Recently, I went to see the latest stage production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's immortal musical The Phantom of the Opera, based on a horror novel by Gaston LeRoux. I found it refreshing and wonderfully performed, in particular stand-out form was Anthony Warlow in his performance as the Phantom. It was on the trip home from this amazing performance that I got to wondering; with all the films and songs written and performed about this book, why hasn't a game been made?
A Phantom game. Unusual, but an exciting thought. Would you play as the Phantom? Perhaps in parts. Maybe, to progress the story, you would have to play as all three of the main characters: The Phantom, Christine and Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny. For example, in the mirror scene, you could play as the Phantom, and rely on stealth to whisk Christine away under your influence before Raoul (just outside the door) notices your presence. Or you could have a section of reaction timers (like the Atlantica level in Kingdom Hearts II) during Christine's performace in Il Muto or Don Juan Triumphant. Perhaps there could also be a combat stage where you play as Raoul fighting the Phantom... no, wait, I don't like that. I can't bear to see my Phantom hurt!
Mmmm, I'm liking this idea. I'd love to get either Michael Crawford (the original stage Phantom) or Anthony Warlow to voice the Phantom. I can see the opening scenes clearly... having the mask fade into view and have the Phantom voice over Welcome to my lair... many years have passed since the fateful events that transpired here and forged my destiny. But I digress... perhaps the only way to tell you my story is to let you live it...
Then the screen would whoosh out to a white screen, where the game begins and Christine would be introduced. Possibly.
It's not a bad idea. Definitely a keeper! But I fear it would only work if the graphics were phenomenal... maybe a square enix game?
Anyway, that's it for now.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Another game review and reflections
It's been a while since I did any sort of reflections as far as the lectures go. As far as being interesting, my attention has been waning. Same goes for the tutorials. I find myself walking out of lectures and seriously considering not showing up to tutorials because I have better things to do than spend two hours having my opinions rubbished or doodling in my notepad while the lecturer drones on in a monotone over the games she plays with her husband. The only time I think I resurfaced was when the clip from Pokemon was playing.
I miss Penny giving the lecturers. She delivered the information in an interesting manner and I found it easy to comprehend. Because of that, I found it easy to retain the lecture content. Tutorials are still boring me to the teeth. If it wasn't too late in the semester and I had the option, I'd switch out. I often find myself wondering whether Marco actually plays games or just reads about them. You can't really define what it is you get from a game. Here's an example.
I recently got myself a second copy of Kingdom Hearts II, since my first copy was stolen. I restarted it and immediately remembered why I loved it so. The compare/contrast nature of Disney worlds with original characters and those taken from Square Enix's well-known series Final Fantasy give the game it's nostalgic feel. The opening cutscenes give a great abstract look back for those who didn't play the two previous games (yes, two. There was Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the second of which was never released in Australia).
The storyline is possibly it's greatest asset. The epic story of Sora's search for his best friend Riku and desperation to return home to Destiny Isle takes him to places where the most iconic of Disney's characters reside.
The final battle sees Riku and Sora reunited and teamed up against a foe that would see Kingdom Hearts (the final resting place for all hearts) destroyed.
The graphics are beautiful and the music is performed by Japan's best-known popstar - Hikaru Utada. She performs two songs over the two PS2 games, Simple and Clean for I and Sanctuary for II. Both are beautifully written and sung as well as fitting the story wonderfully.
Biased as I am, I'd have to give it a 10/10. It never disappoints me.
I miss Penny giving the lecturers. She delivered the information in an interesting manner and I found it easy to comprehend. Because of that, I found it easy to retain the lecture content. Tutorials are still boring me to the teeth. If it wasn't too late in the semester and I had the option, I'd switch out. I often find myself wondering whether Marco actually plays games or just reads about them. You can't really define what it is you get from a game. Here's an example.
I recently got myself a second copy of Kingdom Hearts II, since my first copy was stolen. I restarted it and immediately remembered why I loved it so. The compare/contrast nature of Disney worlds with original characters and those taken from Square Enix's well-known series Final Fantasy give the game it's nostalgic feel. The opening cutscenes give a great abstract look back for those who didn't play the two previous games (yes, two. There was Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the second of which was never released in Australia).
The storyline is possibly it's greatest asset. The epic story of Sora's search for his best friend Riku and desperation to return home to Destiny Isle takes him to places where the most iconic of Disney's characters reside.
The final battle sees Riku and Sora reunited and teamed up against a foe that would see Kingdom Hearts (the final resting place for all hearts) destroyed.
The graphics are beautiful and the music is performed by Japan's best-known popstar - Hikaru Utada. She performs two songs over the two PS2 games, Simple and Clean for I and Sanctuary for II. Both are beautifully written and sung as well as fitting the story wonderfully.
Biased as I am, I'd have to give it a 10/10. It never disappoints me.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Image Post!
Hey guys, my first post! Testing out how uploading pictures will look. This is an example card for the game. Hazard Cards are Red and Civic Duty cards are Blue, but we haven't exactly decided on card layouts yet. As Amy pointed out, it's not plain obvious if it's hazard or not.
Good thing this is just a test right?
Good thing this is just a test right?
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Invitations and a review
The other two members of my group, Amy and Courtney, will also be posting on this blog from now on. They will also be writing in their own journals, but most of the image work completed in photoshop will be posted on here for convenience. As a courtesy, the posts not done by me (Gemma Sinclair) should not be marked (if it makes it any easier, I can remove them).
Since we haven't done much this week re: assignment, a reflection on this week's lecture is in order. First of all, I have to say that Penny is a far better lecturer. She makes it easy to listen and take in and, most importantly, understand. The lecturer this week (who started to introduce herself but failed to say her name) was awful. I left halfway through because she was going too fast and not explaining anything clearly.
I also have a bone to pick with our tutor. He clearly isn't much help in regards to our assignment and makes us play silly pillow-tossing games at the beginning of class. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a structure of tutorial questions, assignment work, discussion about the last lecture and various help. What we're doing at the moment is footling about and not getting help. Example? In two minutes, we were expected to come up with a concept for a game. The ASSIGNMENT in two minutes!!! Then he kept interrupting us as we were reading out our ideas and finding fault with them, making every idea sound stupid. Example of this was when I was trying to read out the rules and he kept stopping me and asking me to repeat something related which I had said only two minutes before! Surely this is a stupid thing to do. I really hated it. It's rude to interrupt. I'm not sorry for saying this, because I'll expect him to be reading this and learn from it: help the students, don't hinder them. You're there for support, not to shoot every idea down in flames.
Sorry for the rant, but there you have it.
I suppose it's time for another review of a commercial game. This time, I'd like to review a console game, particularly for the nintendo Wii.
Title: Pokemon Battle Revolution.
Style: RTS (real time strategy), turn-based.
Aim: You play as a Pokemon trainer, new to Poketopia; an island in the middle of nowhere, where trainers gather to test their skills against each other in a series of colosseum events. Your aim is to complete all the challenges in all the colosseums and become the world's greatest pokemon trainer.
Personal Opinion:
Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion that the game should get progressively harder, not be dead easy up to a point and then slam you with every nasty attack known to trainerkind. The stadiums I'm referring to are the Sunset and Magma Colosseums (that damn Lopunny! Rawr!).
On the other hand, it is very well reminiscent of the great large console games for Pokemon (for those who remember Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Colosseum from the Nintendo 64). The graphics have been improved for a better look overall and the animations for the attacks have vastly improved with graphic capabilities of the Wii.
The actual battling is brilliant, admittedly I am biased towards the classic RPG. Uploading (or 'copying') my own pokemon to the game made it even more enjoyable.
Rating:
The gameplay can get a bit monotonous and you often find yourself wondering when the hell it is going to end. However, the graphics are wonderful and you can always mute the annoying announcer's voice (if I hear 'Ripped by Roar of Time' one more time, I'm going to throw the Wii remote into the screen!).
Overall, I'd give it 7/10.
Since we haven't done much this week re: assignment, a reflection on this week's lecture is in order. First of all, I have to say that Penny is a far better lecturer. She makes it easy to listen and take in and, most importantly, understand. The lecturer this week (who started to introduce herself but failed to say her name) was awful. I left halfway through because she was going too fast and not explaining anything clearly.
I also have a bone to pick with our tutor. He clearly isn't much help in regards to our assignment and makes us play silly pillow-tossing games at the beginning of class. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a structure of tutorial questions, assignment work, discussion about the last lecture and various help. What we're doing at the moment is footling about and not getting help. Example? In two minutes, we were expected to come up with a concept for a game. The ASSIGNMENT in two minutes!!! Then he kept interrupting us as we were reading out our ideas and finding fault with them, making every idea sound stupid. Example of this was when I was trying to read out the rules and he kept stopping me and asking me to repeat something related which I had said only two minutes before! Surely this is a stupid thing to do. I really hated it. It's rude to interrupt. I'm not sorry for saying this, because I'll expect him to be reading this and learn from it: help the students, don't hinder them. You're there for support, not to shoot every idea down in flames.
Sorry for the rant, but there you have it.
I suppose it's time for another review of a commercial game. This time, I'd like to review a console game, particularly for the nintendo Wii.
Title: Pokemon Battle Revolution.
Style: RTS (real time strategy), turn-based.
Aim: You play as a Pokemon trainer, new to Poketopia; an island in the middle of nowhere, where trainers gather to test their skills against each other in a series of colosseum events. Your aim is to complete all the challenges in all the colosseums and become the world's greatest pokemon trainer.
Personal Opinion:
Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion that the game should get progressively harder, not be dead easy up to a point and then slam you with every nasty attack known to trainerkind. The stadiums I'm referring to are the Sunset and Magma Colosseums (that damn Lopunny! Rawr!).
On the other hand, it is very well reminiscent of the great large console games for Pokemon (for those who remember Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Colosseum from the Nintendo 64). The graphics have been improved for a better look overall and the animations for the attacks have vastly improved with graphic capabilities of the Wii.
The actual battling is brilliant, admittedly I am biased towards the classic RPG. Uploading (or 'copying') my own pokemon to the game made it even more enjoyable.
Rating:
The gameplay can get a bit monotonous and you often find yourself wondering when the hell it is going to end. However, the graphics are wonderful and you can always mute the annoying announcer's voice (if I hear 'Ripped by Roar of Time' one more time, I'm going to throw the Wii remote into the screen!).
Overall, I'd give it 7/10.
Courtney's Fantastic PNG's
Our other member of this group is Courtney (who is feeling a bit left out), but who has risen to the occasion and created some great pictures for our hazard and civic duty cards। Hopefully, he'll register on this site, so he can post the pictures. He has also gone beyond the call of duty and created a security card, with a picture of police or army.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Week Three: The Cheshire Cat's Revenge!
Tomorrow is the big team meeting where we write the mega-important HIGH CONCEPT STATEMENT. Or something like that. Exact wording has never been my strong point. All I know is that Amy expects Courtney and I to be at university at nine tomorrow morning to get this concept committed to paper. One has to wonder if we've waited too long...
Still, we've done a lot of productive brainstorming. That's SURE to help. The ideas about the Hazard and Civic Duty cards are something that I'm really happy about. It's a brilliant idea.
Something that was interesting in pursuing was a sequel to American McGee's Alice. Since I haven't finished this fantastic PC-based game yet, I'm not too sure how it would pan out. I'd like to call it Alice II: The Cheshire Cat's Revenge, as a sort of prequel to Alice. As far as inspiration was and is concerned, it was just 'This is too good to be just one game. They need to make more of it'.
From what I've been brainstorming, it would be the prequel to Alice, during the time that Alice is comatose and not in Wonderland. As Alice is going mad, Wonderland begins to fall more and more under the tyrannical rule of The Queen of Hearts. It's down to the Cheshire Cat (Alice's one hope to save her sanity) to save the remaining characters that are loyal to Alice's imagination and to take them to a safe place.
It will be very similar to Alice, in that the controls will be the same, although the weapons and attacks will be different. Players will be able to utilise the Cat's abilities, such as invisibility and teleportation.
I've had a rather exciting idea of how it could link back to the "first" game. The Cheshire Cat could be forced, in battle with the Queen, to reach out to Alice's cerebral cortex, sending out a kind of S.O.S. This would trigger a kind of time/space warp, where Alice would find herself at the start of the "first" game and discover Cat's 'mangy' appearance. Throughout TCCR, Cat could get progressively thinner as the immense strain/drain on his powers allocated by Alice's imagination wastes his body away.
I quite like this idea and it may warrant further exploration. More on this at a later date..
Still, we've done a lot of productive brainstorming. That's SURE to help. The ideas about the Hazard and Civic Duty cards are something that I'm really happy about. It's a brilliant idea.
Something that was interesting in pursuing was a sequel to American McGee's Alice. Since I haven't finished this fantastic PC-based game yet, I'm not too sure how it would pan out. I'd like to call it Alice II: The Cheshire Cat's Revenge, as a sort of prequel to Alice. As far as inspiration was and is concerned, it was just 'This is too good to be just one game. They need to make more of it'.
From what I've been brainstorming, it would be the prequel to Alice, during the time that Alice is comatose and not in Wonderland. As Alice is going mad, Wonderland begins to fall more and more under the tyrannical rule of The Queen of Hearts. It's down to the Cheshire Cat (Alice's one hope to save her sanity) to save the remaining characters that are loyal to Alice's imagination and to take them to a safe place.
It will be very similar to Alice, in that the controls will be the same, although the weapons and attacks will be different. Players will be able to utilise the Cat's abilities, such as invisibility and teleportation.
I've had a rather exciting idea of how it could link back to the "first" game. The Cheshire Cat could be forced, in battle with the Queen, to reach out to Alice's cerebral cortex, sending out a kind of S.O.S. This would trigger a kind of time/space warp, where Alice would find herself at the start of the "first" game and discover Cat's 'mangy' appearance. Throughout TCCR, Cat could get progressively thinner as the immense strain/drain on his powers allocated by Alice's imagination wastes his body away.
I quite like this idea and it may warrant further exploration. More on this at a later date..
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Card Crisis! The discovery of in-game hazards (and reflections of week 2)
Something that intrigues me is the use of game cards. A lot of board games use them; Monopoly, Jumanji (yes, there was a version released after the film), Trivial Pursuit, etc. It may be an idea to take this idea and apply it in some way to the assignment.
I haven't reflected on the last lecture or so, therefore I should probably cover what we did in Week 2:
Week two, for me, was all about the HLC (or High Level Concept). This is taking an idea for a game and turning it into a solid concept for a game (once I went through these steps, I went back and modified the post about The Crystalweb Chronicles).
It was most interesting and I got a lot out of it, particularly how to structure my ideas to make them viable game plans.
I have to admit, though, I'm not enjoying the tutorials very much. Marco (my tutor) doesn't seem to be explaining things to us in an easy-to-understand manner. Yes, I understand that I have to work at learning and that nothing is going to be very easy. But he asks silly questions and argues against all of our answers. We're not interesting in what he thinks, he asked us what we think. No amount of arguing his point is going to change the mind of a bunch of game-players who have been gaming since they were very young. Maybe it's a case of we play for a hobby and don't see it as a job yet. Being a little more advanced, Marco may have a different viewpoint.
I still don't like it. But that's my opinion and no offence is meant.
I haven't reflected on the last lecture or so, therefore I should probably cover what we did in Week 2:
Week two, for me, was all about the HLC (or High Level Concept). This is taking an idea for a game and turning it into a solid concept for a game (once I went through these steps, I went back and modified the post about The Crystalweb Chronicles).
It was most interesting and I got a lot out of it, particularly how to structure my ideas to make them viable game plans.
I have to admit, though, I'm not enjoying the tutorials very much. Marco (my tutor) doesn't seem to be explaining things to us in an easy-to-understand manner. Yes, I understand that I have to work at learning and that nothing is going to be very easy. But he asks silly questions and argues against all of our answers. We're not interesting in what he thinks, he asked us what we think. No amount of arguing his point is going to change the mind of a bunch of game-players who have been gaming since they were very young. Maybe it's a case of we play for a hobby and don't see it as a job yet. Being a little more advanced, Marco may have a different viewpoint.
I still don't like it. But that's my opinion and no offence is meant.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Design Concepts: The Board (and a review!)
After talking it over with Amy on the weekend (and after playing my brand-new Doctor Who board game, for research purposes, of course!), we came to the conclusion that a circular board, similiar to the one we played the game on, with the path that the pieces follow slowly spiralling into the centre would be a good idea. We'll discuss further artwork concepts with Courtney (who I'm sure is feeling a little left out, given Amy and I live so close to each other and can wander over to each other's place whenever we have a brilliant idea) in a team meeting.
Speaking of my new Doctor Who game, it's about time I stuck in a game review... so here it is!
Game:
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Action Game
Style:
Board game
Design:
The board is hexagonal, a style carried over from the popular BBC1 television show. There are mechanical moving parts as well as a light-up and noise-making TARDIS (the time-travelling machine featured in the show).
Aim of the Game:
Each player is dealt four 'monster cards'. They must then race each other to defeat each of their monsters using regeneration energy and return to their starting space.
Hazards:
Gameplay is made more difficult by the TARDIS, which changes the images on the board through what's known as a 'time continuum shift'. This means that even if you are only a few squares away from a monster, seconds later it could be on the opposite side of the board.
Personal Opinion:
I played this game with Amy Vellnagel, so we both enjoyed the fact it was related to Doctor Who as we are both fans of the sci-fi show. However, those who are unfamiliar with the monsters and creatures from the show could find it slightly confusing.
The actual playing of the game needs to be quick, which I found hampered the game. The board changed every thirty seconds, which was not long enough to make a decisive move. However, this may be better for those who have played it a few times and are comfortable with the short time gap.
Rating:
I really do love Doctor Who and the gameplay was fun, if a little difficult. I'd give it 8/10 and recommend it to other Doctor Who fans who can play it with other fans.
(This game can be found at Gamesworld, North Lakes)
Speaking of my new Doctor Who game, it's about time I stuck in a game review... so here it is!
Game:
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Action Game
Style:
Board game
Design:
The board is hexagonal, a style carried over from the popular BBC1 television show. There are mechanical moving parts as well as a light-up and noise-making TARDIS (the time-travelling machine featured in the show).
Aim of the Game:
Each player is dealt four 'monster cards'. They must then race each other to defeat each of their monsters using regeneration energy and return to their starting space.
Hazards:
Gameplay is made more difficult by the TARDIS, which changes the images on the board through what's known as a 'time continuum shift'. This means that even if you are only a few squares away from a monster, seconds later it could be on the opposite side of the board.
Personal Opinion:
I played this game with Amy Vellnagel, so we both enjoyed the fact it was related to Doctor Who as we are both fans of the sci-fi show. However, those who are unfamiliar with the monsters and creatures from the show could find it slightly confusing.
The actual playing of the game needs to be quick, which I found hampered the game. The board changed every thirty seconds, which was not long enough to make a decisive move. However, this may be better for those who have played it a few times and are comfortable with the short time gap.
Rating:
I really do love Doctor Who and the gameplay was fun, if a little difficult. I'd give it 8/10 and recommend it to other Doctor Who fans who can play it with other fans.
(This game can be found at Gamesworld, North Lakes)
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