week 6

Gameplay to me is how easy it is to get into the mood of playing a game, or how addictive that game becomes. I beleive that the rules of gameplay change from genre to genre and the the rules change depending on the person also. At the end of the day its impossible to please everybody, but its not impossible to make it inseresting enough to get the majority of people to play it.
In relation to who is the leading lights in games design, with 3 new consoles just arrived or about to arrive i.e xbox 360, nintendo wii and playstation 3 is it not too soon to say who will become the leading lights in games design? and is that not more important than who is leading at the moment. For instance as the xbox 360 has been out for a little while that will obviously have a larger following that the playstation 3 , so as for next gen games design the future and leader is undecided. The development of a game is and should never be the responcibility of a singular person, if this ever became the case then that game may be doomed before its launched. If a single person makes a game that means that there is only that persons style and experiences inputted into that game never mind the ammount of time and stress upon that person.
To me the most important thing to me when i play a game is relation, if i can relate to a game or a charecter, atmosphere etc within a game it make that game alot more fun for me than a game i know absolutly nothing about , this also relates to why you buy a game and how advertisement affects what you expect from a game.

week 5

The biggest problem that reviews especially magazine reviewers have is time, as stated in keiron gillen's workblog, he picks up the point that there simply is not enough time to think and find out why for example games are buggy, or why the voice of a charecter is not in sync with the movement of their lips. This is because they are forced to find quick faults to point ot without first truly understanding why their there in the first place. This makes for a very poor way of reviwing a game but at the same time do people really want to hear "well they tried their best"?. i think that a better way to review a game is by actually listening to some body who has played it thoughroughly and can give an overall score for the game i.e (10/10). For instance the readers review of project gotham racing 3 has alot more of a personal language to it, therefore if you can relate to that person and they like the game subcontiously your going to think of well in that case il like this game too. NGJ is a form of writing about a game but as though describing everything thats happening in the conversations with other charecters for example, yet things thats happening in real life too "at this point my girlfreind popped her head into the study". This way of writing to me seems a really individual approach and shows how passionate the individual is about a particualr issue, this way the reader knows everything they know about the topic at hand, I really like the idea of NGJ i find it keeps me interested in reading. another form of writing i can think of in game walkthroughs these give a outline of the story of a game and much information, but will allways lack notes of the graphical parts of games and almost allways lack personality. the problems with games reviewers that they have little time to produce a review therefore they rush it and the information they give is not particularly correct, but this is how they make their money, if they complete a review they get their cut from the publishng company. In my writing i beleive I base my points on fact but then once facts are straight i can branch of and say my opinions about it, i.e the graphics are cutting edge technology with the charecters having 10000 polygons is unbeleivable, but the particular style of the game is not all my taste.

week 4

With the stage light slowly dimming on the ps2 and xbox the new arrivals such as xbox360 and ps3 are begining to bloom, these are exciting times indeed. I find myself thinking about the future of gaming and where this will lead us and affect our lives, i beleive in the future we will get to a point where graphicly we will be able to create pretty much anything we want in the term of games. This does however bring up the question of gameplay, i pray that the importance of gameplay in gaming is not forgotten. I would rather play a game that looks crap but keeps me interested and theres allready some hits of games with better graphics becoming less interesting. I feel also in recent years i been addicted to games less and find it harder to turn on a game and automaticly get into it. With the introduction of direct x 10 just over the horizon and windows vista i also find specifications for games are vastly increasing, is it possible that we wll hit a wall where people say "you know what to play this game id have to upgrade my entire computer and its just not worth it"? who knows its possible, but then theres always consoles. Int the future of games i would like atmospheres and themes to continue to develop , every single game that I hold dear is because of 1. storyline and 2. environment and visual style. Its ok making an amazing looking level but if you cant relate to that or if it doesnt look like it fits in that game its just a waste of time. i also find that there has been a large rise in FPS in recent years I would like to see more games that encorperate individual and distinct features into them, such as condemmed a first person shooter where you hardly use guns and oblivion where you never use guns.

I find myself in need of a faster computer... hmmm, after just losing an alienware gaming pc on ebay for 401 pounds i find myself annoyed. main reasons for needing a new pc is 1. gaming 2. actually being able to run 3dsmax smoothly and 3. i want one. what should i do? with direct x 10 just over the hill as well as windows vista im unsure weather to wait or think ahead, hmm who knows il wait till my bursary comes through eitherway..

week 3

Well Im not too familiar with arcades in the 1980s at i was very young then,in the ye old days of the 1980s arcade gaming took to a larger level. arcade games became far more popular and drew in a larger audience, games such as blackbelt and donkey kong started to defined seperate genres. In this age household consoles were born into the market with consoles such as the comodore, atari and spectrum.


these consoles were the godfathers of console rivalry, the consoles fought for consumers loyalty, at the end of the day these machines were created to make money. more games came out and they started to define new genres such as racing and puzzles games such as outrun and forest.



This game layout was called psuedo 3D. Games began to rival in the market aswell, this began household video game entertainment.
Two of the most famous rivals in game history were sega and nintendo, their battle started off as i remember withthe master system and the nintendo entertainment system (but i mainly remember as a kid it being megadrive and snes) the megadrive was introduced two years after the mastersystem and ruled the market, until nintendo bought out the snes. the mega drive did better in japan but in europe and america the nintendo was ruling the roost. few rivalled the two monster macines but they never were as popular such as the turbo grafx 16.

Sega amazed everybody with the release of the sega saturn, never before had a games console used cd-roms and 3d graphics. the sega saturn was dominant but out of nowhere Sony snatched the market from underneath Segas nose with the Sony Playstation. The sony playstation was such a landmark in the computer gaming industry that it still has sex appeal (playability) even today. I remember tombraider and the final fantasy series, the playstation allowed companies like squaresoft to allow their games to become more appealing to a larger audience with 3d graphics, thus luring them to their fate as a ff lover.



In 1999 Sega was working on a project to allow them to take back the market, this came in the form of the dreamcast released in japan, the dreamcasts fate in europe was yet to be decided.

week 2

Ever since i can remember in my mind the first game was PONG, I have no idea where this thought in my head came from or why it was this game in particular, i know that my fathers uncle "John Gratage" was involved in the makeing of the game PONG or one version of it atleast. after reading into this i begin to think to myself, what is it about a game that actualy makes it a game as we know it? is it a group of LEDs that react when we press a button? in my head this simply has no playability and therfor is not a game. begining to think about pong, no matter how much graphics in games advances, pong will always have playability, and people will always play it, this is what makes it a classic just like tetris. I guess in my head the first person who decided to make computers fun was probably somebody who will never be known, perhaps you? didn you ever look at a keyboard and see how quick you could press qwertyqwertyqwertyqwerty as quickly as possible? i know i did. Computers were fun because they made day to day tasks easyier, so i guess the person who decided to make computers fun is... well... us! we decided to pick up a game and play it, and thats why i decided to do this course, cus i beleive i have something to add to the games industry that will hopefully make other people decide to use computers to have fun.

as for my history of gaming, the first game i remember seeing was a game called Forest on the Spectrum i can remember that back then graphics barely existed "LOL" . But my first console was the sega master system, i remember every saturday morning getting up early and playing alex the kid, my mum used to have tears for fears on the big stereo, and whenever i hear that album now it reminds me. i also remember playing mickey mouse "land of illusion" and allways getting to the donald duck level when my mum decided she wanted to go to town, and back in them day there was no save game, she used to tell me to turn it off, but i paused it and turned the TV off instead. my next console was m,y brothers mega drive, this was where i found SONIC, he was so cool, i had sonic wallpaper, sonic quilt, sonic everything... i loved it. T he mega drive was allso where i found my love for RPGs when i bought a second hand game off the market called "Super Hydlide " i absolutly loved this game until my brother decided to sell his mega drive, :(. After this came the PSOne and TombRaider, GranTurismo and Final Fantasy, between these games they managed to keep me from the "real world" for months at a time, my favorite being final fantasy 8, i remember my sister deleting my saved game of 128 hours. this is where my greatest gameing acheivement came in, at 15 i played for 68 hours straight, with the exceptions of the toilet and eating but no sleep. At 12 i remember starting my first mporpg "Runescape" which i still play to this day, this game opened up a whole new world for me, i made so many freinds on this game and it means so much to me. As a whole 90 percent of all my good memories have come from times ive played a game, as sad as it sounds.