Thursday 6 March, 2008

Gamelog Entry #2

GAMEPLAY:

During my second hour of gameplay, I began my quest to travel across the galaxy. By then the controls had become a bit more familiar than they we’re before, and I began to understand the concepts of the game a lot better. In the beginning I kept dying because I was not paying any attention to my life bar, so I was never aware of the times when I was close to death. Because of that, I was dying a lot, and the fact that I had to go through the “game over” phase and all of the loading screens was frustrating me a lot. But with practice comes perfect, and even though I’m not close to perfect, the game has become more familiar to me, and therefore my gameplay is more effective.

Most of the time spent in my second hour playing this game was spent watching cutscenes. Some of these were so long that there were moments in which I felt like I was watching a movie. But all of these scenes are very helpful in the development of the story; and the fact that I’m almost playing out a movie is very interesting even though it seems like sometimes you can’t really do any playing. Perhaps it is because it is only the beginning of the game because as I continued playing it appeared to become more open to actual gameplay.

DESIGN:

There are many aspects to this game that I haven’t seen on other games that I have played before. For starters, the fact that you can gain allies along your quest is pretty much new to me. But one thing I discovered as I played it for the second time was that these allies not only helped you defeat enemies, but they can also be selected as your avatar when the avatar you were using dies in combat. This was very interesting to me because I’ve never played a game of this type.

On the level design part of the game, the fields are pretty linear and straight to the point. Even though the worlds seem to be wide open, there is only one way in which the player can go at a time. The game follows a step-by-step process that the player needs to follow in order to advance in the game.

The way in which different levels are shown is by having them take place in different planets. For each planet that is visited, there is a goal that needs to be reached, and a boss that needs to be beat. Also, the enemies on each planet are completely different in design, and they need to be defeated in different ways. The constant instruction window which appears every time something new comes at you is very helpful. With it you learn new aspects of the game at the time that you’re going to need them, and they seem to be very effective the way they are shown.

The first entry does a bit too much "First I did this, then I did that, and then I did that, etc." and not enough observations. The second entry is much better, and is more in-depth.


- David Seagal (Grader)