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Friday 8 February, 2008
Entry #2
Gameplay:
The second time around I realized that, for a Playstation game, Spyro 2 has a very fluid feel to it. The player can easily move his or her avatar from world to world. This brought about a major design flaw that I found to be very annoying throughout my gameplay experience. The camera is non-responsive. When I moved Spyro around, for the most part, the camera did a decent job of staying behind him. There were times when I was looking at Spyro’s face while moving forward, this made it nearly impossible to see where I was going, and where I needed to be. This can be especially bad in platform games because the player won’t be able to see the platform he/she needs to jump to.
I still had a lot of fun playing Spyro 2 for another forty-five minutes. As I progressed through the game, the levels began to get much harder which gave me more incentive to keep playing. The sense of challenge and the reward of talismans and orbs were primarily what kept me playing. The type of gameplay also developed very nicely. Some of the challenges involved solving puzzles by jumping on giant puzzle pieces in order to solve it. There was even a challenge where Spyro skated around on a frozen pond and shot a puck past a goalie using his mouth. The game’s ability to constantly change the type of play kept me engulfed as well as wanting more.
Design:
Spyro 2 has superb level design, probably the best of any game I can recall on the Playstation console. There is a very linear way to travel through each level, but in nearly every level there are “secret” areas with hidden gems and extra challenges. In addition to these “secret” areas, there are even more dynamics to each level. Sometimes there are places you can only reach until you learn a new maneuver later in the game. You must then come back to the level to explore the level further.
Often, the levels of Spyro 2 expand into the sky, which is a very cool idea. The player starts on the lowest level, and jumps platforms to get higher and higher into the sky. From these higher places the player can see the rest of the level and find different areas they had not seen before. Overall I found this game to be very inventive, fun and cute. This game, in my opinion, holds up to today’s standards. I plan on continuing to play through until the end.
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