Zombie games are an over saturated market of low effort grind fests where you mow down the same dead white guy with a flannel and blue jeans for the 567,000th time, but Left 4 Dead 2 is different. Left 4 Dead 2 is a zombie survival game that acts under the mask of a cheesy horror flick, where the playable characters are likable and the game at times can make you think before you shoot. It's a game made by valve which means two things: The game has aged incredibly well and it's going to be free or a dollar every month or so, so it's definitely worth the money. GAMEPLAY
Narrative
Visuals
Music
Interface
Technical Conclusion This game is a landmark piece that does co-op and zombie games right, it is a masterclass in the genre and every game after it should've taken notes. 5 starts, play with friends play alone, how ever, you have to play this title.
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School is tough, that is not a surprise to anyone who's been to any school. Whether it be the work, the classmates, the tests, the teachers, everyone has had an element of school beat them down, for me personally it's the work. Just about everyday I have to do and turn in something and it can feel like I can't catch a break. It's like I'm juggling rubber balls, each day someone throws me a new one, now sometimes I'll drop one and if I lean down to grab it, I'll drop the others and now I have to pick them up too. Late work is hard to really get done when you have more and more work from 6 other classes due soon, I can normally get it done the same day it was due if I'm not too busy with it but there are times where it's been a while to the point where I feel it's not worth it. I mean turn in your work sure but you don't want late work to pile up, again if I'm juggling and I drop just one rubber ball I don't want to risk dropping more. Having a lot of work or projects that I haven't done wil pile up and make a difference but I feel like I need to keep working on what's due rather than what was due. The lesson has to keep going for everyone, no one's going to stop and wait for you to finish. The jump to online school hasn't been the smoothest, for Game Design it's not too much different but for pretty much every other class it's been hard. I've had to adopt this mentality of just keep going, so I hopefully don't fail every single class. School is like juggling rubber balls, each day someone throws you a new one, sometimes you'll drop one and if you lean down to grab it, you'll drop the others and now you have to pick them up too, your best option is to just keep going.
Unity is a great game making engine that with enough time and passion anyone can learn or even master, it is accessible and so many people have used it to make incredible games. Although with this comes problems and those problem can be so aggravating to try and deal with. Unity is a engine that can do so much but will never tell you what you've done wrong, for example: say you're working on a 2D platformer, you add your movement script to your character and he suddenly cannot move. You look to the logs and it tells you that something is wrong with your code, but not where that problem is just that there's a problem.so you have to look through your code for what feels like hours only to find you forgot to capitalize the T in Transform. Unity will not help you when you make a mistake, whether that be a spelling issue or just the fact you forgot to put an tag on your object, a problem that could've taken seconds to fix took you hours to find out about. At the time of me writing this I've been working on a simple 3D level for my class, it's a 3rd person game with a guy that runs and jumps. Reading that 12 word escription would lead anyone to believe that there's nothing wrong with the game, except for the fact that if the character trips over a crack it will be launched in the air and fly down like a paper airplane. There will be random times where the character will slowly rotate to its left until it is on the floor only able to go directly up, spamming the spacebar sends it to the moon because the ground check I applied doesn't mean anything when it's on its back like a turtle. In this game I have a script that allows the character to respawn from the beginning by reloading the scene, sounds simple right? Well in reality when the scene reloads for the first time the characters jump in cut in half like the gravity got stronger or something. When you die again because you can't jump and the scene resets you are completely unable to jump, only able to walk into death. Third time same as the second and then the fourth time it reloads, the character is in the eternal abyss of the unity default background as its body stretches and pixelates until I exit play mode. Could some if not all of those problems be my fault? most likely but Unity doesn't give any help in fixing anything I mentioned so this post is still justified. Unity is a good tool the evidence being the game talented people have created using Unity, but that of course means it's not going to be easy getting into Unity. I searched just about everywhere to try and fix my problems and one did get fixed because it, well I say fixed but my character can still fly like a paper airplane but not as much anymore. If you give anything your time and passion, you'll be able to create whatever you want, just be prepared for the spikes in the road. My character in the Unity abyss after the fourth reload*
In the preproduction stage, Programmers aren't really needed in the brainstorm "what if this would be in the game" stage, but Programmers are important in seeing if that idea can work in the game. Programmers are the glue to put all the pieces together in a (hopefully) functioning package, the artists, modulars, and producers rely on the programmer to make the finished product of the game. That's a lot of pressure, which is why it's a good idea to start practicing, if you don't have other things you need to do at the exact same time tomorrow. I haven't really gotten started on the scripting as of late since I'm slipping hard in classes so i have to be on top of anything and everything that comes in, which is a headache and not just because I'm staring at my screen for 8 hours a day. But enough about that, the programmers whole job is to actual make the game the players will play. For me, I am working in Unity so I am using c# script to build my games, so correct grammar and spelling are key. As of now I am working on a whitebox prototype, a prototype where you use primitive shapes to act as game pieces in order to write and get code working for you game. First what I have to do is make sure the player can move around since this is a 3D space, I will do that by create a simple player move script. Then I need to make sure the player can pick up certain items with a press of a button, hide in lockers with a press of a button, and the difficult part of programming the monsters AI. Enemy AI on any level is hard to do first time around, you have to make it so the enemy reacts to the players movement while they chase them and have it so the monster doesn't attack players that are hiding in lockers. It will be hard to pull off especially since I'm still a novice but it can be done, it's my job as programmer to make it all work
In my group we are making a game called Strange Occurrences: A Journey, an adventure horror game that has you spending the first part of the game exploring the layout and collecting and the other spent being stalked by a monster and rescuing students from a dimension in the school. The school, Strangeview, is one with a record of students going missing and no one seems to bring up. The introverted and bullied are the only ones to truly notice and end up disappearing themselves. The player character is introverted so of course they find the dimension, the monster, and save the missing students. That is the rough overview of our story so far, pretty solid in my opinion, though the plan didn't start off that way. Originally the group had two different game ideas, one side wanted to do a point and click survivor horror and our producer wanted to make a game set in a high school focused on growing up and the challenges you face. Now you might be thinking "What was the big deal?" well, the big deal was one side already had a foundational elevator pitch for a game that we needed the producer to be on board for, but they didn't like the idea of a monster being a central element because it felt generic, and the Producer wanted us to work on a game that we didn't really understand the core theme. The producer is the leader of the group, producers make the plan, the deadlines, who does what and when, so the producer needs to like a game idea enough to run it. I ended up being the middleman, talking to our 2D artist and producer looking for some kind of compromise. Our 2D Artist wanted to do the point and click horror with a central monster because it's quite a simple concept and the producer wanted to make a game centered around characters with a little more complexity and it features... monsters. Yeah the two ideas shared a template of "oh no there's a monster in the high school" but the ideas were different in a thematic focus, one side wanted monster first characters second, other side wanted the reverse. This went on for a good week, until we worked on a compromise, our Producer finalized his idea to the point where everyone got the premise, the game would focus on characters with a monster as an antagonist, Oh and our 3D Artist was not apart of this at all, they were down for whatever. Now we just need to work on concept art, an overall map design, and a working whitebox prototype (that's my job). First real introduction with working in a group making a video game and i'll be honest, I didn't think it would be a smooth start, I expected a bumpy start. Everyone has different visions of a game and sometimes it's hard to truly communicate that, but it is a great skill to learn since you need your team to know what direction this idea will go. Communication is extremely important and getting that nailed down is important in any team.
Miitopia is a turn based RPG made by Nintendo for the 3DS in 2016. Miitopia is about a dark lord that stole the faces of the citizens of the miitopia island, leaving you and your friends to save the island and defeat the Dark Lord. This game is very fun to play, although it is a turn based RPG so replay ability is almost out of the question it is soul crushing. I spent a lot of my summer playing Miitopia because of the gimmick of filling the roles of your character, the Dark Lord, and your teammates with any mii. With 3DS's streetpass, you can take any mii made from other people and fill the roles with them. It's a great game that I suggest to anyone but it's not without its flaws.
Narrative The plot is very simple, a Dark Lord steals the faces of the citizens and you and your friends have to save those faces, but there's a twist. It's turns out the Dark Lord was a normal person possessed by an evil spirit. The evil spirit was a person who hated their own face so much they casted their face away, filling the soul with hatred. That's as far as the narrative goes, you go through different areas helping different people and areas by slaying monsters and recusing faces by defeating bosses.The dialogue is silly and fun all around, you don't control what your characters say so they feel like their own little characters. The game is very simple and innocent, except the twerkeys but we'll get to those. Gameplay The game itself is quite linear, when you properly start the game you're given a map selection screen where you're able to pick a level. There are optional levels but it all funnels to a certain point of a town or a boss you need to defeat. The levels often have branching paths but what they do it mostly give coin, challenge, or make you want to do all of the paths because you want every level to be completed like me. Now to the battles, you are only allow to control your character, what your teammates do is out of your control. Sometimes, depending on what personality you've given a character, a character will do something related to that trait, like not attacking a monster or giving items to teammates if they're kind. Personalities make battle unpredictable and fun and could be considered as a different class all together, but that doesn't mean battles can be all too fun. If you get a certain ability that does a lot of damage, you won't find a lot of reasons to use your other abilities because they don't do as much damage, making battles a grind. You can level up your characters through battle and improve their stats by feeding them food you've collected in battle at the inn. The inn is where you stop to rest at the end of every level, in inns you can place two teammates in each room. Putting teammates in the same room fills their friendship meter, which in turns allows them to do things like team up on the enemy or take damage for each other if one is about to die.The game is built to be unpredictable in what your team does and says, it's like you're a god watching down on this team instead of being apart of it, and I really like that design. Visual The game has a pretty distinct art style, very close to Tomodachi Life on the 3DS, the animations are smooth and the models for characters looks good on the 3DS. It uses colors a lot, there is no dull looking place in Miitopia it's all very imaginative. Art was just very appealing to look at but not anything to write home about. Audio Miitopia's music is amazing, the music in this game is a treat in it of itself it's incredible. Each piece compliments each part of the island you explore and they all just bop like they are really good, definitely suggest to listening to the OST. But away from the music, when a mii talks a speech bubble appears above their hand and says what they're saying, there is no voice acting just random little sounds to indicate that they are speaking. Game sounds were normally in the background, the music is the main focus of the audio department and I say it really paid off for them. Interface A lot of the game is controlled by the touchpad of the 3DS, just tap to action to do it. There are button inputs you can use the joystick and A button to go through menus but this game was definitely touchpad first.The menu was user friendly and I'd expect that for a nintendo game since they are normally family friendly in game design. Miitopia is a 3DS exclusive so there's no graphics or audio settings because you really don't have to change the graphics and you can turn off your volume on the 3DS itself. Everything in this game is very easy and streamlined, the maps are short and easy to run through and I can find just about anything within the menus, no complaints here. Accessibility In the front of the case it says that Miitopia was made for everyone 7+, and with streamlined elements I think they nailed the accessibility, except for one thing. Replaying Miitopia feels like a chore, the game does have random moments but the core story is still linear so running through the game again loses a lot of the charm. Having access to fun replayability is not common with a lot of turn based RPG since getting rid of all the progress you've done and starting anew isn't so fun, especially when you're only given one save slot like in Miitopia. That's the one aspect of Accessibility Miitopia is lacking in, everything else is quite easy to do not counting New Lumos aka the challenge world as that is in the post game. Technical Miitopia ran great with no problems from my end, the game is structurally sound in terms of technical sides. The game was built for the 3DS so I'd expect it to work on a 3DS, I've not come across any bugs, glitches, or crashes throughout my run. Conclusion Miitopia is a cute, weird game that I love, it has fun random moments, odd humor, and jsut sucks you in with it's gameplay and presentation. This game is more or less untalked about now a days and it one of the only reasons I still have a Nintendo 3DS. The only problem is just replaying it because once you've played through it once, you've seen everything the game has to offer. But besides that I'm giving it a 4/5 stars, pick it up and try it out, it's a fun little adventure. |
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and Do Not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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