BlindLuke's Blog - Jan to Mar 15 (1 follower)
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Mar29
Percentage goalsPermalink
One of them is right there on my stat page. 60% completion before the end of the year. This means that I have to find 160+ trophies somewhere in the games I've already started. Finishing Heavy Rain and Castlevania should get me 40 trophies closer to the goal, Mass Effect, which is next on the playlist - probably 20 more. Then comes the tricky part - I can't see myself not starting the two remaining parts of the trilogy as soon as I'm finished with the first one. Hopefully, when I'm done, I'll still be about 100 trophies behind the target. Thirty should come out of Trine and LEGO HP 5-7, twenty out of Red Dead Redemption. As soon as I get my LittleBigPlanet box back, I'll add another twenty to the list. All in due time.

The other goal is to get rid of the games that I've barely started. I could state the goal as having no <10% completed games on the profile, but this seems unreasonable. A better goal would be to have no more than five games in the 0-10% range, then - no more than three, and then, I'll start extending the range. A desired final goal would be to have no more than three games below 25% completion rate. Initial targets: Mass Effect (currently 4%), Red Dead Redemption (2%), ICO (6%), Stealth Inc. (8%), Dark Souls (7%).
Posted by BlindLuke on 29 March 15 at 20:38 | There are no comments on this blog - Please log in to comment on this blog.
Mar22
A list of waiting boxesPermalink
I have a sad habit of collecting games at a rate that greatly exceeds my ability to play them. This leads to a pile of boxes, full of discs that have yet to see the inside of my Playstation. As the first step is always admitting that you have a problem, here is a list of games still waiting to be started.

Bioshock: Ultimate Rapture Edition
Fallout 3: GOTY
Prince of Persia
Dragon Age: Origins
X-COM: Enemy Unknown
The Bureau: X-COM Declassified
Ni No Kuni
Remember Me
Beyond: Two Souls
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 3
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Motorstorm: Apocalypse
GRID 2
Grand Slam Tennis 2
Killzone 3

Some of them will have to wait a while. I don't see myself playing Fallout, GRID or Motorstorm any time soon. As for the rest, some of the short ones are tempting, but the current plan is to bring at least three of the games I've already started out of the 0-10% zone before I start some new titles. The obvious candidates are ICO, Stealth Inc. and one of the big ones: Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim.
Posted by BlindLuke on 22 March 15 at 20:34 | There are no comments on this blog - Please log in to comment on this blog.
Mar15
Child of Light impressionsPermalink
Child of Light is a strange game. It has an excellent comabt system, varied environments, stunning visuals, and all of this is attached to 10-12 hours of gameplay. In an old Final Fantasy game, this could be the moment when the world ends. The final combat encounter end with what seems to be a victory, and, just then, the opposing force laughs, escapes, and the world crubles around you while you escape with your life. And then the game begins anew.

Nothing like this happens here. The game ends in an elegant way, and if there is something that could be considered a missed opportunity, it's the fact that your companions don't play a larger part in the story. The rest is excellent. I only regret that I did not play the game on the highest available difficulty setting. This would add to the length of the gameplay, and would push me to explore the combat system even more. I'm sure this is how I will approach my second playthrough.

I have a strange feeling that the second wave of UbiArt framework games (including this and Rayman Legends) was primarily aimed at the WiiU. It's already a known fact about Rayman Legends, but Child of Light uses a moving cursor mechanic in similar ways, and my guess would be that the best (and maybe the intended) way to play it would include the use of the WiiU gamepad. Unfortunately, I could not confirm my suspicions - the only development fact I was able to find is the note that the game was developed by people who have just finished the work on FarCry 3. Which is quite interesting.
Posted by BlindLuke on 15 March 15 at 13:58 | Last edited on 15 March 15 at 13:59 | There are no comments on this blog - Please log in to comment on this blog.
Mar01
Gaming progress - February 2015Permalink
The hours:

28.75 hours total, which gives about 7h 10m per week (Monday - Sunday, 4 weeks total)

The games:

Sly 3 - from start to finish, all trophies except one (challenges) - 16h
Heavy Rain - from start to about 75% of the story - 7h
Wipeout HD - campaign progress, some online play - 6h

Progress towards year goals:

Finish more games: 3/12 - 25% (+1)

No other progress.

What next?

I've started running again. Not all the workouts will compete directly with the hours spent playing, but I think that my average will drop to about 5h/week. This gives me twenty hours of gameplay. Considering that I'll spend about five of them finishing Heavy Rain, I have room for one other game in March. Child of Light? Castlevania: LoS? ICO?
Posted by BlindLuke on 01 March 15 at 21:21 | There are no comments on this blog - Please log in to comment on this blog.
Feb22
Finding riddles in a dungeonPermalink
Over the last few days, I thought about puzzles in the game. In games like Braid and Portal, you cannot separate the puzzles from the gameplay. Games like Professor Layton or Myst are nothing but a collection of puzzles. Somewhere between games in which you solve riddles by playing the game, and games in which you complete the game by solving all the riddles, is a place for games with an established game mechanic and some mechanically unrelated puzzles added to the mix.

Imagine a shooter game in which you find a chess puzzle lying on the ground. This intuitively seems a terrible idea. The core game mechanic is something completely unrelated to the idea of solving puzzles, and a chess puzzle requires some knowledge of a completely different game. It would be just as bad to include trivia questions. And so, I can make two notes for myself. The puzzles should stand on their own, and they don't have a place in a game that requires only precision and dexterity.

Let's say that the game is a tactical, squad based shooter. The player finds a math based puzzle on the floor. There is nothing wrong with the scenario, assuming that solving the puzzle is not necessary for the player to proceed with the game. That's another thought - the progress of the player cannot stop because of his inability to solve a puzzle that is something mechanically different from the game itself. Either the puzzle must be trivial (and now it serves only as a means to control the pace of the game, like the Uncharted puzzles), or it must be optional.

Let's say that the player, still within the squad based shooter example, finds an audiolog, like the ones introduced in Bioshock. Before he can listen to the log, he needs to solve the puzzle. The puzzle does not impede the progress, it is optional, it can make sense within the game world. There is only one problem - the player is deprived of the reward for finding the log. He went out of his way, he paid attention to his surroundings, he found the tape in a corner, yet there is no reward. There is only the award for completing the puzzle - the decrypted audio log.

It seems that I can add another observation to the list - the puzzles cannot be hard to find, unless I can think of a way to reward the player for the act of finding the puzzle itself.
Posted by BlindLuke on 22 February 15 at 22:44 | There are no comments on this blog - Please log in to comment on this blog.
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