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.