Level 6 Assignment 4 Critique/Review

Title & Code of Module                      Communications G30001

Assessment Technique                        Portfolio Of Coursework

Weighing                                             5% (50 divided by 10)

Title                                                     Critique/Review

Guidelines:

The critique/review may be on any topic of the candidate’s choice.

The written review should be 500-700 words long and will form the basis for an oral presentation to the candidate’s peers.

Assessment Criteria:

Choice of topic (10)

Content – research, critical thinking (10)

Correct use of grammar, spelling, punctuation etc (10)

Structure – introduction, body of text, conclusion, appropriate length (10)

Presentation and layout (10)

What are your reasons for critiquing? You are getting marked on your critical skills. Do you know what critical thinking is? Here is a video which discusses the idea of critical thinking. It's a little fast paced but if you watch it through you will have a better understanding of what being critical means.

Uploaded by QualiaSoup on 24 Dec 2009

How do you review critically? Is it enough to just say “it sucks” or “it’s brilliant” without discussing why you think so? How can your readers make an informed decision regarding why you thought something if they cannot read it. When you read a movie review, is it simply a retelling of the plot or is there more to it? Why are sites like http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ so popular? Have you ever disagreed with a reviewer or felt angry when they have written something negatively about a musician or film you liked?

The world of the critical reviewer is changing fast. Gone are the days where we solely relied on a weekly film review show on the TV to determine our cinema choices. Being a movie reviewer isn’t hard with the advent of the internet where we can post our reviews for free. Being a good critical reviewer is a little more difficult. How does a personal attack of the artist’s character or their celebrity status enhance your knowledge regarding the film? How can you criticise constructively? Can you compare the film with an actor or director’s previous work or with other movies within that genre? For example arguing that Barbie The Movie is a movie dripping with schmaltz and sugary sweet emotions which should only be viewed by children”. Well is that not the point of the movie? If you watch a brainless comedy with cheap laughs and little plot aimed at the teen market, well how does it compare with other  brainless comedies with cheap laughs and little plot aimed at the teen market? Some people like those type of movies.

What is your purpose as the reviewer? To help sell more newspapers or to attract followers to your blog? To gain notoriety for being outspoken similar to critics like Perez Hilton or can you give a more thoughtful review similar to Paul Gambaccini, Mark Kermode or Jonathon Ross? Look at issues of music and movie magazines  and read the reviews.


Look up popular reviews on the internet maybe on www.amazon.com or something similar. Is there parts of the review you are reading that you agree with? How can you reference others writing so that it will enhance the authority of your review? Do aspects of any existing reviews online conform more with your own viewpoint? Why is your review going to be more interesting?

Structure

Introduction

How are you going to structure the review? What is your introduction going to be like? You want to get the reader to keep reading, how are you going to get their attention and make them want to read more? How is the introduction going to set up the rest of the review?

Body

What are the main details you want to get across in your review? Are you spending too much or too little time on each point? How can you get what you want to say across clearly. Can you reference other people’s writing to enhance your own correctly?

Conclusion

You want to leave your audience with something to remember. Often this is the last thing they read. It is a term known as recency. This is the place where it is useful to remind your audience what your review was about. You do not want to be approaching new topics in the conclusion but rather strengthening your point.

Seminal Games

These are a handful of the most influential and important games in the development of the games industry, though there are much, much more. So in no particular order:

-        Spacewars

One of the earliest games made, created for use in MIT on the college computers in 1961, it featured two ships on a black screen which could turn, move forward and shoot. The object of the game was to shoot the other ship while avoiding the star in the middle which pulled the ships towards it. The game had no colour or any particularly interesting features bar the ability to teleport your ship away from danger a few times during the game, yet it was extremely popular.

Even today if you find a ported version online somewhere and give it a go yourself (which I highly recommend to get a feel for what games went before today’s games, in fact if you haven’t already you should definitely play all the games on this list, even just for a few minutes.) and you can get it working, as the controls are a little tricky to master at first, play against someone and you will still enjoy it even 50 odd years later.

There are a few reasons for its popularity when it was released first. Number one is no game like it had been made before and it was a relatively simple concept to grasp and play. Another is the theme. It was released during the space race so anything to do with space and the great unknown was going to be popular at the time.

-        Pong

Even if you’ve never played it you’ve more than likely seen or heard of pong. Released by Atari in the early 70’s pong was an extremely popular game which was played on home consoles and in arcades alike. The game was ridiculously simple consisting of two paddles which were just two lines of white squares, and a ball that moved over and back, which was one square, and a “beep” sound when the paddle hit the ball – and that was it. The whole game took a few days to code.

All you had to do was move your paddle up or down to hit the ball and stop it going into the goal behind you. Yet it became a craze and one of the most popular games of its time with competitions being held in arcades and people everywhere playing it. For one reason – it kept a score. It played on our human nature to be competitive.

The game was so simple that anyone could pick it up and play and all you had to rely on was your reactions. This shows how important a tool adding a competitive edge to a game can be, online leaderboards and multiplayer modes to games are all there in modern day games for this reason.

-        Wolfenstein 3D

Wolf 3D was one of the first FPS games released, and featured a “fake” 3D engine. The game looked as if it had 3D models but this was only an effect. Yet the player could move around and explore the areas in the game just as with subsequent FPS games. The game featured an American soldier who has to escape from a Nazi stronghold. This setting was quite controversial and the game was censored quite a bit.

The player begins with a pistol and three lives and must try to escape the compound, shooting enemies as you go. As you progress through different levels you rack up points and find new weapons, unless your health drops to zero which results in losing all ammo and weapons bar your pistol. In each level you could also find treasure and extra lives.

Now on its own that doesn’t seem all that impressive, but consider that this was one of the first FPS games out, and even today a lot of games have lives, a score counter, a variety of weapons for you to find etc. so it really set out the guidelines for all future FPS games to follow.

-        Zork

Zork is a text based game. This means there are no images, no characters to look at, only text to read. Now initially you may wonder how this could make an interesting game to play, but consider a book, the readers imagination makes the book come alive. Much is the same for text based games, you have a limited amount of controls you type in, for example go west, pick up lamp, open door etc. with the game only reading designated commands.

 This type of game is not as common nowadays as it was when Zork was originally released, but text based adventures are still being made today, at a whole new level and I recommend anyone reading this to at least give one a try. What Zork did so well was it showed how engrossing you could make the most basic of settings if the player could interact with a variety of objects and use them in interesting ways to progress to the next area. The only way of getting through Zork was to think outside the box.

Go to this site below for a good introduction to some modern text based games (or interactive fiction) or to play Zork if you so wish.

http://pr-if.org/

-        Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario is possibly one of the most well recognised names in the games industry, I can nearly guarantee if you’re reading this now you have at least heard the name if you haven’t played any of the games (which is unlikely). Super Mario Bros was first released in 1985 by Nintendo, and subsequent games (Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, and Super Mario World) were all largely the same apart from a few extra features and slight improvements in graphics.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer that puts you in control of Super Mario, the small Italian plumber who must pass through the levels in front of him to get to his nemesis Bowser and rescue Princess Peach. Each level see’s Mario jumping from platform to platform, avoiding or jumping on a variety of different enemies and manoeuvring through obstacles. There are also boxes to hit which can give you coins which you collect to get an extra life, or mushrooms which make you bigger and stronger and a flower which lets you shoot fireballs, with the next games in the series adding a few new power ups.

And that’s it. However the gameplay is fast paced and fun and in the more difficult levels can get quite hectic, but in a gradual way, so you can complete the earlier levels and improve as it gets harder and harder. Also there is a nice variety of levels including underwater, underground, cloud levels, and each one (particularly in 3 and World) are beautifully drawn despite the basic graphics. The main positive about this game though is that it’s fun. Even today I could happily pick it up and spend a few hours of my afternoon happily playing away.

Super Mario World

-        Final Fantasy VII

This has been critically acclaimed as one of the best RPG games ever released.

Gamefan mag called it “quite possibly the greatest game ever made”   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_fantasy_7

IGN said “The RPG by which all others are to be measured, FFVII is a cinematic wonder”

http://www.ign.com/games/final-fantasy-vii/ps-494

 Released in 1997 by SquareSoft (now known as SquareEnix) this game introduced the RPG format to Europe and really set the standard of what could be done.

Final Fantasy VII (FFVII) is an RPG that puts the player in control of a band of rebel soldiers who are fighting against the corruption in their city and against a bloodthirsty company that is damaging the earth. The game uses a turn based system, where you pick a move (or attack) for a character, and then have to wait for a bar to fill up before you can choose another action for that same character, but fighting flows quite well. In the game you use “materia” orbs which grant different abilities and powers to customise each person and fight how you want to, and the combat is quite fun and can be very tactical and challenging at times, keeping you on your toes.

The graphics do certainly leave a lot to be desired, even for their time they were not fantastic, but FFVII makes up for it in how it makes you feel. Every character is really fleshed out and you get a really good impression of their personality, everyone has a back story and you learn about everyone which is impressive for a game that has no voice acting in it. You can relate to the characters and they mean something to you in the story, and it is the story that is one of the game’s strongest aspects, it is told beautifully and keeps you hooked the whole way through with plenty of twists and surprises.

The main character, Cloud as well as trying to save the planet, has to deal with his relationship with the people around him and his own dubious past. There are also sub plots going on the whole way through the game and it really ties everything well together. Few games have engrossed me as much into the story of a game.

Also you can explore a huge game world with plenty of hidden surprises and extra activities to keep you busy, and every area feels unique and distinctive in its own way. This is helped in part to the music which sets the tone for each region and event in the game and is an example of how important music can be in a game. Try finding some of the music from the game and just listening to it and seeing what kind of mood it sets.

So if you haven’t played this gem of a game yet I highly recommend doing so if you are any way a fan of RPG games.

Computer game genres

Game genres

·        First person shooter

Example of a generic fps game

A first person shooter or FPS is a very popular genre of game. The game is played through the eyes of the player’s character (as seen below) which is known as first person perspective. Generally the aim of this kind of game is to shoot enemies and navigate your character through the environment around you. It also usually consists of a number of linear levels that you must go through in sequence to get to the end and finish the game.

·        RPG

RPG or role playing games are more popular with hard-core gamers. In these games you control a character and play through a story in a fictional world. Often this consists of lots of exploration and interacting with NPC’s (Non-Person Characters, or characters in the game controlled the game itself). This is also a more personalised experience as most RPGs allow you customise your character or play through the way in a variety of different ways and can be much longer to play through than other genres of game.

·        Platformer

In a platformer game the players’ character usually has to jump between various platforms (hence the name) and avoid obstacles on the way. Super Mario was an early example platformer game, with many others evolving from this such as Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot.

·        Side-Scroller

Side-scroller games were originally very popular in arcade machines, where the player controlled a character had to move through the level rather like a platformer or shoot enemies to progress, while moving from the left of the screen to the right which then drags the screen, scrolling to the next section of the level. The metal slug series are an example of side-scrollers.

Similar to this genre is the top-down scroller which simply flips the orientation, but is otherwise the same although the screen may scroll down automatically such as in the game 1942.

·        Action-Adventure

This genre is very broad and therefore difficult to define. Any game that follows a story for the character to go through and action elements such as combat can be said to fit into this genre.

·        MMORPG

Standing for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game” these games are as their title suggests played online and against hundreds if not thousands of other players. They are basically RPGs were you create your own character and personalise them and then get put into a huge fictional world, the only difference being there are nearly no NPCs (Non Person Characters) here, everyone you interact with is another user. World of Warcraft is an example of an extremely popular MMORPG.

·        Strategy

This simply refers to any game that heavily makes use of strategy elements in its gameplay such as games where you control armies and order them tactically around a battlefield, sometimes building bases or defences. Medieval 2 Total War or  Command and Conquer are good examples.

·        Fighting/beat ‘em up

This genre of game features the player controlling a character who must fight against a variety of opponents, either in one on one combat like in Tekken or against numerous weaker enemies like in Streets of Rage. The players’ character will usually have a repertoire of moves or attacks like high kick, punch etc.

·        Puzzle

Puzzle games like the name suggests are a game that either is a series of fun and challenging puzzles that the player must solve, or an action adventure game that has number of challenges blocking progression throughout the game. The Professor Layton series of games on the Nintendo DS are a popular example of puzzles games.

·        Simulation

Any game that tries to simulate a real-life activity accurately can be classes a simulation. However it must try to simulate realism, for example Burnout Paradise, a racing game featuring unrealistically fast cars which drive around on streets full of other cars is an arcade style racing game, whereas Gran Turismo 5, a circuit racing game where every car is an exact replica of its real-life counterpart and the cars handle as much like they do really as the developers could make it is a racing simulator. There are also various flight and train simulators around.

Adding one piece of equipment to a car in Forza Motorsport 4

To conclude:

As you can see many of these genres can overlap and a game can be in more than more genre. Also this is not a definitive list of genres as you can break many of them down further into sub-genres, or add others such as driving or sports but most of these are fairly self-explanatory so I’ve left them out.

Technological Influence on the Games Industry

Uploaded by IGNentertainment on 8 Mar 2011

As the consoles and computers on which games are played have improved over the years, the limit to what a game can achieve has been pushed further and further. Games have not only improved their graphics but have become bigger and more complicated as machines now have greater processing power. However this is only one aspect of games that has improved due to new hardware. Any new machine out, be it a faster PC or a smart phone, opens new possibilities for games.

As machines became smaller in size portable consoles such as the Gameboy became possible and today the Nintendo DS combines this portability with a touchscreen feature. Also the capability of smart phones to be able to play bigger games than was possible on any older handsets has really opened a new market for games designer, in particular apps such as Angry Birds have had phenomenal success worldwide.

Further again the Ipod and Ipad have added motion sensors to add a whole new dimension to what game designers have to play around with. Now in addition to whatever core gameplay they had in mind they can incorporate various touch activated commands along with movement of the device to make entirely new gaming experiences.

Yes you look silly but it works...

Even 3D has made its way into games recently as some console games have options to display in 3D on 3D capable TVs, and the Nintendo 3DS having a form of image projection, while not entirely 3D itself, is still impressive on a handheld console. This just proves that with every new advancement in technology games embrace it and progress further so it’s always a good idea to keep up to date with any new upcoming technologies.

Online games are also beginning to replace games that would normally be single player and just on your own machine now that more and more players have better internet connections allowing them to all play together either against each other or cooperatively and really makes games more of a community.

                                                     Uploaded by AresBrutus on 21 Dec 2007

Games Reviews

One important aspect of studying and creating games is the ability to correctly review and critique existing games, so that eventually when you come to make your own games you can apply these techniques to your own games to improve them via a process of analysing your game, making a report, and applying any changes you feel necessary. This is how you test and refine your game and remove any bugs and errors it might have.

Some terminology used in game reviews:

·        Gameplay

This simply covers how the gameplay mechanics of the game work, basically what you do as your character in-game. The reviewer will look at things such as is the gameplay balanced or too difficult or easy, and whether it is interesting enough to keep you playing for hours or whether it’s repetitive and not engaging

·        Visual

On the right is a computer generated image of the character in L.A. Noire

This cover how the game looks and how “pretty” or impressive the graphics of the game are. Note that high quality and realistic graphics aren’t a necessity, with games such as Okami, and Geometry Wars using nice art styles and colour schemes to really suit their game and make it stand out.

Geometry Wars

·        Story

Fairly self-explanatory this covers how well the story is constructed and whether it engages the player or even has any real depth or purpose. Many multiplayer games for example do have single player options with a generic story to play through but so much time has gone into the multiplayer aspects of the game that the story is nothing exceptional, such as is the case in Battlefield 3.

·        Audio

This area is how well the in-game audio adds to the gaming experience, via music during gameplay or menus, ambient sounds in the background (e.g. wind, running water, traffic) character voices and any sounds of any kind that appear in the game. This is often overlooked but audio can be a major part of getting your player immersed into your game and bad audio can really hamper a game. For example if you are playing a game and your character must talk to a lot of in-game characters and they are badly voiced and sound ridiculous, you won’t take the game seriously.

·        Polish

This refers to the level detailed involved in finishing the game off. A highly polished game will have few bugs, all aspects of the game will be finished to high level, and a great attention to detail (this could be something as for example a kitchen in a level having all the usual utensils and equipment you would usually find, and say a pot boiling on a cooker.) These are small things but really make a game come alive.

Notice all the background and miscellaneous object in the room 

·        Replay value/Replayability

Some games, particularly story driven games usually don’t have much replay value, in that after you finish the game there is no incentive or desire to want to play it again. Some ways to improve this is to have multiple ways to play through the game, or different story endings for the player to get, or make the game continue on after the main story is completed, e.g. The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim. Multiplayer games usually don’t have an issue with replay value unless the gameplay gets boring after a while and tops you wanting to come back to play it.

·        Bugs

Any errors or glitches in the game that shouldn’t be there, such as holes in the floor you can fall through, cut scenes or story objectives not loading when they should, A.I. not behaving correctly (e.g. enemies not shooting at you in a FPS) or complete crashes that shut your game down are all bugs which ruin a game and all rest of the work done as they ruin immersion and can make a game unplayable at times. They can be subtle as well for example out of sync voice acting, when you are talking to a character in a game who is saying something but their lips are moving randomly so it feels like a badly dubbed film.

·        Fun Factor

Very simple but very important, how fun is this game? The whole point of games is to enjoy playing them so if the gameplay is repetitive, there is no substantial story, and it is full of bugs, how fun can be it to play? This is usually an overview of all the aspects of the game.

·        Rating

Reviews all rate games with their own particular system, for example marks out of ten, with 6 or 7 being good to average games, 9+ being excellent games, stars from 1 to 5, or any similar representation usually with a quick overview of the other heading explained above.

Development of computer game analysis

When computer games first came into existence they were extremely basic, consisting of only a few pixels on a screen that the player could control, and they ran mainly on huge college institute computers. Over the years they have moved from these humble beginnings to filling up arcades full of machines, to being a part of nearly most households.

Games themselves have progressed with higher quality graphics, better gameplay mechanics etc.. However this is not the only way that they have evolved. Look back at earlier games and they are either aimed mainly at children, such as Super Mario, or at teenagers and young adults as they are either violent combat games such as Mortal Kombat or some kind of action game.

Mortal Kombat

For the most part, most of society has looked own on games as a form of media, seeing them more as a toy than a form of art such a film or television. But in recent years games have matured, bringing in more adult themes, and not in a gaudy or childish way. Characters are fully fleshed out with backstories, emotions, traits and you really get a sense of who they are.

Bioshock

Indeed some games now have scripts and story lines to rival that of many movies, for example Metal Gear Solid 4 which was extremely popular and got great critical acclaim when it was released, and are trying to cater for a wider audience, moving away from the stereotypical image of a gamer being someone who’s slightly overweight, bearded and plays games alone in a dark room.

Not your typical gamer any more

That type of gamer is still catered for, and many games released are still aimed at children or family gaming, particularly on Nintendo’s Wii console, just as movies are targeted at certain audiences. However for all this gaming still has some of the stigma surrounding it, and is still not taken as seriously as say film for the moment.

Technology being researched that reads your brain signals

One trick up the sleeve of gaming though is that it is evolving. As new technology is released games instantly start utilising it and as games are interactive there is much more you can do with new hardware than film or television can, for example the Kinect on the Xbox 360 tracks the players movement, removing the need for controllers, and there are a number of new technologies on the horizon which could have huge implications for the future of gaming.

Ludology

Ludology

What is Ludology?

Ludology is the rather off-putting term given to the study of games, the people who play games, and how games feature in our society.

Genres and terminology

So let’s start at the beginning here, what is a video game exactly? A game allows you (the player) to usually control a virtual character, who has to face challenges or navigate puzzles or similar obstacles to progress through levels in the game to reach the end. Now that is a very basic outline of the structure of games and most modern games add story and narration and various other elements, but at their core most games follow it.

If you are unfamiliar with games or perhaps don’t play them very often here are some important terms which you may hear a lot

-The Player / Player Character: This refers to the person or character that you control in the game,                                who is usually the protagonist or main character of the game.

-HUD: This stand for Heads Up Display, and it refers to all the on screen information you see when playing the game, for example life bars, time remaining to complete a level, maps.

-Menu: Games usually have a few menu’s in the game such as the start menu, which gives you the option to start a new game, load a saved game, change game options, or quit the same the game along with other choices depending on the game. Other menus include pause menu when you have paused the game and.

-Cut Scenes / In-Game Cinematic: This is a small section of the game, usually between a few seconds and a couple of minutes long where the player loses control of the game, and gameplay is replaced with an animation or movie that usually tells a part of the games story or shows the player where to go.

-UI / User Interface: The means by which the player and the game interact with each other. This consists of two parts. The on screen information the game displays to the user, prompts, on screen messages, which tell the user what to do, and on the other side the buttons or keys the user presses, moving a joystick, pressing a screen or any kind of input to the game.

-Level: A level in a game is a section or part of the whole entity. Games are mostly broken down into levels, with the player starting at the first level or level one, and upon reaching the end of level one then level two is loaded and so on.

-Credits: This is a list of all the people and companies involved with the creation and publishing of the games, which is usually displayed after you finished the game.

-Genres: Each game produced will fall into a certain genre (much like films have comedies, action films etc.) with each one having the player interact with the game in a different way. Examples of these genres in games include FPS (or first person shooter) Puzzle or RPG (role playing game). In the next section I’ll go through a full list of these and explain each one.

Types of Gamers

There are typically two types of gamer (or people who play games). People who might spend a small amount of time playing games and who like a game to be easy to pick up and play without having hours of story to sit through and who don’t like complicated controls to get used to would be considered “casual gamers”.  These players consist of a large percentage of the market however due to machines like the Nintendo Wii suiting this kind of gamer.

“Hard-core Gamers” spend much more time playing games, usually every day and prefer an engrossing story to get into and tend to dislike simplified controls and gameplay (the more difficult and challenging the better). Also these players are usually much more competitive, spending a lot of time competing online in games such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty Black Ops against each other. This kind of gamer usually prefers the Xbox 360 or PS3 consoles or PC gaming as opposed to the Wii or other handheld devices.

Company Involvement

First Party Companies are companies that own the platform on which a game was made, such as Sony who own the PS3, and they may also develop their own games for their machine, as Nintendo do. The main First Party Companies are Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Third Party is a company that isn’t owned by the platform owner, and who doesn’t own the platform themselves, but who makes a game for the platform, often multiple platforms. For example EA are a Third Party Company that makes games for a variety of platforms such as PS3 Xbox 360 PC Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP etc.

The people who make the game

Game development companies consist of teams of people with different skills who work together to produce games, which has come a long way from the days of someone designing and creating a game in their bedroom. In larger companies there will obviously be more staff and larger groups of people working together and for example loads of artists with one head artist but this is a list of the main jobs:

-       Game Designer: This person will design the core elements of the game, and how the game will be played. Usually the other members of the team will consult with this person about how to make their part (e.g. the art style) fit into the idea of the game.

-     Programmer: The programmer writes the code or the software behind the game that lets the game actually work.

-    Modeller: Working closely with the artists the 3D modeller makes models of characters and locations in the game from drawings by the artists, usually first in clay before making 3D models on a PC.

-        Artist/Graphic Designer: The artist draws concept art of characters and areas from the game, based on the ideas of the game designer. These will then be made into models which eventually will become parts of the game.

-    Sound Engineer/Designer: An often overlooked part, the sound of a game, be it ambient noises or sound effects, or a moving or memorable soundtrack is an important part of any game. This person will record needed sounds depending on the needs of the game, as well as coming up with music for the game. The Final Fantasy series of games always have a great score of music accompanying each game, written by composers and performed by an orchestra.

-    Writer: As games have developed over the years and begun to deal with more adult or complicated topics and scenarios they have had more and more complex plot lines and stories behind them. To facilitate this writers are hired to come in and write the narration for the game (how the story is told to the player).

-        Localisation Team: With games being released all over the world when a particular game is made it must be able to be played in a vast amount of countries and languages, so the localisation team is in charge of this. In addition to changing the original language of the game they may also have to edit certain parts that may have religious or cultural implications in a certain country.

To see what the industry is like in Ireland right now and to keep up with new events happening check out the site below:

http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/home/