My Games Design

I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 because it's the first seriously long game in ages that I've been thoroughly engrossed in and wanted to play non-stop. Heavy Rain was probably the last title that had that effect on me, but it really didn't take too long to get through, and according to my save game files I've spent over 40 hours playing Mass Effect during the last three weeks... There's another post I'm thinking of writing about my gaming habits and how game-play fits into my life but first I want to reflect on why this game sucked me in as much as it did. I was interested in the first Mass Effect when it came out but I didn't have an Xbox 360, and my laptop wouldn't have been able to cope with it. I'd also heard a lot about it from my friend Paul, who went on to enthuse about the second installment. So when I heard it was coming out on PS3, I was already excited. An action-RPG set in the future where I get to command a space ship and my choices a...

It's time to talk about Spore . Designed by Will Wright (who gave us Sim City and The Sims ) and produced by Maxis there has been a lot of hype surrounding this game, partly because it took so long to develop. In Spore, the player gets to follow and make choices about the evolution of their species through a series of phases: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space. Now I got the game back when it was released in September and got through the first four stages relatively quickly, but then I hit Space. I'm not even sure you can compare the Space phase to the previous ones because it is ridiculously huge. In the earlier phases, it is fun to watch your creation evolve, but it also feels like there is a lot of repetition going on e.g. in terms of how you interact with other creatures, plus I don't get why things like the camera controls seem to differ at each stage. But anyway, once you get through all that and unify your civilization, you discover space travel and th...