My Games Design

It's been longer than I thought since I last wrote but since then I bought myself a PS3 and have been playing lots of games :-) One of which is Heavy Rain. I really enjoyed this game. Actually, enjoyed might be the wrong word, as I'm not sure I've played anything that's made me feel the way Heavy Rain has, especially in terms of experiencing guilt. I should probably post the obligatory SPOILER ALERT here as I will be discussing what happened when I played the game, though I won't reveal the identity of the Origami Killer. I don't want to spend half this post telling you about the game itself though, as this is less of a review and more a way to document my own response to it. For those who know little about the game though and don't plan on playing it go here for a synopsis. So first off, it's probably worth knowing that I didn't play the game on my own. My friend Paul came round and we took turns playing (on three seperate session). I'm not su...

First off, I need to say thanks to my mate Paul for sharing his PS3 with me over the last couple of weeks - I promise I will get one myself but it's going to have to wait till after Christmas... So first, we played Trine (from Finnish developers Frozenbyte and you can also get it on PC ) And it was good. A physics based action/platformer/puzzle game? That you can play with up to two other players?! Awesome!!! It looked pretty too (see video above). I have to admit not really caring about the storyline so much, but I did love the gameplay. Especially when we had to stop and think about what we needed to do next. I seemed to gravitate towards the thief most - I liked the fact she used arrows (so I didn't have to get too close to enemies) and I guess I just like jumping! I kind of left the wizardy stuff to the more experienced player as he seemed to have a good handle on when to do what but we would sometimes switch depending on what was going on. All in all, Trine did a brillian...

I had a couple of friends come round last weekend so we could have a go on a some games I'd been wanting to try out. The first one was World of Goo , which I already knew I was going to love as I'd already played the PC demo. At first we were looking for some sort of multi-player mode, but then realised that all you had to do was point another wiimote at the screen to join in the puzzle solving. World of Goo is seriously easy to pick up, and we enjoyed it pretty much from the start. It follows the usual approach of starting you off with relatively easy tasks which get grow more and more difficult the further you progress - achieving a nice balance between your developing skills and the challenges you have to face. I also really like how you gradually start to become more and more curious about the goo and what exactly is going on in the game world . Who is the mysterious Sign Painter who leaves cryptic clues around the place? What are goo balls used for? What's with the r...

I finally finished Portal . It's a first person action/puzzle game, where an AI called GLaDOS challenges you to get through each of the test chambers through the use of a portal gun (which allows you to create a connection between two different locations in 3D space). Oh, and you are promised cake when you complete all the trials. I borrowed it ages ago from the library, and meant to complete a lot sooner but kept getting annoyed with certain puzzles and taking weeks off before trying them again. Now I’m well aware that a lot of people out there thought Portal was a piece of cake (pardon the pun…) and it only took them a day or something to get through the game. If anything, that’s an important part of why I just didn't give up on it entirely after the first time I got stuck – I wasn’t going to let this “easy” game beat me. But you see the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t solve the puzzles, it was that I had trouble putting my solutions in practice. I’ve never really played first...