Week 7 - READING WEEK!

So I have no game design blog for this week since its reading week, haven’t been doing any homework since I completed it prior. Instead of giving a board game write up, I’m simply going to review a couple of games that I’ve been playing over the break. First would be Twisted Metal and second would be Final Fantasy XIII-2. Two very different games, since most of my friends are on vacation I can’t really do much else :P.

I’ll start with Final Fantasy. The original Final Fantasy XIII took a huge hit in terms of reviews and critiques, because it was a game that people felt like the typical RPG aspects. A lot of long-time fans of the series believed the original game to be much too linear. Many claimed that it was like they were watching a movie while mashing the X button on their controller (from a PS3 perspective) to battle. The game was missing classic features such as towns, mini-games, and super fun and challenging side quests. The story was also very confusing for most people, unlike the previous Final Fantasy games, the story took a very long time for people to understand, and this made it difficult to recommend the game to someone who’s new to the series. One situation I ran into during the summer was lending that game to a friend who had received surgery. I figured this person would want to play something movie-like in order to kill time and get through a simple story. This was a huge fail however. I however really enjoyed the game and played it to the max by completing it 100%.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 however, made a huge improvement in my opinion. I actually did not get bored at all playing this game and I believe it was everything that Final Fantasy XIII should have been. There were more than enough town-like scenarios, A LOT of side quests, optional bosses, and hidden monsters, weapons that you would have to grind opponents for and a more complex levelling system. One cool thing they added to this game was the fact that you could capture monsters that you fought and get them to fight alongside you (POKEMON!) you could even level them up and combine their abilities with others. The game has already released a couple of downloadable contents. The first one being a boss battle between the original games main protagonist, Lightning. This character was used throughout the games entire marketing lifespan, but was not even playable in the game. This was the one thing that I did miss about this game, the fact that I could not play as some of my favorite characters from the original.  

I’m currently still working towards 100% completion of this game. The game has stunning visuals as always. It still played like a movie, but it added a feature during battle cut scenes where you would have to press buttons during the scene to complete it. Conversations with certain people also gave me the option to select different things to say, a standard feature in even the most simple RPGs. Overall I am really enjoying this game, although I completed the main storyline, I’m still working on it. Both games did have a phenomenal soundtrack as usual. Final Fantasy as a series has some of the best music in any video game or movie.

Twisted Metal was a very popular game back on the original Playstation. I was introduced to this game series by a neighbour who got me hooked on it. It’s simply a game where you drive around in different vehicles and kill others with various types of weapons. When I was a kid, I found the game really cool because of all the different characters and maps that they had. There were four instalments in the series originally.

There was another title on the Playstation 2 called Twisted Metal Black, I never actually played this one, but I heard it was really good…PLUS it’s included as a free download in the new one.

The main mascot for this game is a deranged psychotic Ice Cream truck driver called Sweet Tooth. It is somewhat shocking that I enjoy this game because I am TERRIFIED of clowns. As a child I never really thought much of the games story, but this new 2012 reincarnation of the game actually kinda scares the hell outta me. The game goes through the story of three main characters: Sweet Tooth, Mr. Grimm and Dollface which are all familiar Twisted Metal characters. The gameplay is based off the same format as the older ones, with new features of course.

My favourite thing about this game is that it has a cooperative story mode. This alone provides a huge challenge if played on the harder difficulties. I did in fact finish the game with a friend, and the story was also really cool. It was done in a very dark setting and did not hold back with the gruesome details. The cinematic were done using real actors and costumes. A lot of visual effects were added in to give it more of a fictional setting but it was well done. The language and the voice overs did not hold back on the cursing.

Some of the cool things about this game would be the weapons, primarily the special weapons of the characters. One car uses a flamethrower, another uses a machine gun. One of the vehicles known as Axel simply consists of a driver made of two wheels like the picture. This character’s special ability was pretty cool because he could combine to make one big wheel and spikes would appear. This way, whenever the player rammed into another player they would do serious damage to them. The game also has a helicopter vehicle that is pretty cool, I like using it in the story mode to help my partner out from above. This is somewhat cheap though :P. 

The soundtrack for this game was actually really good, it brought back some of the old classic songs from the original Twisted Metal games such as Dragula by Rob Zombie. As well as adding some new Rock, Heavy Metal and even Hardcore Rap songs into the mix. The game also allows you to add your own music off the Playstation into the game. 

Here’s a trailer for both games:

Week 6 - Romeo & Juliet

So it’s been some time since I’ve updated with some new information, mainly due to the fact that we were on reading week for the semester. There were no lectures for that week but we still had a polished board game to make. We were assigned to create a board game of any style based on a Shakespeare play. For once I actually really liked the assignment because I actually really enjoy most of the Shakespeare plays. King Lyre and the Tempest were some of my favourite ones, of course I was forced to read them in high school but I did really enjoy them. 

Anyways… the play that we chose to recreate was Romeo and Juliet. This was mainly chosen by my group member Yang and me. I was unable to attend our usual Thursday work sessions so I decided I would try and help out before. I met up with Yang at his house to try and think of the main concept for our game. We decided on the main objective of our game based off one of the play’s major events, Romeo trying to reach Juliet. This was done in a simple board game style where each player would take on the role of Romeo, and try and reach the end of the board… Yes, a race to the end game. It’s not as easy as it seems though because we added guards to our board, which were pretty much non player entities that were controlled by cards. Each player would roll dice to move across the board, and after all the player’s turns are done, a voluntary player would draw a card from a deck. These cards would outline what position the guards would move to or how many spaces they would move. The guards would be determined by different coloured pieces. A card drawn might say “Red Guard move 5 spaces to the left” and any player caught in between that would have to face off with a voluntary player in a game of dice. The higher roll would win. If the player rolled higher than the guard, they would be ok, if they rolled lower; they would have to go to the dungeon spot near the beginning and will be at a huge disadvantage. 

I don’t really have any pictures of the board right now, but I may upload it later..

Christian Perera

100343813

Week 5 - Paperboy & Liar's Dice

This week we were instructed to recreate an Atari game as a board game as part of our homework assignment. As expected the majority of the class recreated the popular game Frogger in various ways which seemed quite interesting. Within the large list of popular Atari games, these names would include, Space Invaders, Frogger, Dig Dug and much more. 

Our group decided to choose the infamous PAPERBOY! Ever played it? It’s a classic… recreating it wasn’t the easiest thing to do but together as a group we actually got some ideas down and came up with something. Now Paperboy was a simple concept, you pretty much just had to deliver papers to different houses in a route, and you would have a specific list of houses that you were supposed to deliver for extra points. 

Here’s a video link of the original game:

 

Pretty simple, so basically we turned it into a board game that kinda borrowed traits from Monopoly. The board was arranged like the following: 

(Game Board Created By: Shing Lee)

The players will move across the board by rolling dice, this would allow them to move across the board and stop at houses to deliver papers. Each player would start off with a certain amount of paper and they would gradually decrease as they delivered papers. The question mark spots on the board would prompt the player to pick up a card which would be a specific event. Now the original Paperboy would have things like cars and obstacles that would hit the player or challenge them in some way. The player can receive more paper by passing the Paper factory in the corner (similar to Monopoly’s Passing GO system) Players would receive points by delivering papers obviously. Each player would have a customer list with specific housing addresses to hit for bonus points. Once the customer list was completed, the player would receive additional bonus points. Basically the player who would have the most points at a certain time, or reach a certain number of points would win. Depending on how the players would like to play. Pretty cool huh? Definitely something people would probably play on a 90s rainy day.

The second part of our assignment was to play Liar's Dice. Ever heard of it? You might remember it from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. A personal favorite of mine. If you did see the movie, this game is the one that is played aboard the Flying Dutchman by the crew members. It is later played and explained somewhat when Will Turner challenges Davy Jones and bets an eternity of service aboard the ship. This was done in order for him to find the key that opened the Dead Man's Chest. Basically the game plays by each player having a cup with 5 dice. They would be rolled, and each player would look at their own dice and make a bet saying how many of a certain die face value there was... this was across all players, so if I had three 5's, I would bet with a minimum of three 5's, I could however bluff and say I had more, but then someone could call me a liar if they don't believe. If I am proven to be a liar, then I would lose one of my dies. Pretty complex game, makes for a good gambler... though I'm not too sure if most people have that many dice. Heres a video from Pirates of the Caribbean:

Our job for this assignment was to add/remove/manipulate rules of the game in order to remove a positive feedback loop. We established that this loop was found when the bidders would keep increasing the bids and repeating the cycle. My rule was actually quite useless to removing this loop, but it did bring upon a cool concept. I proposed that we make the game more like Poker with a cup and dice set in the middle of the playing area, that players would also be able to add in with their bets. They weren't able to look at the middle set until after all the bids were made, this way every player could lose to the "dealer"....the problem is, nobody was controlling that dealer spot, therefore where would all the bets go? Maybe if it was implemented in a Casino or something, with an actual personnel controlling it, it would make more sense. But it would kinda be like adding a new player. Either way, this was one homework assignment that I actually did somewhat enjoy.... obtaining 20 dice was a problem though.. hopefully we don't have to do this again... That's it for this week.

Christian Perera

100343813