Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Clockwork Universes
So I have a videogame review and analysis blog now.
Juan said I should make a thread for it, so I'm making a thread for it. I'll post here whenever I have a new post, and people can discuss it and stuff, I guess, if they want.
Anyway, posts I have so far:
- So what is this thing, anyway?
- Pokèmon Red and Blue versions
- Pokèmon Yellow Version
- Dark Souls
- Dark Souls Survival Guide
- Mass Effect Retrospective
- Quantum Conundrum
- Steam Greenlight
- Review Scores
- Human Revolution (revised)
Updating is currently suspended while I rework my existing articles.
Comments
Yeah. Humor is the part I need most. Aside from the obvious benefit of being fun, it'll keep people reading through the longer articles. I tried to have a little bit here and there, but there isn't nearly enough.
I liked it overall. Especially the aesthetics part. Aesthetics don't get enough love in most analyses.
New post is up.
It's more humorous than your last, but it also feels a bit less... in-depth, I guess.
In your last article, you did a good job of exploring how each element works- not just saying 'these elements supported X' but explaining how X helped the game excel. This article lacked that- you talked a lot about how elements supported exploration, but neglected to mention how exploration supported the game.
You also didn't explain how severe some of the design flaws (even going beyond glitches) were and how it didn't hamper the game in the long run.
Yeah, and I see that. The problem I'm having with it is that I don't see why.
Like, I already know why, because I've thought about this myself. But to someone who just stumbles across your post without playing the games, they're going to think, "Oh, okay, the game's got a lot of stuff supporting the theme of exploration. Okay, but I don't see how that affects the game itself."
Like, you said it was a good thing, but you didn't say how it appealed.
Honestly, I feel Like the non-glitch design flaws aren't that bad, except in terms of comparison to the later generations. Thus, I'll go more in-depth on them as they're removed.
>and how it didn't hamper the game in the long run.
True...I'm not really sure how to articulate that except by saying that the game is still functional, which is just recursive...
>Like, you said it was a good thing, but you didn't say how it appealed.
Really, I consider exploration to be a core human appeal in and of itself.
It's an appeal, but within a game, elements don't work just like that. I mean, empowerment (like in many shooters and RPG's) is a pretty big appeal to a lot of appeal, but then there are a lot of games (like Dark Souls and many horror games) where part of the appeal is in not being particularly empowered. Likewise, there are many linear games, where the lack of exploration gives the game a focus it would otherwise miss, or else otherwise helps the game (for example, early Mario games).
So I guess what I'm saying is I think you should have explained how the exploration so many of the game elements supported actually helped the game.
I disagree, and am a firm believer of the quicksand box. The best exploration heavy games have some sort incentive to get you explore, and some direction to guide you to it. What you should have done was explain how Pokemon encourages this (even if it's really just the promise of more loot/Pokemon/fights).
-googles-
...tropes?!?!
anyway, allow me to put it this way:
Everybody likes food, right? The issue is simply that there's such a thing as too much food. When that happens, you simply don't feel like eating everything so you just focus on the things that you really want to eat. Sure, how much you can eat depends on the person, but at the end, unless someone's not hungry, everybody eats.
I'm not hungry
You need to eat though.
Only enough to keep me alive and (relatively) healthy!
Well, yeah, in a game where exploration isn't the core appeal, exploration might be bad, but in a game where it is, it's good to have.
Constrained exploration is still exploration.
I did talk about that in the story section, though I probably could have afforded to be more explicit about it.
Yes, I get that. But what the point of that was saying was, you probably should have explained why. I mean, if it was an intrinsic thing, like... how everyone wants to do something in a game, rather than be a protagonist who does nothing, then you could just state that "Okay, the game lets you do stuff, let's move on because that's self-evident." But when it's not that self-evident, you probably should explain why the element of the game works.
In Pokemon's case, a lot of the reason exploration works is that you get a sense of fulfilment out of it. There are a lot of out-of-the-way secrets, and in exploring them, you find them. Things like items, NPC's and rare Pokemon can only be found through exploring the world- and in exploring the world, you come to feel like you actually know the game.
But then, that's not even really it. I guess the reason that exploration works on the game's end, rather than the player's end, is that it keeps people playing. Allowing people to explore means that people will find their own things to do- rather than just catching and raising Pokemon, they're also running around the game world, searching and exploring it. It's a form of natural, enjoyable padding, I guess.
And there's where one of the game's flaws runs in; the natural walking speed is so slow that it actually hampers this sense of exploration, and makes the padding feel artificial, rather than natural. People tend not to explore regions where they can't use their bikes/running shoes, because progress is so slow without them that it feels like it takes three times as long. (That's also why the abundance of long grass in the third generation is so loathed, by the by.)
Tall grass, I liked Route 119. That's cause I catched a female feebas on a random spot more than anything, also, the raining in the area felt really cool to me.
I liked one region of tall grass because I caught an Absol in it in a Nuzlocke run, and he wiped out two members of the Elite Four for me and the Nate & Tate gym, the Psychic one.
Other than that, I loathe it.
Ugh, the R/B/Y games were so horribly designed.
The R/B/Y games were excellently designed in many areas. They were just horribly designed in many other areas.
One big reason for that was the incredibly small filesize of the games. Did you know that the R/B/Y games were actually less than .4MB big?
The game itself was well-designed. There were just numerous small design decisions that kinda dragged it down. The slow walking speed, many of the glitches/bad design decisions in the battles, the way the games would glitch to the point of unplayability if you did particular things.
Many of these glitches and design features wouldn't be fixed until the third generation, which is why the third generation is often considered to be the major jumping point for the series. It was a game filled with bad decisions in its own right, but it fixed many of the old bad design decisions- in fact, they pretty much had to, as I do believe they had to redesign the game from the ground up due to the shift to the GBA.
That's also why you'll find Fire Red/Leaf Green to be so, so much better than the original games.
The fact that a 10-year-old could break the game by accident is a testament to how horrid the game was.
FR/LG was way better. The Sevii Islands were completely unnecessary, however.
B/W was the best in terms of game design. They rewarded the players for using HMs but only made them necessary once (and all three Crutch Characters could learn it) and the gym puzzles were way more challenging.
How so? It provided new areas for veterans to experience, a way to get Johto Pokemon, and added a lot of post-game content to where there was previously very little.
Oh yeah, that.
The fact that it was necessary before the E4 pisses me off though.
That is more to do with the fact that they attempted to do so much with so little, actually.
The game was brilliant in design, but due to having limited memory space, it was shoddy and took shortcuts in the actual game programming. Thus, unpredictable behaviour had a tendency to cause glitches, and there wasn't much they could do about them due to having jack shit memory space.
Look, for comparison:
This picture uses over twice the memory space that the entirety of the original Pokemon games did, and it's barely over a megabyte.
Holy shit, really?
Also, where is that picture from?
Probably Senki Zesshou Symphogear, unless I am really bad at identifying anime.
Yeah. You can check ROMs for comparison, if you want.
Does that help you to understand, anyway? Otherwise, I don't know any other comparisons.
And DYRE is right about the anime.
Looking back over my article and what people have said, I think the overall root problem with it is that I frequently bring up something that could use elaboration, then just move on.
I feel like there's a lot to improve on the first one too...okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'll get, say, a month's worth of articles written, and then I'll go back, figure out everything that's wrong with them and fix them. That should give me a good idea of what to look out for with future articles.