having spent more time with the game, I can safely say that the combat is starting to wear on me. Not to the point where I want to quite playing the game, but it definitely feels like a chore more than an enjoyable experience. It is what I will call “skilled” button mashing (meaning it requires some timing and skill to avoid death), but it is still button mashing nonetheless and it begins to wear out its welcome rather quickly. Repetitiveness aside, it does still look pretty cool but I can’t imagine that carrying the combat for the rest of the game.

The story in the game is nothing particularly special either. It does provide you and your character with your motivation from hacking down all these enemies and solving all these puzzles, but its not very engrossing. I can also appreciate the fact that the game wants to be cinematic, but the constant barrage of cut-scenes after every little thing (after every battle you are greeted with an unskipable cut scene of you holstering you weapons for example) actually breaks up my gameplay experience instead of enhancing it. There are occasions where they do actually enhance the experience however. The main one being the short cut-scene following every save point that shows you what you will be doing in the “future”. These scenes keep with the games theme of time and give you nice little hints about what you should be doing in any particular level with an annoying HUD display or pop up message that would ruin the atmosphere.

DESIGN:
SoT is actually an odd mix of very good design choice and some that makes me ask “what were they thinking”. Thankfully, there are more of that former than the latter.

The level design with respect to platforming is superb. All the levels I have played have had a natural progression in regards to where I should be jumping/climbing/running to next. Each level is also very well “timed”, that is you characters ability to run on walls runs out at just the right moment that you need to jump off a wall onto a near by platform for example. Everything flows very nicely in each level.

The same cannot be said for the actual navigation and progression (i.e., “where do I go/what do I do next?”). Once the platforming is done and you have to get to the next area, the way is not very well indicated. Unlike when platforming, the level design doesn’t do a very good job of seamlessly “telling” me where I should be going to next through the layout of the level (as you find games with excellent level design). I often found myself stuck because I was not clear that I had to push a bookcase out of the way to access a door way or I would miss a switch to open a door because it was not clearly marked. No visual or audio clues were given so I simply had to wonder around until a tip popped up telling me what to do when I finally got close enough to an object (as is the case with the bookcase) or I died and was respawned at the location of a key item or switch. Maybe to help get around the limitation there is a cool little design concept that shows you your “future” (which is basically a little tutorial that shows you how you are suppose to get things done), but you are only shown key actions and often those are just how you should navigate the platforming which doesn’t need to be explained as it is very well designed.

As mentioned above, the game is very cinematic and cut-scenes do add to the game’s atmosphere and presentation. But the fact that they happen so frequent and in some cases seem out of place is more of a hindrance then a plus to gameplay (see above for more of my feelings about that). I don’t know if so many were included because of technical limitations (that is it is nice to see a cut-scene than a load screen) or because they wanted your character to look like a bad ass and the game to feel like a movie, but either way they are for the most part a major minus.

Some of the nicer, little design touches include getting hints from in game characters rather than from pop up text boxes (like during a puzzle a NPC would basically yell that you were doing it wrong or to “Think about what you are going” if you were going about collecting a series of pillars in the wrong order for example), the ability to regain health by drinking water from fountains or lakes (rather than just collecting hearts or turkeys or magic red orbs), and the use of the rewind time feature to give you character extra lives without having to have a little icon of your head with a “times n-number of lives” next to it (like on a Mario game for example).

note: HUGE SUCCESS. This is exactly what we're looking for. My only concern is that I missed the ending, as it just sorta drops off mid-sentence. I wanna know how it ends!

- Ian Rickard, your TA

(the following is included on all my first-round gradings, and should not be taken as any commentary on your writing.)

If you're interested, I'm happy to provide additional nit-picks of your writing. However as this course is not considered writing intensive, lapses in spelling and grammer of the type I would critique will not have any affect on your grade and so you really needn't worry about them. If you're interested in this type of feedback, email me at inio@soe and I'll provide it privately.

fixed the ending...tho it was just a few words and it kind of confusing anyways.