week six, gameplay

Gameplay, simply put it can be decribed as your expeirience of the game, but it seams that over the years from the days of sonic the hedgehog, and even older games such as pac man, and asteroids, to todays standards of gears of war, and call of duty, the gameplay has, and hasn't changed that much at all.

what im trying to say is that if you take away the fancy graphics and inovative controll systems and such, resistance fall of man for the ps3 can be seen as just a hyperextended version of pacman, by this i mean your chasing something around trying to kill it, and collecting items along the way, as in cherries for pacman, and healt and guns in fall of man.




but while i can say that alot has changed in the way the games are played, as i remember in pacman, you could memerise a route that if you followed it perfectly you'd dodge the path that the ghosts took everysingle time and eat them all, while now in next generation games, a certain level of ai is involved, and rather than just pressing up down left or right thers alot more control and interaction with the game, you can get more imersed into the game becouse you have what seems to be full control (even though you dont) in a lavish almost photo realistic looking environment.
and while the principles of it might be the same as pacman, you won't get a kid pretending to be a pacman going around eating pacdots, and biting things, but you will get them pretending to shoot gung, and kill aliens, and play army and such, which to a certain extent gives these kids what they want, guns, not pacdots.

also it takes alot more to make games now days, design wise, i personally, and a child of 7, could model a pacman level in 2 seconds flat, noway days, its a one man job to make something so simple, but on new next generation games, more than one man might be needed to make one building, or character for a game, ther is now alot more man hours goin into games than ther ever has been.



so in a sense, the main aspects of gaming are practically the same as some of the first games, but at the same time the level of detail, interaction, and quility of gamepley are far higher nowadays.

although just recently, which i think might be because it takes so much time and hard work to make these games, is that games seem quite short, i just got call of duty 4, and the single player campaign can be completed in under a day.
while older games i played such as final fantasy 7, or the metal gear series there was weeks worth of gaming in there. so even though games nowdays can have gameplay far exceeding older games theres a lot of time a hard work involved in making it this good.

week five; games journalism

this weeks blogging task has us reviewing some game reviews and journalism, and write back about it, after reading most of the links provided i found that some writing about games can be really in depth and longwinded, but interesting non-the less.
one thing we've been asked too look at is NGJ, which is new games journalism, which started in 2004 by journalist Kieron Gillen, and is a form of new journalism, implied into video game journalism. this type of review includes personal anecdotes, referenced to other media and creative analysis to explore games, rather than the older style which iv'e seen alot of where a reviewer lists the so called pro's and cons of a game, and then gives them a score? like 5 out of 5, or 95%? but what i don't get is that if a game scores 100% which some do, they should be the perfect game if this system works, but i know of games that have been given 100% that i hate, but shouldn't a so called perfect game appeal to just about everyone?.


how i see it the numbers don't mean anything, its how the reviewer puts it across to the gamer that the game is worth buying, and i think with the added personal level of ngj people are more than likely to buy games that they like, rather than just buying a game with a good number, and hate it.



also from this reading i have found out that game reviewers are actually under alot of preassure to get these reviews out on time, whereas i thought it was just people sitting playing games all day in there underwear and then write a little bit, it turns out they are really pushed, because new games, such as rpgs and such, have literally hundreds of hours of gameplay that could add to a review, and the reviewers don't have that time.



a case of this arose in 2006 where a reviewer majorly underplayed a game, the game was the ps3 title enchanted arms, i have this game and i know that 3 hours into the game i was nower into it, and this is apparently as far as the reviewer got into it, before publishing his review.



i think i where to be the game reviewer (and if i had enough time to get a decent play in) id try the ngj aproach to writing, because so far i have found these reviews far more helpful in buying games than other reviews.



one reviewer who i beleive is ngj, is ben Yahtzee, who doues the zero puntuation reviews on the escapist magazine website.

although sometimes i disagree with whats said, every point made is true, and all the bad, and good points are made, in a way that isnt listing them but connecting with the reader through jokes and humour.