Tuesday 15 January, 2008

GAMEPLAY:
After the initial action-packed sequence, the game slows down a bit with puzzles. The puzzles really don't add much in my opinion as to solve them you just go anywhere you currently can which will probably lead you to unlock the next place to go and so on until the all the switches have been activated to open the big door. It's really not much of a puzzle and just makes you spend time running back and forth.
The areas now seem to hold a lot of little secret prizes here and there which I found fun and rewarded you for looking around thoroughly. There are also many things you can scan such as special objects and creatures. From my experience with Metroid Prime 1, I think you are rewarded with unlockable extras for the more things you scan. This gives you another reason to search every area you go through.
As I mentioned before, you aim with the wiimote, you also look around by moving the aimer to the side of the screen in any direction. I found this to be a little annoying as I would try to aim at something near the side of the screen. Looking around in this way is not as fast and easy as with an analog stick either. Though it is fun to aim with the wiimote, it is not as effective as analog sticks.

DESIGN:
Metroid Prime 3 does a good job of immersing you in the game. Visually, it looks great, and the thing that really pulled me in was the attention to little things like the way the visor fogs up when you go through steam and how you can sometimes see the reflection of Samus's face on the inside of the visor. The environment also sets the mood well. The spaceship rooms look high-tech and sophisticated and the ancient ruins are crumbly and overgrown. The cutscenes work well in progressing the story and showing you what to do. They are evenly spaced and not too long.
The game keeps you interested thoughout by giving you more than just your mission to do. While your trying to get the the next area, there are secrets to find and things to scan. This always gives you something to do as you go. Some of the secrets you find tell a parts of a story about how the civilization you are exploring fell. The more pieces of the story you find, the more you want to keep going to find the next. The game also keeps you motivated by occationally upgrading your armor with new guns and gadgets.
The game is pretty easy as you have many bars of life and the enemies deal little damage. On the first boss I missed hardly any of its attacks but still won with plenty of life to spare. The enemies are sufficiently difficult, they don't just stand still and they have good aim, but it doesn't matter because you can get hit by all of they and still win. This, to me, is too easy. I would rather die and be forced to get better then have such little challenge. I am playing on normal and there is a harder difficulty available, so perhaps I will switch to that. I haven't gotten very far either so it may get harder as well.

This is pretty much what we're looking for. In the future, adding two line breaks between paragraphs would make it a little easier to read. Oh, and don't worry, it will get much harder... or at least more frustrating.

- 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.