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.