Game Studies Proposal

I had planned on doing a creative piece for my final project. I was going to use the idea that a classmate suggested to me and make a comic. I was thinking of making a short comic book that would tell a story about something that happened to me while I was playing a video game. Instead of sitting there and drawing out the characters from the game I thought it would be cooler, as well as easier and less time consuming, to draw my friends in the place of the video game characters. As a way to add a little humor to the comic I was going to draw my friends in what is called a “chibi” style of drawing. This will make them look goofy and disproportioned. In addition to making them look funny I thought I should give invert all but one of their sexes. That is just something that I enjoy doing when I depict my friends in drawings. I am still deciding on what game and what video game moment to draw. I am debating between Kingdom Hearts, Halo 2 and Gears of Wars. I went with old games because I have had more time to completely play through and unlock everything and they were out when I was younger and that was when my friends did dumb stuff around me.

Samurai Warriors Review

I made the decision to do my game review on Samurai Warriors. When I first started playing this game it was very hard to not notice how much Samurai Warriors had in common with Dynasty Warriors. The graphics that was used in Samurai Warriors was pretty good for the time that that the game came out. Though there were a few rendering issues that bugged me. The game play for this game is awesome, there was not too much that I could complain about when it came to game play. The biggest issue of this video game is the game’s logic, the logic used in this game is completely off and make no sense at all.
First off I want to go over the good graphics of this game. Samurai Warriors is a five year old game. So keeping that in mind the character design and game rendering was really good. The physics of the game worked out well also. For example hair and clothing moved in ways that would be expected. One of the best parts about the game rendering was that there were not any characters that had hair that would go through their hand when they tried to scratch their head. There happened to be two small, but noticeable, problems with the graphics and maybe one issue that was just the game artist being creative. The first issue is with the way the horses in the game run. They take off running just fine but when you jump off or make them stop, their hind legs slide out and forward in such a way that is completely unrealistic and would cause a real horse’s legs to break. Another issue that bothered me was some of the character’s eyes. A few of the character’s eyes did not move at all. Their eyes would stay fixed on one thing and not move at all even if the character turn their head or blink. I found that to be just a little creepy. The last thing that I noticed may not really be an issue, maybe the artist did it on purpose, but there are red horses in the game. I mean like really red, not that sandy brown color that looks slightly red. These horses are like Crayola crayon red, but there are also normal colored horses and these same red horses are in Dynasty Warriors as well. At first I thought I it was my television so I tried other TVs and played the game at a more than one friend’s home, so maybe the game artist got creative I am not sure but it bugged me.
When taking in account the game play there is no real difference between Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors. One really annoying part of the game play is how the characters will repeat the same lines over and over again. It gets really frustrating after a while but besides that the game play is pretty solid. The object of the game is complete the story of a samurai that is fighting for a certain army. The player can pick one of the game characters or make their own samurai. If the player creates their own character then they must go through training to become a samurai; samurai training takes a year, in the game’s time, to complete. In training the player will practice skills that the game feel is important for you to know even though you do not use them unless you are trying to join an army. You are graded on how well you do during the exercises but the game does not do a good job of telling you what it want done and how they want it done, so you may have to try a few parts over. After completing the training the player gets to pick what army they want to try and join. In order to join an army you must pass two tests, if you do not gain at least 100 points then you fail and if you fail you cannot retry that army’s test. There is also a Survival Mode where the player can either try to make to a specific spot on a hidden map in a certain amount of time. If they make it to the spot then they get to fight a random character from the game. Along the way the player must avoid traps and fight enemy forces. The other option in the Survival Mode is to explore the basement of a castle and fight a random character. There is a Challenge Mode where the player can work on their skills like killing people while riding a horse or deflecting arrows with their weapon. In the Versus Mode two players can either fight against each other or fight together and destroy the enemy. In the Free Mode the player can pick a character they want to use and pick which battle they want to fight in. All of the game modes follow the same basic game mechanics. The fighting in this game is really easy and is not much more than dodging and mashing the attack buttons, but it is time consuming and fun.
The only serious problem that I could find with this game was the logic. As I mentioned in a previous paragraph if the player creates a character they must go through training. Well you can completely fail every part of training and still qualify to become a samurai and all you have to do is pass the two tests that the army you chose to join gives you. However you must pass with at least 100 points to join someone’s army. So you can flunk most things as long as you pass the things that matter (kind of like college). A bigger issue can be found in the Free Mode of the game. Since you can pick a character and a battle instead of following the story line of the game, this means you can play as a character from one army but fight on the side of a different army. If you do this and happen to pick a battle where the character you selected is fighting against the army you are fighting for there will be two of your character. That is bad enough but it gets worst. You can actually kill the other you, which would be good because they are the enemy so your team will win but at the same time they are you. Since you killed yourself while you were fighting for someone else the first thing that happens is you win, you defeated the enemy. They give you your rewards and let you save, then you lose and the “Game Over” screen pops up. So you win and you lose, because you killed the enemy but you died because the enemy was the character that you were using at the time that you killed you.
Samurai Warriors is an overall good game, it does seem like they just took Dynasty Warriors, changed the name and added a new line up of characters. The game play is solid and will keep you entertained for at least for a little while. Graphics are great, at times creepy, given how old the game happens to be. However the logic of the game is horrible and would make my Philosophy professor slap the game’s programmer repeatedly. Besides that the game is good and should totally be at least rented for a few days I give it a strong 3.58 out of 5.

IGS 150-170

I am not completely sure if Dr. Betajames wanted us to post a blog for this reading or not, so I am going to assume that he did and post one anyway. After reading the last chapter of the “An Introduction to Game Studies” text that was assigned for my class I find myself a little lost. The chapter went over picking a topic for a Games Studies project and performing research on that topic. I found it to be pretty helpful but at the same time it caused me to wonder what I was going to do my project over. The chapter pointed out some basic guidelines for picking a topic. I have done research projects before and find myself overwhelmed. I think it is because I pick to broad of a topic, like when I was in high school and thought I could successfully do a five page research paper over the entire Final Fantasy franchise. That paper started to get to long and confusing so I cropped it down to just Final Fantasy VII, ah good times.
I think I am going to draw from my love of art or maybe my eerie and obsessive interest with the human mind and thought process. Pulling from one of the aforementioned fascinations I was maybe going to look at why people relate so deeply with a game character or possibly public view of art in video games. This is all assuming I understand what it is that is expected of me for this assignment, I am not sure if I am on the right track. One really stupefying thing I learned about from reading the chapter is the Hermeneutic circle! I love the entire concept of this thing it shows how the research should move from theory to more observation and so on, plus it is a circle kind of like the unit circle from trigonometry (I like shapes). I am going to give this some more thought because I think I need to seriously compress the range of my two possible topics. Another thing the book mentioned was how hard it would be to research topics in Games Studies since it is still in the development stages. This chapter did help me out a lot though when it came to considering how to do my research and how to pick a topic. I know I want to go over either a topic dealing with social sciences or design and maybe pay close attention to meta-design. I find myself to be slightly more focused than what I was before.

Video games & sex, violence, etc

Video games & sex, violence, etc

For about 40 years now video games have made sure that people everywhere are entertained. Video games have always been treated as a hobby or a way of waste time. Not too many people actually think about all the hard work and creativity that goes into making video games. The home video gaming industry first got its start in 1972, when Magnavox released the Odyssey. Designed by Ralph H. Baer in 1966, The Odyssey was the first home gaming console (“Technology Review”). Thanks to this one event in history the world was significantly changed forever.
When The Odyssey was released the graphics were extremely bad. There was not a character on the screen that players controlled. There was just a little rectangle that the user would slide across and up and down the screen using the joystick. There was not any real differentiation between the games. Even though The Odyssey did not do too well and the future of home gaming looked like a failed venture. In 1977 Atari launched the 2600; companies like Atari were what help keep video games from falling out of existence. Not too long after the Atari 2600 other game consoles started to be produced by companies like Sega and Nintendo. With all of these home consoles being made the market needed game designers to make the games for these machines.
As time went on video games and the art that was used in the creation of video games became better defined. The images became clearer and people were able to easily match the image of a specific character to the title of a certain game. Sadly most people did not think of this turn of events as a good thing. Video games have been going through the same struggles as any other art form. It seems they are slowly becoming acknowledged as a form of media entertainment, and not being looked at as just a toy. However being recognized by the public is in a sense a double edged sword. The recognition of their art and hard work is something that all game developers want. Unfortunately the more the masses are aware of your presence the harder they try to keep you down.
Video games have been blamed for many things; people say they affect how children learn causing them to not do as well in school. Psychologists also say that Games make kids violent and causes depression that will later lead to suicide. One of the latest things video games have been accused of is selling sex. This all seems to be just another ploy to keep the gaming community down. The individuals who claim that video games are overly sexual and forcing sexual images upon the youths of America do not even play video games and have no point of reference when they make these statements. Further proof of this is where Fox News reported that Mass Effect featured “full digital nudity and sex”. This statement that they made could not have been further from the truth. Actually the game did not show any sex and the player only would have seen a side view of the female character, this is assuming the player made it to this point in the game. This scene was not a part of the main game play, it could only be accessed if the individual playing the game made the right decisions and tried to form a romantic relationship with the female character in the game.
It is extremely rare to see any sexual images in a video game, most games the player just makes their character run around killing things and solving puzzles. There are more graphic sexual images displayed in movies than in video games but no one is trying to ban movies and keep children away from them.
Besides the selling sex issue the other thing that everyday society is accusing video games of is racism. During mid 2007 Capcom released a trailer for their upcoming horror game Resident Evil 5. The launch of this trailer caused an up roar from people across the nation. People, mainly those outside of the gaming community, called the game racist because the trailer depicted a White protagonist killing Black characters. The same people who were calling the game racist, once again, did not know anything about the series and did not research the plot of the game. If they had they would have known that the game took place in Africa and that the entire Resident Evil series centers on killing infected humans in an attempt to keep the rest of the world from becoming infected and taken over by terrorist. Society likes to pick and choose what they consider needs to be banned and kept from children. There was never uproar about the release of Resident Evil 4. In which there was another White protagonist killing Spaniards, and just like the Africans of Resident Evil 5 the Spaniards of Resident Evil 4 lived in a poor rural area.
The portions of society that do not fall into the classification of “gamers” are trying their hardest to keep video games off the market. They say that games are selling sex when they show a brief video of the side view of a naked woman, but they do not say anything about movies that show full nudity, like what was shown in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate. As long as a White video game character is not killing Black game characters then there is nothing wrong. The whole sector of “normal” adults do not know what video games are, the concept confuses them so they want to get rid of games. This is the same cycle of confused public, unjust hatred, and eventual acceptance that every media art form went through with time hopefully things will change for video games.

MMORPGs

I do not think people can be addicted to an MMORPG. I do not feel that there is anything about any form of video game that can cause addiction. I know a few people who play MMORPGs more often than should. At the very most I think someone can be obsessed with a game, but never addicted. I found the articles that we were suppose to read to be very interesting. Mainly because I have an odd interest in how humans think and why. I do not play any MMORPG because I was never able to get into them. I find them to be very boring, I do not enjoy being limited by what I can do until I get a certain amount of experience and level a certain amount of times. I just want to go forth and kill stuff, so I occupy myself with hack-and-slash, shooters, and fighting games! However I have seen some of the effects that these MMORPGs can have. I have a friend who plays World of Warcraft and another friend who plays Final Fantasy XI online.
Neither one of my two friends do anything other than play online and occasionally eat and go to the bathroom, I doubt they bathe anymore. So, I understand what Sol Invictus was saying about how time consuming these MMOs can be. I personally do not agree with the idea of paying a monthly fee to play a video game when they are usually free. That has always bugged me, when I spoke to my friends about why they pay to play, they simply said that they are paying to use the server and interact with people. I still think it is strange, since I can turn on Left 4 Dead or Call of Duty and interact with friends for free or even invite them over and we play Rock Band until four O’clock in the morning.
I am not sure but I think people play those games and take them so seriously because it is away to escape from the bleak tragedy that is everyday life. This would explain why that user got so upset when Davis Myers kept killing him and threaten his life. Most people do not like it when someone interferes with their fantasy or something that they enjoy doing. If an RPG is how they spend their free time having someone who comes and constantly destroys that could be infuriating. I just think it is a little weird to be that into a MMORPG or any video game, but I understand why someone would want to play a game they have to pay subscription for. I guess my lack interest and lack of understanding is what shaped my view of the game genre. It does not really matter to me once you go far enough to threaten someones life over a game I think you have went too far.

Game Review

I decided to do my video game review over Way of The Samurai 3. I did my review over the Xbox 360 version of the game. I was absolutely thrilled when I heard they were making a third installment of this series, I have been playing it since the first one on the Play Station 2.
For the most part the game is absolutely awesome. It follows the same concept as the previous games. The player of the game plays as a samurai and based on the choices that the player makes the outcome of the story will change. The game has not changed too much from the previous two titles of the series. The player gets to customize their character looks and name him. The customization is very limited when you first start the game, but as you accomplish certain things in the game you can unlock new clothes and things like that and the more you get unlocked the more you can pimp out your samurai.
Another cool thing the game does is give the player titles. If you end a stage after doing a certain thing the game will reward you with a title, which is a little like an accomplishment except without points or anything. For example when I first started all I did was steal vegetables from people’s gardens and when I died I had a bunch of them still on me so I unlocked the Vegetarian title, which was cool to me since I am one. Besides collecting title and unlocking new clothes the player can also pick and customize swords that they have either bought or stolen from a dead body. Just about anything in the game can be used as a weapon. My favorite weapon in the entire game is an onion. The onion has some really awesome combo attacks and can block just about any attack that your enemy may attempt to use against you. Cool weapons and titles are just part of what made me love this game so much.
The other thing that helped make this game awesome was the game play. The fighting mechanics of this game is really cool. It is not like most button masher/hack and slash games, where you run around hitting the same button over and over again. There is some type form of strategy involved, not much but enough to make me like the game. The player should not attempt to spam the “A” button through every fight, attacking an opponent while they are blocking damages your blade or onion and after so long it will break. So, the player need to find a way through their opponent’s guard, this aspect makes fighting a little less tedious. Another part of the game play is being able to be good or evil. Just like in the previous games the player could determine their fate in the game, but in this one you can pick on the weak and steal their stuff. Based on what decisions the player makes the ending of the will be different and there are over twenty different endings for this game. Between unlocking all the endings, unlocking all playable characters, finding all of the weapons and unlocking all of the clothing the game easily offers over 40 hours of game play as well as a reason to keep playing the game over and over again.
This game is really awesome and has great concept, but sadly everything about the game is not good. One of the biggest issues with this game happens to be the game design. The graphics look dated, it seems like the designers used an obsolete game engine when it came time to render the game art. Not only are the graphics a little crappy but they does this annoying lagging thing. When the characters walk in a muddy area, their foot hit the ground and then a second or two later the mud splashes up from the ground. At first I thought it was just my Xbox 360, but after playing it on other Xbox 360s (I think that is how you make that word plural) it turned out to be a rendering error. However the worst thing about the entire game was the text. The text in the game is really small and impossible to read and since you have to read everything that happens in the game this is a big problem. I can deal with bad graphics but not knowing what is going on in a story because the text is so my small is just not right. The only other annoying thing about the game is that you cannot kill people who do not have a weapon and you cannot kill children. It is hard to destroy a village and work towards reaching ultimate evil when they limit who you can kill so you have to be like really rude to them and that takes from the game play, I hate being limited. That is pretty much it for the bad stuff in the game.
It is a fun game and the player can play it over as many times as they want and still find new things. There are a bunch of interesting things that can be found or unlocked within the game. The graphics are pretty bad and hurt the game’s visual aspects. For some reason the text in the game is really hard to read, that happens to be the biggest problem in the whole game. The game limits what characters the player can kill so the player must try to invent news to be evil, or just be a good guy that is still an option, it is the player’s choice. Overall it is an awesome game if you are into the Fable type video games, if not it is a good game I would give it a 3 out 5.

Video Games & Racism, Sex, Violence, Etc.

While doing my reading for this week’s topic the article “Sex in Video Games” cites the results form a poll that was on the What They Play website. Poll was asking parents what it was that they worried that their children might being doing away from home. I found the results to be a little disturbing since “playing Grand Theft Auto” took second place, beating “drinking beer” and “watching pornography”. I do not know what it is that Grand Theft Auto has done that was so bad, that people can consider it worst than pornography and alcohol. Video games seem to draw negative publicity for everything they do. If the game is not racist, then it is selling sex, or it is too violent. There are much worst things in movies than what they depict in Grand Theft Auto or any other video game. In the few video games that do have sexual mini games within them the player never see anything. All the player is doing is pressing the buttons as they flash across the screen. People insist on blowing things out of proportion whenever video games are concerned.

Another topic that was covered in the assigned readings was racism in video games. The article “How My Opinion About Race in ‘Resident Evil 5’ Has Changed” looks at the debate that went on over Resident Evil 5, where people called the game racist because the story depicts a White character is killing Black characters. I thought it was interesting how people got so bent out of shape about this game. In the game’s description it says that it takes place in Africa and anyone who has followed the Resident Evil series know that it is the player’s job to kill the infected humans in order to save their own life. Another reason that confused me about people screaming that Resident Evil 5 was racist, I notice the author mentioned this as well, is that no one said anything about Resident Evil 4. In Resident Evil 4 the player controls another White character and is killing Spaniards who are, when one looks at the scenery in the game, living in a poor rural area just like the Africans. Then when the game came out and it turned out that the player was not killing only Africans people were ok with it. It seems that the masses are ok with killing Spaniards and Whites but not if you are only killing Africans. It appears to me that the non-gamer portion of society want to pick and choose what is racist and what is drowned in strong sexual themes. Sex is ok if it is in a movie, but a side view image of a half naked woman in a video game is going too far and it is ok to murder the poor as long as they are not Black. I feel those are some pretty twisted messages to have our children believing.