Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count – Darfur is Dying - 472
America Army - 374

Group – 11: 00

Darfur is Dying

Darfur is dying is an ethical game which is free to play over the internet at www.darfurisdying.com. The purpose of the game is to raise awareness of the current crisis in Darfur. It was released back in April 2006 and was created by mtvU.

The idea of the game is to give you a brief idea as to what day to day life is like for a Darfur family who have been displaced and are now living in a refugee camp. The game starts by allowing you to choose a member of the family to play as; when this has been done to game takes you into your first task, collecting water. You have to get from your camp to the well to collect water without being seen by the Janjaweed militia. The Janjaweed militia patrol the area in jeeps and will chase after you if you are spotted. If you are captured the game will inform you about what has happened to your character, and then you will be given the chance to play again as another member of the family. To help you avoid the Janjaweed militia you can hide behind rocks and tall plants. Once you have collected the water and got it back to camp, the game will take you into the second task, the running of the camp Here the game turns into a management game. The player has a top down view of the camp and has to use the water that they have collected to water crops and use it to create building materials such as bricks to build huts. As you play the water will run out and you will have to go back out and collect more water. Also in the game, your camp can come under attack from the Janaweed militia; you can stop this from happening by clicking on the Take Action Now button, which will allow you to visit websites, which aim to help people in Darfur. The ultimate goal is to keep the camp running for seven days.

The aim of this game is to tell you about the hardship and suffering currently being endured by families in Darfur, and although I feel it does raise the issue of the situation out there to anyone who didn’t know, which can only be a good thing, the game is let down by poor design and gameplay, which may put some people off from playing it. The game does attempt to draw the player into signing petitions and visiting websites that aim to help, but how much difference is that really making.

Darfur is dying is a game trying to raise awareness, which is does. But I felt I would have learnt just as much or maybe even a little bit more with just a well designed website.

America’s Army

America’s Army is a First Person shooter, multiplayer, P.C online game. It is developed and published by the U.S Army. It was first released on 4th July as America’s Army: Recon and has had 20 different versions released since then, with the latest being America’s Army: Special Forces (Overmatch).

The idea of America’s Army is to give potential recruits a chance to see what life is like for a U.S soldier, from the training to fighting the war on terrorism.

The main emphasis of the game is on multiplayer, but to get to the multiplayer maps you have to complete a series of training levels. There are a number of different training missions that can be completed, but to get into the game, basic training must be completed. There are other training missions in which the player can expand their U.S army career. There are numerous training missions which include airborne training and Combat Medic Training. Once the training is complete, the player can enter America’s Army multiplayer maps. Once here they can choose to play as a U.S soldier or a member of the Special Forces.

America’s Army uses the term Rules of Engagement, this is a term used in the game to encourage the player to act as if they were playing for real in the U.S army. The game will reward you with honour points, which are basically experience points. You get rewarded for actions such as completing missions, healing injured team mates, and killing enemies. You can also lose honour points by killing your own team mates, and failing mission objectives. If you lose too many honour points you are put in a virtual jail, and can be banned from playing.

I feel that this game is a good idea; it uses modern technology to encourage young people to sign up for the U.S Army. America’s Army recruiters themselves have said that the game is designed as a low cost recruitment tool. It will also gives potential recruits a chance to see what life is like in the U.S Army. It will also give them the chance to see what the training is like in the army, and the different types of careers that are available in the U.S Army.

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count – 972

Group – 11:00



World of Warcraft. What’s it all about?

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). It was released early in 2005 and was developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.

Before I go into the gameplay of WoW, I think I should explain what a MMORPG is first. An MMORPG allows you to assume the role of a character that you have created in a virtual world with other peoples created characters. MMORPGs take a lot of their characteristics from Role - Playing Games (RPG). These include:

Traditional Dungeons and Dragons style of gameplay e.g. taking on quests, killing monsters etc.

Character development. Character can be levelled up after gaining experience points

Being able to join a guild or clan, so quests can be carried out by yourself and friends.

An economy within the game, e.g. being able to trade items

Finally, with most MMORPGs there is a fee to pay every month to continue playing the game. This also applies for WoW. When you purchase the game, which can be brought for as little as £9.99 now, you receive a months free trial, then after that you have to pay a monthly subscription which costs somewhere in the region of £7 to £9 a month.

So what’s WoW all about then? You start the game by creating a character. In WoW there are eight races to choose from. These eight races are split into two opposing factions, the Alliance and the Horde. The alliance consists of the humans, dwarves, night elves, gnomes, the Horde consist of the orcs, trolls, the tauren, and the undead. Each race has their own good and bad points, but you should find that no one race is far more superior to the other. Once you have created your character you can then begin to explore the huge environment that WoW has to offer. The basic gameplay mechanics of WoW are:


Fighting

In WoW you can fight creatures, this will help you gain experience points. Also this will help if you have a profession in the game. You can gather useful items from the dead creature. E.g. you can choose to be a leatherworker, so you can skin the creature and use the skills as a leatherworker to create new items e.g. armour. You may create items which you do not need. In this case you can give these items to guild members (if part of a guild), or you can auction them off in one of the auction houses.

You may also decide to battle other players; this can be done in Player v Player (PvP) realms.

As with most games, going into battle will probably see your character killed every now and then. When you do die in WoW you will respawn as a ghost in the nearest graveyard. You then have a number of choices as to what you can do. If you are part of a guild, and there is a healer character, they may choose to bring you back to life. If this is not the case, you can run back to find your body and respawn, or you can respawn back at the graveyard but doing this will weaken you for a short period of time. Also when you die in WoW the durability of your items will decrease. These will need to be fixed by a non playable character for a small fee.

Exploration

The virtual world within WoW is huge, but it can all be explored by foot. You will also find that when you start to explore new areas you will gain experience points, making exploration a key part of the game. As you continue to play the game, you may find yourself needing to get from one point on the map to another in a short amount of time. This is when you can use one of the flying creatures to take you to where you need to go.

Taking on various quests

This is what you will find yourself doing most of the time while playing WoW. Quests are given out by computer controlled characters. They are easy to spot because they are the characters with the big explanation marks above their heads. Some quests in the beginning of the game will only require yourself to complete them, but as you go further into the game, you may have to team up with others to complete quests. Once you have completed a quest, you will gain experience points. You may also acquire new items and explore new parts of the game world where you have never been before.

Gaining experience points

As I have mentioned, many activities that you do throughout the game will gain you experience points. These experience points will then be used to help you level up. The more you level up, the better player that you become e.g. being able to acquire new and more powerful weapons. Currently in WoW, the highest level that you can get to is level 60.


Pros and Cons of WoW

WoW gets a lot of abuse thrown at it by some people, because they seem to think that all people who play WoW are social retards, who have no lives and play it 24:7.

Pros

It has a huge amount of content for the player to explore

It is another way of meeting new people

Gets people playing together, such as friends and even families.

Releasing new content by downloadable patches

Cons

Have to pay a monthly subscription

It can get repetitive

It can be very addictive, and it can take over your life (not everybody’s though)

I hope this has been an informative description of WoW, which will allow you to make your decision on whether to join the other seven million people who also play WoW.

Another Guitar Hero Review

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count – 240

Group – 11:00

Guitar Hero

Do you find yourself playing air guitar when you hear your favourite song? If so, then this is the game for you, with some old classic songs and some new, this will appeal to the young and old who dream of being a rockstar.

Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix Music, published by Red Octane and released on the 4th July for the Playstation2.

The brilliance of this game is the controller; it’s in the shape of a guitar. It consists of five coloured buttons, a flipper which is used for strumming and a whammy bar.



The idea of the game is to press the coloured buttons in time with the music.



On the game screen, there is a scrolling fret board, which have various coloured notes on it. Each one of these colours represents one of the coloured buttons on the guitar, you have to hold down the buttons while scrumming with the flipper as the coloured notes move up the fret board.

There are three different game modes to get you playing, Career, Quick Play and Multiplayer. In career mode, you go through the different songs, unlocking new songs, guitars and characters as you progress. In quick play, you can play any song that you have unlocked on the varying difficultly settings. Finally, you can play against a friend in multiplayer.

With some great graphics, this game will keep you hooked until you have it mastered.

What have I learnt so far

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count – 248

Group – 11:00

What have I learnt so far?

So, what have I learnt so far in games reviewing, quite a lot actually. That is not what I thought I’d be saying when I first started this module; I say this because at first I thought I’d started doing English lessons all over again.

When it actually came to writing a review, I had a brief idea what I was doing; the techniques that have been taught to help have been very helpful. These include the telegram technique, it’s not an elephant and Kipling’s poem. The one technique that I use the most is Kipling’s poem, who, where, what, why, when and how. I find this helps me plan out what I need to include in my review. I am also getting used to free writing.

I have also learnt a lot about editing my piece of work, one piece of editing that I always do now is eyeballing, getting someone else to read through my work to point out any mistakes. I am always surprised by the mistakes that I make and miss when reading back through my work.

Lastly there are Buzz Words which can be included in a review; these are words or phases which can be included and are used to impress.

I have learnt a lot, but I fell there is more to learn myself, I need to make my reviews more interesting as at the moment I feel that my reviews are a little boring.

Games Review

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count - 249

Games Review

Pong

Well, what can I say about Pong. It’s where gaming started, but how it started out life is more complicated then you might think.

Back in 1972 Atari was founded, and its first release was Pong. It was a huge success when it was first released as an arcade game in a small bar. Within two months Atari was producing hundreds of Pong arcade machines and then went on to produce Home Pong. This is when a problem arose; a man named Ralph Baer claimed to have the patent to pong. He claimed that one of the founders of Atari had seen his idea at a trade show. If the case had gone to court the damage would had been huge to Atari, but they settled out of court, paying $700,000 for the license to the game.

Pong is simple to play. On the screen there are, two paddles, a ball, and that’s it. You take control of one paddle and the idea is to bat the ball back, by moving your paddle up and down, and get it past your opponents paddle. If you do, then you score a point, and if your opponent does the same to you, then they gain a point. There are no 3D graphics, and its all in black and white, and that’s all there is to it. So put down your latest game with its 3D graphics, and go back to where gaming started, with a game of pong.

Games Review

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count - 237

Games Review

Minesweeper

Minesweeper is aimed at the casual gamer, and is mainly played just as a quick fix of gaming.

The idea of minesweeper is to discover all of the mines on the playing field in the quickest time, without actually uncovering them. If one of the mines is uncovered then it’s game over.

Minesweeper offers different modes in which the game can be played, beginner, intermediate, expert and custom. The custom game allows you to customise the playing field, by adjusting the height and width, and amount of mines in the playing field.

To play minesweeper you have to uncover the squares on the playing field, to do this you click a tile with your mouse. This will either have a mine under it which means its game over or it will have a number under it, this is a clue as to where the mines are located. If it has a number under it, then that is how many mines there are in the eight tiles surrounding it. Minesweeper also gives you some useful tools to locate the mines. If you suspect that under a certain tile there is a mine, you can put a flag on that square to mark it by right clicking the tile; if however you are not sure about a tile then you can place a question mark on top of it by double clicking the right mouse button.

Games Review

Matthew Battison

msb1@bolton.ac.uk

matts-games-reviewing.blogspot.com

Word Count - 248

Games Review

Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix Music and published by Red Octane and released on the 4th July in Europe for the Playstation2 priced at £49.99 (Including Guitar). When you purchase the game you get a controller in the shape of a guitar, which consists of five coloured buttons, a little flipper which is used for strumming and a whammy bar.

Guitar Hero is a rhythm game, the idea is to hit the coloured buttons when they move up the screen. There are four different difficulty modes, these range from easy to expert. The game consists of 30 different songs to choose from which range from old Black Sabbath songs to modern day songs e.g. Franz Ferdinand.

There are three different gameplay modes, in career mode the idea is to complete songs and move your character through different venues, as you complete songs your character is given money, which can be used to unlock new characters, new songs and new guitars. In quick play you can pick any song that you have unlocked and play it. Multiplayer allows you to compete against another player. The game has good in game graphics, while playing a song, your player is joined on stage by a vocalist, a bass player and a drummer as well as a crowd, which react to how well you are playing the song. So with 30 songs, unlockable characters and an expert mode to master, there is plenty to keep you occupied.