Game Design Reviews: Page 4

The Longest Journey: Could be shorter

By Krystian Majewski on May 5, 2008

Recently, I’ve played The Longest Journey by the Norwegian Studio Funcom. It is not to be confused with it’s very different sequel Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The Game Designer responsible is Ragnar Tørnquist and I found out that he was about my age when he began working on the game, which is always quite a shock. The game is supposed to be one of the milestones in the recent development of adventure games. It was praised in almost every source I found and according to many reviews it is one of the best adventures of all time.

The Longest Journey is considered a game especially suitable for women. Even though the main character looks a bit slutty, I must agree.

The game has some extraordinary aspects and I would like to address them. However, if this it the best adventure of all time then the genre has yet many problems to solve.

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Fahrenheit: New Movie

By Krystian Majewski on April 21, 2008

Why are French games often called different in the USA? Fahrenheit is a game by the French studio Quantic Dream. It was released as Indigo Prophecy in the USA. According to Wikipedia it was done to prevent confusion with Fahrenheit 9/11 but wouldn’t this kind of confusion also happen in Europe?

New Movie? I thought I bought a game.

I bought Fahrenheit some time ago and I had just recently the opportunity to finish it. It is a somewhat important title as it is often quoted as being a revolutionary step in the development of the adventure genre. It does raise some interesting questions and I would like to address some of them.

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Experience 112: Puzzle vs. Experience

By Krystian Majewski on April 19, 2008

Recently, there have been some interesting developments in the adventure genre. I believe they are signs of a upcoming (or ongoing) evolution of this genre, which might revive the adventure game or even redefine what we consider a game. One of the new, interesting adventures is called Experience 112 (The Experiment in America, I believe). It is by the French studio Lexis Numérique.

The beginning of the game is the best part. You might want to check out the demo.

Experience 112 feels quite like a nice, shiny French Bande Dessinée: looks good (sometimes), maybe a bit shallow, amazingly clichéd but then some surprising details which will make it just different enough for you to remember it. Today I would like to summarize some of my observations, point out some flaws and talk about what I think are some important lessons.

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Loom: Music as part of gameplay

By Krystian Majewski on January 25, 2008

My cousin is a Jazz pianist. Sometimes I envy him. I am sitting the whole day in front of the computer, coming up with elegant code, intricate game design mechanics and laboriously squeezing every pixel in Photoshop to communicate the desired message, and people will still have such hard time recognizing the value of that work. Meanwhile, he can casually walk up to a piano, sit down and spontaneously create a tune which everybody in a room will instantly understand as “art” and something worth spending time listening to. Maybe this is why I am a bit suspicious when it comes to music, especially music in games. Not that I don’t like music, I do! I especially like my cousin’s music too! I just sometimes find myself thinking I am the only sane person in the world, who does not make such a big deal out of it.

My cousin, Marcin Masecki, doing his thing.

Here are three important facts about music and what is can and cannot do in games:

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Endless Ocean: Games for People

By Krystian Majewski on December 4, 2007

A big challenge for game designers is to open up their games for different target groups, especially for girls and women. However, what I often found that they end up developing games specifically made for female players. Instead of getting games out of their teenage boy niche and creating product which can appeal universally to different people, they end up in yet another niche.

This is the game I have bought instead if Mario Galaxy.

At this point I would like to mention one interesting game I bought just recently (instead of Mario Galaxy) called Endless Ocean. The game fascinates me and I might talk some more about it. Today I will talk about it as a product.

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Desktop Tower Defense: Perfect Job

By Daniel Renkel on July 25, 2007

There is a game that is damn popular, but not really treated as a piece of good game design, but merely a lucky case of good propaganda is HandDrawnGames Desktop Tower Defense. I like to review it because i believe that from a game designers pov (point of view) it is a clever masterpiece.

It probably isn’t the most innovative game out there, the original game concept of Tower Defense has already been popular among RTS mods since end of nineties (e.g. Starcraft), but lately got reincarnated into this very well acclaimed flash game. I would like to talk about what I think is special about the basic game concept of Tower Defense and especially about Desktop Tower Defense.

Three simple and basic but still important steps of good game design have been done right:

Vision as in inspiration (from existing games) and the one-line game idea it should boil down to.
Basics: from knowing your technology to basic game design rules, decissions and their results.
Improvements, that stand out from the crowd.

Basically I don’t want to describe how Tower Defense plays, as i believe everybody has played it already. And if not, just do so, its worth the experience.

This is what it looks like when a newbie loses his first time.

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Hotel Dusk: Play Session Analysis

By Krystian Majewski on July 24, 2007

The last time I was talking about Hotel Dusk, I complained how it uses invisible causality to link the player’s actions to the story dramatically instead of relying on logic. This causes a lot of problems and it is a major design fault. However, the game redeems itself by showing how it’s designers clearly identified their goals and developed the game play accordingly.

(if you have problems with the player, here are the direct links for YouTube and Sevenload)

I did a small experiment inspired by design researcher Gesche Joost, whom I met in my second semester at KISD. She developed a system for analysis of audiovisual rhetoric. Basically, what she did was taking a video and tracking along a timelime every relevant element of that video. Cuts, color, sounds, music, composition, etc. Having this chart as a basis, she could easily expose the rhetorical figures and tricks used in the video. Back then we theorized about how this system might be also applied on interactive media.

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Gran Turismo 4: Cognitive Dissonance

By Krystian Majewski on July 18, 2007

Recently, some game design unrelated research brought me to a certain concept I already knew. After some thinking I finally realized that this special concept is the missing puzzle piece to explain a great game design feature of a game I am very fond of.

“Yay, I won! I am the best! But…wait a minute, what are those A-Spec points?”

The game is Gran Turismo 4 and I really think it is one of the masterpieces of game design. The game design feature I want to talk about are the A-Spec Points and how they motivate the player without limiting him. The concept, which explains the phenomenon is Cognitive Dissonance.

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Sword of Mana: Bad Customization

By Krystian Majewski on July 14, 2007

I have already written about Sword of Mana and how bad it is when compared to Mystic Quest (aka Final Fantasy Adveture), the game it is supposed to be a remake of. I have written how Sword of Mana spoils the story through foreshadowing and how it has an inferior world design. Today I finish the trilogy by looking at how Sword of Mana ‘improved’ the equipment system.

The equipment screen in Mystic Quest. Note how only two numbers indicate the character’s stats. One for the weapon and the other is for the armor. Simple, yet effective – the designers of Sword of Mana simply HAD to mess around with it.

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Sword of Mana: World Design

By Krystian Majewski on July 8, 2007

Recently, I was talking about how bad Sword of Mana is because it foreshadows scripted events. This time I would focus on another curious and fatal difference to predecessor Mystic Quest:

Click here to see the world of Mystic Quest in full resolution.

Mystic Quest is like the NES Zelda: it has no scrolling. The world is divided into separate screens. Sword of Mana uses scrolling to some extent. The “camera” follows the avatar and the world scrolls underneath the avatar as he is moving. Curiously enough Mystic Quests creates a more consistent and believable world. Let me explain the trick:

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