|
Thursday 21 February, 2008
Gameplay 2: In my second hour of play I found myself much much more frustrated with this game. The music was so fun and silly sounding, it started to drive me crazy (yet the marble penguin made such cute sounds!) It made me realize more that when designing a game one must put in varying music, lest the player want to chuck the console out the window. There are a lot of songs on marble mania, however, when on random, I seem to have gotten a lot of the same songs repeating, thus causing my distress. But on an exciting note, I got 15 green bonus crystals and unlocked 5 secret Kororinpa levels! most thrilling.
Also, I do not have much experience on the Wii, so playing with the remote control in the way this game requires was difficult. There is lost of wrist contorting (thus the challenge) but it really impaired my gameplay and caused a lot of frustration.
Design: On the note of frustration: I found that this game was designed so amazingly, yet so frustratingly challenging. It is not a game that a typical "video game person" would be good at. Nor would it be good for someone who was particularly good at sports (like some sports games are for knowledge sake; except maybe someone who played tennis with exception wrist strength). Point being, it is a very unique game that is so addicting, yet so maddening, it is difficult to play.
I have gotten to level 31 and have found each and every set of levels (in 3s or 4s) to be unique and inspiring. From artistic design perspective, this game has so much to look at. Each level has intense ammounts of color and extreme details in the background as well as on the puzzles themselves. All the backgrounds light up and move in some way, some even have things walking across the surfaces. The puzzles each have details as well. The "toy" level is mostly made of wooden things, and the wood looks so real! The skyscrapers are made of roadways and have little yellow divider lines going down the centers of the roads. No detail goes overlooked, and even when you turn the puzzle upside down and view the sky, the sky has little realistic details (as does the underside of the puzzle). As someone who is interested in the art perspective of video game design, this game is extremely appealing because it has so much to explore in one level, let alone 50. However, the bonus levels, though cute, (and i only have 5 so far) were not nearly as complex as the regular levels, which was sad, however, they had such an intense amount of crystals (70 in one level!) it was so much fun, and extremely visually appealing.
It is most amazing how the game is set up. It is 3D, which in itself is cool because then it has to apply all sorts of pysics to make it actual work with gravity. Like I said in my gameplay, I found that I could make my own path of play in which I tip the puzzle and make my marble land in a spot on the path below, skipping ahead to a later place. I found this especially helpful once you fall of as a way of moving the level along more quickly. Though that was one complaint I had on some of the more difficult levels. The checkpoint spaces did not come soon enough (if at all) on some of the really hard levels, proving the game much more difficult to play on that level. I would have designed it in a way that there were more checkpoints in the longer levels and at least one on the difficult levels.
Note to player: If you get frustrated by the game, just walk away! If you keep playing, you will find your time just gets worse and worse. This game is best played when stress free!
|
