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Thursday 6 March, 2008
Gamelog Entry #2:
GAMEPLAY:
I must say that after playing it for a couple days (read as 15+ hours), I definitely have a much better grasp on the game than in the beginning. The fast paced zones that were just murderously hard in the beginning have become less difficult –still a challenge though– and I have even made several top score boards. I have figured out that I can spread out ‘fins’ and capture the blocks on all the tracks at the same time by holding down the left mouse button, and I have also figured out that in particularly difficult and/or cramped situations I have the ability to jump and thereby avoid blocks that I need to.
I still have not tried out all of the puzzles and mostly stick to Mono Pro (edit for my previous post: it was supposed to be Mono Pro not Ninja Mono).
DESIGN:
Naturally the levels of this game are very varied, since each level is based directly on a particular song; so unless you play the same song each level will be different. Meaning that if you have a lot of music you would, potentially, be able to play a different level each time by playing a different song from your collection. The game world, or each track in this case, is very colorful, most of the time having the color change depending on the intensity of the song that you are playing.
This game’s main challenges are sensorimotor (hand-to-eye coordination), spatial reasoning (seeing the blocks and knowing how to react to them based on your position), pattern recognition, (grabbing up blocks in such a way as to get the highest amount of points), and sequential reasoning (planning ahead to either grab certain blocks or not to). The last three you pretty much get dumped into one because you have to look ahead at which blocks are coming up, be able to decide if you can grab them, and also plan ahead to obtain the combo and/or bonuses you want.
As I said in my previous gamelog, this is an online game so there always exists a social challenge that is backed up by a performance conflict of wanting to score higher than your friends and every one else playing the game and/or your favorite song.
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