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I thought that the way that this essay was structured was really strange. She goes on about the Spectacle for a page and a half and then suddenly transforms it into an essay about education. I like the point that she’s making, but it seemed a little odd to suddenly throw in a piece about education half way in. It was almost like two entirely different papers slapped into one. You don’t really need to introduce something for that long, especially in such a short piece.

I felt like she mostly just rambled on about some points in a very vague way without really describing what she means. I would have liked to have read a little more because I’m not sure what I got out of this. I don’t mean to say that it’s pointless, but I feel like I’ve read the same things elsewhere by people who supported their argument more.

I think that her point about educational software being built upon a representation of education was an astute observation though. People seem to generally think that “learning” means “being bored,” and that you’re supposed to hate learning. I’ve been in atmospheres where learning is fun, and I’ve also been in atmospheres where it isn’t, and the latter seems to get more play than the former. It’s like people think that you’re not learning if you’re having fun. I don’t know why learning has to be this insufferable process that the older generation wants to subcribe children to.

I think that educational games are an attempt at making learning fun, but they often fail. Most kids probably think to themselves, “Well, I have to learn during school, why do I have to learn in my free time?” And in a way they have every right to feel that way. But I think what they don’t realize and what this author doesn’t realize (or doesn’t necessarily agree with) is that kids can learn from games that aren’t officially considered to be in the “educational/family fun” genre. If games can teach us to keep giving in to the Spectacle, then why can’t they teach us, in a general sense, at the same time as well?

It’s great to sit there and write that we should be questioning authority and constructing information instead of receiving it, but at some point, don’t you just have to give in? I know this sounds defeatist and I know that conformity is awful, and all that other stuff they teach you in art school, but eventually you need to grow up and accept the fact that the world is a hierarchy and that we are part of that hierarchy whether or not we want to be.

Kotaku recently posted an article about two rival Counterstrike teams LANing if off, and all the while there were strippers in the room that the promoter hired to distract both of the teams.

On first seeing this, I thought it was pretty funny. Some of the faces on those guys are priceless. I really don’t think that it affected them though. They probably cared more about their game than they did about the women around them.

Maybe it’s just me, because I’m not a guy, but I didn’t find the strippers to be that attractive. Some of them had nice bodies, but they were all generally ugly. Adding a female gamer to each group would have probably stirred things up more than this. It wouldn’t have been as funny, but I think that would have been interesting too. What if there were girl gamers on their teams? Would the promoter still have tossed in some strippers to upset the applecart?

I just noticed in the second photo though that there was a girl in the background, so I guess I just answered my own question. I wonder if she was a girlfriend or a teammate.

I really wish that this article was more extensive. I like Kotaku and I think that they write interesting posts, but sometimes I think they’re just lazy and don’t want to write an actual story. It would have been nice to have more info about this event instead of asking myself a bunch of questions and trying to figure it out.

In case anybody cares, foRze beat Virtus.Pro.

I think the actual guys started commenting on the article too, which is what really struck me as funny.

Brenda Laurel is a very clever person. I admier her writing style and her points about her main ideas are as captivating. Now, she has that narcisistic tendancy to claim everyone is a part of the machine as opposed to raging against it, but if we were all PhD’s the world would be a very fucked up place. Otherwise, she makes some points i really agree with.

Not really the mentioning of so much as the choices of words, but she discusses the prescence of advertisement briefly and how it hounds us at every turn in our media world. I can totally relate to this because i often do feel invaded and sickened by advertisement – sometimes watching TV is an exhausting experience for me because io simply hate being asked to buy things, and i even moreso hate it when ads try to assume thigns of me as a rationale for why i should buy their product. Arguably, the only thing worse than advertising is cocky advertising, and once you start to notice cocky advertising, good luck ever being comofortable with it again – it just nags at you whenever you notice it. It makes you want to rage against the aforementioned machine.

Her point about games enticing us to maintain rather than rise against is very interesting. We, as a gaming culture (<– this is like the part of the movie where they say the movie’s title in the movie) often praise the ability of our games to make us think in certain ways or consider the effects of certain things while simultaneously failing to notice that their ability to encapsulate, when unleashed upon our ability to consider, totally sedates us. She is proposing something almost similar to the part of Fallout 3 where you discover your father trapped inside of a simulation and you must find a way out by starting the Chinese invasion (this allusion is both relevant and mind blowing, contextually. also it’s pretty funny.). While I don’t believe any sort of a movement is anywhere near happening, she gives us food for thought when we as a nation may need to consider a people’s revolt.

The final thing i wanted to comment on was her mentioning of how education fails in both the physical and game world. I touched on this exact point from the other side in the mosrt recent essay i did for my Media Theory & Design 2 class about the dub movement and the remix. The dub movement can basically be attributed to the remix and the remix can looserly be attributed to the entire media state of youth culture today. Larry Lessig argues remix exists all over social networking and the internet as a whole, and insists that this remix environment is nothing less than a complete literacy for our generation. It has become and educational fundamental that envelopes the scientifically proven effective methods of learning, that being active participation mixed with individual interpretation. We accept soem things, and undertsand them enough to present our own reowrking of them to an audience later. In doing this, we learn the technologies of remix as well as the semiotics of our medium and the content of our project at hand. There is undoubtedly no better model for learning than this. If we could impliment a system of creative understanding into our educational system, we would surely escape the spectacle abnd flourish as a society.

Ok I’m totally bored with Shift, I admit it. This game is so flawed and inherently boring that i can’t bring myself to play it. I’m about to buy Borderlands, I’d really like to switch to that because it seems like it has alot more replay value. The cars are hard to drive, you can’t win any of the fucking car competition races, the statistically worse car is never the car i choose and i ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS get passed and left not moments behind, but like, in the dust -  and im tired of being slowed down around corners. This game is way too damn frustrating for me to play and I can play it for the remainder of the semester if i absolutely have to, but I’d really prefer to play something with alot more substance and has actually functioning fantastic gameplay. I apologize for the shrot game entry, I’m absolutely swamped with homework and i feel like just admitting this game is nothing special at all is probably for the best.

I like to start or at some point add to my blog entries something self-reflective for the sake of, i guess, self improvement. Also, i believe in this day and age knowledge is most valuable when it passes peer to peer, so here’s some information you can assume is authentic.Outright, I should have chosen a blog other than IGN to cover foremost, because pretty much all of their writers are getting on my nerves. I trust IGN for the most part because they are arguably the most informative gaming blog, and they’re descriptive about topics which are worth the effort of going into detail over. For as much as they inform, they also whine. Every last writer who’s articles that I’ve covered complains about (what I’d like to refer to as) the dumbest shit during their reviews/previews. In this article, Charles Oynett starts worrying Bioshock may be more about combat than exploration -  I’m going to refute that claim using examples from his own text.

He mentions that you play as a Big Daddy, Have New weapons, and the upgrading system is different in addition to being able to wield both plasmids and weapons simultaneously. Based on this, he argues Bioshock may be more bout combat now than exploration. First of all, Bioshock is a shooter before it’s anything else, and i say this because the game it plays most like is a shooter. This is an admitted stretch, but Bioshock is sort of like Halo Combat Evolved except underwater with a different aesthetic – It has RPG and adventure elements, but nearly every shooter in thisd day and age does. Ignoring that, Oynett is still wrong. The upgrade system has been noticably simplified, by which i mean weapons only have three upgrades, the third being available only after using the first two. You’re a Big Daddy, so you can’t even use half the weapons of the last game, and finally, he mentions numerous times that there is stil writing all over the walls and parts of the city actually collapse and immerse you underwater. Yea, wait, that actually sounds like a badass adventure game with a simplified weapons system (that means you won’t have to focus on wepaons as much) – so we as the BIoshock audience have been given less to worry about weapon wise and a city that is still inherently Rapture. Anyways, the article was informative otherwise. The following is my beef with the large change in Bioshock…

…hacking. Hacking is no long the pipe switching mini game – let me make sure you heard that; that fun ass crazy addictive pipe switching game, which could be sold as a standalone app for the iPhone because of how fun it is, has been removed from the game. Now you do the Blue Dragon style moving-cursor-in-the-hot-zones live game where you press the A buton when the cursor is in a good spot. Oh and gameplay doesn’t stop when you do this, so your dealing with enemy fire while your hacking that i imagine you cannot respond to until your finished hacking. Game Companies, can game please remain with their original developers? So this type of dumb shit doesn’t happen anymore? No, probably not…anyway…My point is, for the sake of honesty, based entirely in opinion. I know anything that pauses live gameplay for another gameplay function that takes up real time is inherently flawed, but the mechanics of hacking were so fun that i actually developed an OCD hack thing where everything hackable i had to hack before i left an area, similar to how i had to entirely dismember, by stomping, every single enemy in Dead Space (no bullshit,  develope eccentricities in certain games).

All the other enemy and story additions sound fantastic, and I’m especially stoked about the Rail Gun and the Spear Gun especially. Those fun little audio logs are still around, and if you weren’t taking at least a little bit of time in each are to hear the audio logs, you missed out on alot of the game and you should make a note to hear as many as possible on your next play through.For my final point, im going to start in all caps in hopes that more people notice this as a result.

THIS MAY OR MAY NOT BE AMAZINGLY IMPORTANT. There is an edited preview video embedded in this blog, and near the end is something i found very interesting. Excuse me while i load up the video… … … … …ok, at 3:47, start paying very close attention, and watch this video in HD if you can help it (watchg the entire video because its pretty cool, but here especially). AT 3:51, PAUSE THE VIDEO. Look at the dead body floating in the water, and look under the dangling arm, hit play. That looked like some movement in the distance, right? and you’ll notice where the movement happened is a totally acessable area. Watch it again, and you’ll notice that’s clearly a huge fucking shark swimming WITH YOU UNDERWATER INSIDE RAPTURE.  Now, I’m not saying that you fiught sharks underwater in this game, but this is where I’m going to end this blog, savor that as food for thought.

Sharks? @ 3:52?

Willie Rivers

10/12/2009

Game Culture

Earthbound is a role playing game on the Super Nintendo about a boy named Ness, who is chosen by a being from the future Buzz Buzz. Ness is on a quest to gather sounds from eight sanctuaries in order to kill a monster from the future named Giygas. Ness can not do it alone because he needs three friends to help him on his journey. His friends are Paula, who is really good at PSI, which means magic, Jeff, a student who is likes to build weapons to destroy his enemies and Poo, who is a master of martial arts. They are chosen to help Ness accomplish his goal.

In Earthbound the player’s goal is to find eight sanctuaries around the globe but this is not an easy task because in each sanctuary there is guardian. The player has to defeat each guardian in order to record the sound afterwards.  The sanctuary bosses have different themes and backgrounds in fights. The background in the sanctuary boss is a black and purple color. Behind the sanctuary boss is a purple spider-web that sometimes has servants fighting along side them. Each normal battle will have a different tune depending on the enemy you are facing. Every battle has a different battle screen because it makes each battle unique. For example if I was fighting an enemy in a desert, the background color would be brown behind the enemy. The background might also have decorative or doing different things with brown in the background.

In role-playing games the player is forced by the developers to explore different areas. Earthbound is no different from any role-playing game in that regard since it also forces the player to move place to place. Most places or towns that you go to would present certain problems and the player has to solve the problem within that place. This game sometimes makes the player confused. The player does not know which town they have to go next and what task do they have to do. The game gives out hints to help the player, but sometimes it is not a good hint and the player have to pay the character a lot of money who is giving out hints.  

One of the reasons why Earthbound is a great game is because the game makes the player laugh. The player learns that Earthbound makes fun of traditional role-playing games. The player knows this by looking at the character names. Some of the dialogue is funny because some characters say phrases that do not make any sense. The player also knows that some of enemies are designed in funny manner. The designers intentionally create weird and awkward moments to entertain the player. The designers did not want to create a serious traditional role-playing game that can bore a player. The developers want the player to realize that this game is different from traditional role-playing games.

 The game forces the player to level up and learn more abilities to defeat stronger enemies and bosses. The reason being is that this game is a turn-based role-playing game. The player is supposed to have some certain strategy in battle that is determined by the main enemy or boss. In order to know what strategy the player is supposed to know their own strengths and weaknesses and their enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. To know the enemy weakness, the player has to use the character named Jeff. Jeff has an ability to analyze the enemy’s strength and weakness. After Jeff’s analysis, the player should know what certain techniques are going to defeat an enemy.

Each character has their own unique abilities and skills and the player needs to know how they utilized in battle. The player needs to know what item and weapons are compatible with the character Ness is the main character in the game and he has all around stats. Ness has high hp, which means health, considered to the other characters. Ness preferred weapon of choice is bats and yo-yos. Paula is the best PSI user in the group but she suffers from low health, attack, and defense. She has to the best defensive equipment out of all the party members. Her preferred weapon of choice is frying pans. Jeff is a character who only uses physical attacks. Jeff can also make inventions like rockets and bombs which does a lot of damage to the enemy. But Jeff doesn’t have any PSI so he can’t use magic. Poo is the player last party member; he supports the party by healing them with magic spells. Poo does not wear any equipment so there is no need to buy him anything.

Earthbound has a couple of problems within the game. One of the problems is that this game does not have a lot of character development. Players are more connected with the characters in a role-playing game than any other genre because of its in-depth character development. But in Earthbound, the main character is a silent protagonist so he cannot talk and the other characters in the party rarely speak. So you cannot connect with the characters inside this game. One thing that is unique about this game is that the player doesn’t have to grind for money. The player has to call the main character’s dad for some cash and save the player’s progress. This also is bad news to the player because the only way to save is calling the main character’s father in a facility like a bakery or a hotel. So the player cannot save inside a cave or a forest.

            Earthbound is great game that is overlooked in gaming and should be recognized as one of the best role-playing games in all time. Earthbound is different from most role-playing games because the game relies mostly on humor to interest the player and the game itself mocks traditional role-playing games.  I haven’t finished this game yet but so far the game is so much fun.

Dead Space is a game with a rich enveloping atmosphere that dives the player deep into its world. The player character interaction and the character character interaction is very fluid and throughout the whole game the connection to the dark and threatening horror/zombie film feel is never lost.
In Dead Space the player takes the place of Isaac Clarke a member of a small repair crew who were on a rescue/repair mission in search of the USG Ishimmura. From the window on the ship they are arriving in you can see the Ishimura and it is a massive ship and the sight is impressive. The ships design is very similar to the design of the Marines space ship in the movie Aliens, this is most likely due to the fact that the game is modeled after a horror film/ scifi movie and Aliens is already both. After hailing the ship with no response they start to dock with disastrous results. After a crash landing they make their way to the security check point where an alarm goes off and the lights cut, at this point a necromorph (a monster made from the dead body of a person) shows up and the player has to escape from it. From this point on Isac’s progress is moved along by his two surviving cremates who give him direction. Various things break that need fixing in order to get home alive and Isaac being the engineer has to do all of it while Kendra the technologist directs you from the computer core and Zach the crew leader directs you from the bridge. Eventually Zach dies and the source of the necromorphs is revealed to be a  mysterious marker th was removed from the planet during mining, it is much like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey. After this Isaac takes the marker back to the planet’s surface in order to put it back and stop the necromorphs. It is then revealed that Kendra is a spy and plans to take the marker for her own, however she is killed shortly after trying to escape with it and a final battle with the giant over mind that controls the necromorphs ensues. After defeating it and placing the marker back where it was Isaac leaves the planet and during the final cut scene he sees his beloved whom he was receiving direction from when on the surface and in a video he watches her die but just then he turns around and is attacked by a necromorph  version of her.
When we think player interactivity the players HUD and other concerning data are often high points of interest, the  health and ammo system along with the HUD operate in real time and try to be as unintrusive as possible. The players health displayed as a bar with sections running along Isaac’s spine; The ammo for a weapon shows above the weapon when you aim with it and the ammo for his stasis pack is on his back in the form of a circle that becomes less complete as the ammo depletes. Lastly the player HUD is shown as a screen that floats in front of Isaac. The HUD’s position stays the same no matter where you rotate the camera, so if you are on the side of him then the HUD will look as if you are looking at a computer screen from the side because it comes up as a floating computer screen with the scan lines going across it and a slight translucency. The HUD reacts in real time during play not on a paused screen so if the player is being attacked and needs something that is in one of the HUD’s menus then they have to do so while that attack continues. This style of HUD is in keeping with the theme in the game, it is a nice compliment of new spacey technology with a very utilitarian design.This theme continues with the weapons in the game like the plasma cutter, a dangerous weapon that is really just a tool.
The character to character interaction in the game is also within this theme, it is almost exclusively done from communicators that they all have which cause a pop up window like the HUD to appear when someone is talking to Isaac, their voices have a the slight echo and scratchiness that radios have to them to help emphasize the fact that they are far away and also it gives you the feeling that at any moment they might just stop working. Along with the character to character interactive there are many notes, videos and audio recordings that help give depth to the game. These files can be brought up from the HUD and viewed the same that character to character interaction is handled.
The environment in Dead Space is very detailed. The visual and audio quality of the game great and so is the level design. The walkways have the girder-like appearance that the walkways in Aliens and the music is erie and ambient with a hint of death. Some walls have some random characters on them that can be deciphered later on if you get the right chart which is just on the wall about 3/4 of the way through the game, the writing is very angular which gives it a very dangerous appearance and much of it is written in blood or has blood smeared on it making it appear even more threatening. The game also has some interactive environments like zero gravity areas and places that are along the hull of the ship where there is no atmosphere. A case of this is the part of the game where Isaac has to fight a plant monster in a giant air vent and the player can run around the entire inside while always being right side up because of magnetic boots and the fact that there is no gravity in there. When in zero gravity areas he can leap through the 0 gravity air to any point. At many times in the game Isaac must exit areas that have air and repair places where he is exposed to the vacuum of space. His suit has limited amounts of oxygen in it and at times you must refill it from refiling stations while still out in the vacuum. The interesting thing about these moments is that almost nothing has much sound, the developers took the effect that the vacuum of space has on sound into consideration and so sounds are muffled dull and deep just as it would be in a vacuum-less space.
The interactive atmosphere and the consistancy of the themeing help bring the player experience to a new level. The depth that which the developers went to to keep the player immersed in the Dead Space world really paid off.

History of Dynasty Warriors 6 (Empires)

Dynasty Warriors is a hack and slash game created by Omega Force and published by Koei. There are exactly 6 Dynasty Warriors installments out today and more are being released. The sequels of these games are well known to most gamers, throughout the US and overseas. My purpose for choosing Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires is simple. I just didn’t find it too interesting, just more repetitious if anything. It had it some great qualities, such as graphics and customization, but I just could not get into it as much as I would have wanted too.

Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires was released this year of May and is played on Playstation and Xbox 360. This series is much alike DW6 but with a level-up system for weapons has been implemented and requires players to have their weapons adjusted at a blacksmith. Besides adding more attacks, players can also adjust what skills and abilities a weapon can have based on what items the player has collected from battle. The Renbu gauge is no longer an element that requires the player to build up as they play. Rather, their Renbu level is now determined by the rank of their character’s weapons. Strategies are implemented in battle by holding L2 and pressing the color buttons on the right of the controller.

This installment of the game adds a few new alternatives allowing players to serve as a vassal to another lord, or play as a solo-officer of no party, as well as giving the usual choice of being a ruler. As usual, the goal of a leader is to conquer China, while the goal of an officer is to support your leader until he/she unites china. The goal of a solo-officer is find a worthy lord to serve, thus changing your character into an officer. While serving under a lord, the player is given orders to participate in battles, serve as messengers and can disagree with their leader’s decisions and offer alternatives instead. Officers, as well as those that choose to serve no party, can accept freelance missions from independent parties, during which they can form alliances with officers you perform service for. During battle, players have the option of betraying their liege and fight against their former sovereign to gain control of the land, or defecting to another force.

My Game Play

My first time encountering this game was exciting. The graphics were breath taking and the characters as well as the look of the game were very well defined. . What I liked the most was the customization of the characters. I could really personalize it, such as the hair type, skin color, eyes, lips, and gender. Even the character’s clothing and the attributes you give them, plus I get to choose their fighting style and wielded weapons. However, if I just wanted to go straight to the game play, I would simply just pick from the premade generals giving to me.
I never played any of the other Dynasty Warriors sequels but I’ve read and heard much talk about them. I did however experience the first factor of this game; it could be pretty tedious. I was too busy customizing my character and it takes me forever to customize anything in any game. I just kept on making character after character, because I was planning on using each one for each scenario of the game, and of course to see how each weapon worked in game play. That was not the only thing that made it tedious. When it came time to give the character’s abilities and attributes, there were so many and I honestly did not know what some of them meant. If that’s not time consuming, I really do not know what is.

After all the excitement of seeing the graphics and customizing my character, it was time for my game play and I was pretty annoyed by one tiny tweak in the animation for the characters. Their mouths didn’t follow the audio. Surely this could have been noticed and fixed quickly, but I guess they thought it wasn’t a big deal. The thing I really disliked the most about the game was its repetitive game play. For one I was a bit confused as to what I was supposed to do. There was things scattered everywhere on the screen, I honestly did not know where to start. Of course after a time of playing I figured most of it all out.

Before each battle, I must first meet with my war council to decide upon military and political policies for the kingdom; then it’s time for war! I must issue direct orders to each officer or general commands to officers on the field. Take the offensive, defend my ground, or have all officers rally for an ambush. Choose the officer’s attack force, entice captured soldiers to join me, or expel them from my kingdom. I had to clear the initial area of enemies, before being directed to an awaiting battle via a red flashing signal on the player map. I used normal and powerful attacks, tapping out combos to annihilate groups of foes, who all conveniently display a red heath bar above their heads. While most of the enemies willingly wait for me in other parts of the map, lieutenants and bosses will come out of the wood works to challenge me. I could count on both hands and feet the many times I’ve died fighting head bosses and their subordinates. I had to carefully set up my attacks to avoid being killed again, and I found that having a horse with me saves much health and charge time. Each horse has a special ability, for instance, mines can land an attack just by jumping and slamming back down to the ground, knocking out groups of nearby enemies approaching me, giving me more time to charge up for my special. This special attack is used only when the power meter is filled up and there are also different typess, depending on the fighting style or you could just buy them. This attack can be pretty effective depending on how well developed the character is. While playing I never knew I could have more than one special. Each special was the color buttons on the controller plus the left back button. It was pretty simple to use, once I knew what do. Achieving a mission and gaining power over a enemies base meant more gold, more allies and of course rank.

The developers of the Dynasty Warriors franchise suspected that their game would live up to its moniker. I suppose they were right, taking how some actually enjoy this game; I on the other hand, grew bored of it. I hated the fact that the game never auto saved and you know what happens when you don’t save your progress? Everything you work so hard on gets completely lost and that drove me nuts. Don’t get me wrong I like the fighting system setup and even the loading menu, which allows me to choose from a list of songs to listen to as I wait patiently for play. This game is quite successful for the most part and it has a great story behind it. I would consider playing this game once more to see if there is anything more interest I could find or more tweaks within it, but only if there is not another game in my reach.

Although seemingly simple in game play and concept, Tomb Raider is one of those great classic games that not only helped inspire a genre but it also changed the way gender is portrayed in video games. Lara’s debut on the game scene challenged us to rethink women’s roles in video games and how their appearance can have a huge impact in how they’re received by an audience.

Up until the early 90’s female video game characters were sparse. Even rarer was the idea of a female character starring in a game. You had Samus and Chun Li but none of them were well known in mainstream America. When Tomb Raider was released, the game created a lot of buzz, mostly around its star Lara Croft. It was the first time that a video game had a sexed up heroine that received as much attention for her features as the game itself. The game received criticism for being sexist, having an impossibly proportioned sexy female lead that players could ogle at and control; fulfilling some sort of male fantasy. So much emphasis was put on what Lara looked like that critics missed the fact that Lara had a unique personality that hadn’t been seen before in a game. She was a strong, single, wealthy and adventurous female heroine. Extremely intelligent and very well educated, she was able to identify ruins of ancient cultures and translate dialects from all over the world. She was stubborn and not willing to back down from an adversary till she got what she was after and she did it all while fighting off dangerous adversaries and demons. Lara Croft was the female James Bond. Although their line of work differed, they both still conjured up images of sexy rich powerful adventurers who seem larger than life and are somehow idolized.

According to GameTap’s Ten Year’s of Tomb Raider: A GameTap Retrospective, when Toby Gard, one of Eidos’ lead designers, was first creating Lara’s character, he wanted to create a truly original female character that would “personify womanhood” yet be “strong and sexy through her actions”. His first concepts were too manly and strange looking as he tried to focus too much on making her look powerful and ignored her feminine side. One day while rendering her character, Gard accidentally made Lara’s breasts too large, but kept it that way, feeling that her strong personality would show that you can be powerful and sexy at the same time. It also was not bad marketing material either.

Lara’s appearance had such a big impact that it overshadowed the game itself. Yet the game was unprecedented for its time. Tomb Raider was able to give players the experience of exploring that felt life-like in the way the environments were presented and how Lara perceived them. It took the rigid linear path of prior video games and expanded it into an environment that made the player feel agency and freedom to do whatever they wanted in the game. They did this by making Lara’s surroundings feel massive and unending by making objects in the distance fade to black. From Lara’s perspective the player can somewhat see what’s to come ahead but because of the darkness, it’s really not clear what’s there until she explores more. This encourages the player to move around, compelling them to look at every nook and cranny of the level up close instead of trying to scope out the area from a distance. In underground temples and caves Lara’s vision is restricted more than if you were outside in the open. Underwater her view is reduced to almost nothing giving the player a feeling of dread as there’s no signs of what lies in the water.

The relative lack of music or sounds in the game creates an eerie atmosphere that adds to the adventurous and mysterious feeling of the game. When the player is exploring a level, it’s relatively quiet. There are sound effects when Lara runs, shoots, or interacts with objects in the environment, but that’s about all the sound there is in the game. Animals are silent until you turn the corner and run into them, giving the player a huge surprise. This puts them on edge for the rest of the level, wondering what else is lurking in the darkness, creating suspense that only adds to the excitement of exploring unknown territory. The newer Tomb Raider games have music cues or sounds that alert the player when a bad guy is nearby so you can stroll through the game relatively comfortably. But the sense of mystery and the unknown is the crux of the Tomb Raider games.  You explore because what’s ahead of you is not visible. The only time music is used in the game is when there’s a pretty extravagant level or there’s a big fight against a boss. A good example of this is in the third stage when you stumble upon a secret underground jungle and as you wander around enjoying the view the music starts up in this heart pounding beat, to someone who’s never played this before they’re left to wonder what’s going on and as they cautiously move forward suddenly a huge T-Rex charges at the player. Even when there’s music, the game still manages to surprise.

The engaging game play is also enhanced by the rich details that flesh the game out and give it character. One way they do this is through the archeological symbols that set up the atmosphere. The player knows they’re in the Greece level by the Greek architecture, the Roman numeral writing, the references to Greek mythology. Some parts actually play out these myths, having Lara dodge Thor’s hammer, or having her running from a giant boulder that falls from an Atlas statue. These details are fun little addition for players who actually know the myths. The same goes for the Egypt level where the player explores tombs filled with mummies and the sphinx standing ominously in the background. Additionally, the little puzzles they throw into the levels are hard enough to keep you stumped for hours and some of the secret med packs are near impossible to find. These important details help to expand the game into more than just running and jumping but make it a puzzle adventure game.

The only aspects of the game that tend to ruin this agency are the controls and the camera. The controls in the game are by no means perfect, trying to steer Lara around at first seems clunky and awkward and takes a few hours of playing to start to get more familiar with them. About 90% of Tomb Raider is spent jumping from cliff to pillar to wall to pretty much everything so when the jump button isn’t perfect it’s painfully noticeable. When Lara runs forward towards an edge the player has to hold down the jump button a few seconds before she leaves the edge in order to make her jump. If it’s tapped when she gets to the edge, she’ll just run off.  Lara’s mansion level has an obstacle course which helps you perfect this but the amount of finesse it takes to pull off sometimes can be frustrating. Next is the camera which Tomb Raider is notorious for. The camera is fine most of the time but becomes a problem when Lara has to do a particularly hard jump or when you need to do a succession of particularly hard jumps. When you come to a cliff located in a corner, the camera turns from being behind Lara to being in front of Lara, giving the player a grand view of Lara but refusing to let them see what’s ahead of them. You can use the camera button to force the camera to point in front of you but as soon as you let go it reverts back to the awkward Lara shot, causing the player to make a blind leap of faith that’s usually only successful half the time.

Despite how empowering and rich Lara’s character is, and how deeply immersive the game tends to be, Lara Croft still gets a bad rap for her over sexualized looks. Even though Eidos, the creators of Tomb Raider, have toned down Lara’s voluptuous body, the stigma still remains. The problem is that many people have heard of Tomb Raider and know of Lara but have never played the game. But it’s hard to really know a character unless you’ve played the game they star in because essentially the game is their story.

Some of us well know the Dynasty Warrior game it’s probably one of the most popular game that was ever release from Japan. The setting of the game is basically a spin-of of the Romance of the 3 Kingdoms series, which was originally a battle between 3 great kingdoms of China. In this game you can choose from three kingdoms Shu, Wu, and Wei and from each kingdom you choose a variety of characters. With the choice of the character you play out in a history. For example if you choose a character that was from Shu and play as him through the game then the game would end with the Shu side being victorious. But if you choose a character from Wei then Wei would be victorious.

The first Dynasty Warriors was released in 1997 on the PlayStation, but the game was different from the one we are use to today. Instead of it being a battle scenario it was more of a fighting game with the features of the Tekken game. The only difference was the addition of weapons and more exotics moves.  Later Dynasty Warrior 2 was released and from then on the rest of the Dynasty Warrior had brought on a new dynasty to the gaming industry.

In the game there are 3 modes that you play in Musou mode or story mode. They’re also a free style mode, where you can choose any character, any sides, and any levels.  Dream mode where are face with mini game, for example slaughter mode is where you try and kill the most in an amount of time. There also some special features that tells you about the characters that you have unlocked and the true history that was based of in the game.

Dynasty Warriors is a series that literally evolves through the years that passed by. Most people would like the idea that Dynasty Warrior is up to date with this year current technology. But some people don’t like the idea; mostly because that as the game progresses so do the characters do as well. For example in one game in the past used a spear as a weapon, but in the current game today that same character would now be using a sword instead of a spear. Due to this change most people would not like the idea that the character they probably grew up with was using a different weapon that they played with when they where young.

One of the themes that are placed in this game is open world scenario, maybe not like Grand Theft Auto or Spiderman, but the character can roam freely around with no boundaries. Another theme is a battlefield playing, like Star Wars Battle Front;            Dynasty Warriors lets fight as an officer on the battlefield to defeat the opposing sides. Event though the first Dynasty Warrior game was a fighting game it had become a war kind scenario. Dynasty Warriors is best know for portraying it characters with personalities, for example one of the characters is a ruler of the kingdom but he might have the personalities of a tyrant or an aristocrat.

The first time I had played these games was when the third Dynasty Warrior was out on the Play Station 2. At first I had hard time understanding it but as time pasted by I was hooked on it. When Dynasty Warriors four came out I was excited to play it, but when I bought the game and started playing it I notice that the character design was different than the last game and that there were more characters to choose from. But those weren’t the issues that bothered me it was the fact that the story line of the game had not changed or the layout of the game. I thought to myself ‘what a rip-off it just the same as the last game I played. They just change the character design and added more characters.’ After a while I realized that that was the point of these sequels just to add more characters and keep the storyline the same.

In 2002 Koie had released a spinoff of Dynasty Warriors called Dynasty Tactics. Unlike Dynasty Warriors Dynasty Tactics was almost like a civilization game where you plan where your unit would go or what units to create. Another spinoff that Koie had released was Samurai Warriors, while Dynasty warriors took place in ancient China Samurai Warriors took place in feudal era of Japan. Most of it characters was based of true generals that fought in Japan, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The game itself was pretty impressive and the character design was also creative as well.

The game that I found the most incredible spinoff of the Dynasty Warrior series was Dynasty Gundams. As the tittle says instead of warriors that are from China they have gundams fighting in battle fields, but they also fight in space. If you don’t know what Gumdam is its probably the most favorite mecha anime that was ever released. It about a group of people rebeling against an emipre that want to take over the planet earth. They fight against this empire with large robots called Gundam. It a series that almost simalr to Dynasty Warriors. I mean that it the same thing in each new series but it evolves as the centuries continue onward. But in this game the have all the Gundams from all there series that was ever realesed. If you have not wacth the Gundam series you would be confused with the story line of the game, but after hours of playing this game you would want to watch this series.

The most reacent Dynasty Warriors that came out was the sixth, this one had almost everybody hiped up to go buy this game. But as I said before most of them was disapointed, because most of the characters has different weapons and different costumes. The storyline had stayed the same as the other games did but with different events happening. For example if the other game one of the character dies due to a fight he lost, but in the sixth that same character died due to a sickness. The lighting of the game is bright, like in the first Fable game, it was kinda hard to see when it was daytime cause it almost blinded you, when it was night time you had to ajust the brightness to see what was going on.

As the years past and technology becomes more and more advance so will Dynasty Warriors. We might not know how it will change or what other characters might be added to the fight, but one factor remain that Dynasty Warriors is one of the few game that the storyline stays the same but it evolves along with the technology.