Ever wondered what’s the difference between a “game mechanic” and “gameplay”? Here’s 10 examples to help you understand. Take with salt: ?
via 10 Different Gameplay Experiences Explained Using the Combat Mechanics — Game Cosmos Press
Star Wars Battlefront 2 beta
So I started up this bad boy with low to medium expectations. Honestly I was thinking the space battles would be fun, the arcade mode solid with the real excitement to be had in the land battles. But how did it it compare to expectations?
Well the space battles while a little odd are fun but a but repetitive boiling down to kill some ships blow up shields blow up more ships. Still the controls are responsive.
The arcade mode, well lets be honest we all thought playing an Darth Maul would be fun, and guess what? Playing as Darth Maul is fun. You run around with a double sided light saber force choking people and stabbing them. I could not ask for more.
Down to the part we all were waiting for. The ground battles. The beta contained a mode where you bounce back and forth between offense and defense basically. One side will attempt to steal an artifact while the other side attempts to defend it. If you like multiplayer games from DICE you will love this one as well without a doubt.
Now one thing I haven’t touched on was graphics. This will be short and sweet. They are absolutely beautiful. I experienced 0 frame rate issues or anything of the sort. That being said, if you missed out on the beta you missed out on a fun weekend. I for one however will be waiting for a sale if I buy it at all. May the gaming gods bring you glory.
Ghoulies 2 (1987)
My friend that requested the first Ghoulies movie will be taking the blame on this one too. Not because he requested this one but simply because i wasn’t going to review one and not the other. Now this one was slightly better. Visuals weren’t bad acting was still solid, and this time our little demons escaped to a carnival called Hells Den where the ran rampant in the haunted house, killed a few people and were they themselves defeated.
I wish this was a joke. They kill these lil bastards by summoning a bigger demon to show up and eat them. It looks like the others. Just bigger. Then they stiff a Molotov cocktail into a midgets gorilla suit, get him to eat it and he explodes…yup. I’m done. Don’t even care if there is a third one. May the gaming gods bring you glory,and may they make sure no one ever sees this movie.
Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)
Godzilla vs Mothra has been told many times, this time a meteorite awakens Godzilla and Mothra and Mothras dark counterpart Battra. As the movie progresses the three will occasionally fight until Mothra and Battra tranform into flying creatures to do battle. After Mothra is seriously injured,Godzilla attacks Battra until Battra and Mothra are forced to join forces to defeat Godzilla.
Despite the usual Godzilla formula the battle actually isn’t truly the biggest story going on here. The twin girls known to frequent Mothra movies are present and play a huge role, as well as an entire story arc about the purpose of Battra and its purpose for existing and its true connection with Mothra. As much as I love Godzilla movies this one may have the most in depth story of them all and is absolutely worth watching so if you have access to Hulu give it a watch, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Saw 3
Ok, I’m telling you to stop at Saw 3. Seriously, don’t keep rolling down this rabbit hole. The ending is fine, not every question has to be answered, let it go. I wish I did.
Saw 3 picks up with Matthews’s team trying to find him. only finding more bodies. But there seems to be something different. These following traps were designed unwinnable, either by flaw or purpose. It doesn’t take long for the cops to figure out it ain’t John Kramer’s work. Matthew’s partner Kerry finds out the hard way when she’s caught, trapped and wins…but dies anyway. Meanwhile, a doctor gets nabbed by Amanda, Jigsaw’s apprentice, and taken to John with a very simple goal: keep John alive long enough for another victim to pass three tests or the bomb collar around her neck will explode. The man being tested is named Jeff, a grieving father whose son got killed by a drunk driver. Every test puts him face to face with someone responsible for the crime and it’s his choice whether to save them or not. Lynn is violently depressed and self medicating on pills while still working at the hospital, which got here in this mess. We begin to see Amanda ain’t quite (cough) stable. We find out she has killed needlessly and rigs her traps to be unwinnable on purpose. At the end she flips and suddenly all these lives are in Amanda’s hands for Jigsaw’s true finale…
Saw 3 would have been a fine end to a damn trilogy. Again the traps were memorable and cool; the angel and crucifix traps stick in my mind a lot. I felt for Jeff and was actually invested in his journey and actually felt for some of the accused too. I liked Amanda as a imperfect apprentice and the relation between her and John has it’s weirdly Star Wars moments. To me, it feels a little longer than it should and the color textures and set design of the series start to get on my nerves a bit, but if it was a TRILOGY I could ignore it. Sadly no. Overall, stop at 3.
Ghoulies (1985)
Until the other day I had never heard of this movie, and I really didn’t know two of them existed. An ex good friend of mine requested I review it. I say ex because a real friend would not have asked me to watch this movie.
That may be a little harsh, the sound and visuals for a movie made in the 1980’s weren’t bad and I have no complaints about the acting, but the story was just so damn stupid. Basically a dude tried to sacrifice is son and mom stops him. Years later he inherited the house, discovers a bunch of stuff including that he can summon little demon creatures and seemingly make it rain in his basement. While the idea sounds good it just wasn’t. The twist at the end when they revive his dad from the dead whom tries to sacrifice his son to the devil in return for eternal life isn’t much a twist nor did it save the movie from being mediocre at best. May the gaming gods bring you glory, and may the have mercy on my friends soul for this movie.
Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991)
Any fan of the Godzilla franchise knows the movies are basically either CGI or a dude in a suit..or a mixture of both, and you can always tell. And the classic lips still move well after voices stop is well intact.
This time around a ship from the future has come to help rid Japan of Godzilla once and for all before he destroys their nuclear power plants and makes the island unlivable. One small problem, their intent is to make Godzilla not exist so they can use King Ghidorah to take over the world themselves. I won’t spoil the specifics but in the end our favorite fire breathing lizard is back bigger and meaner than ever before.
Zombie Army Trilogy
Like shooting games? Wanna shoot zombies? Hate Nazis? Have I got a game for you. Zombie Army Trilogy is a game where Hitler has a secret plan. When World War 2 went south for the Nazi side of things Hitler turned to the occult, and the results were Hitler and his army being turned into an army of the undead. The controls can be a little stiff at times but they are perfectly usable and while the sound and graphics aren’t what I would call top notch I won’t complain about them either. The game is both challenging and fun. It also offers both a story mode and horde mode both available in single player and online multiplayer. Casual gamers may not like it, but zombie shooter fans will enjoy it. Now get out there and shoot some Nazi zombies, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Friday the 13th
The ultimate anti-thesis to Michael Myers and the suspenseful bloodless Halloween, we get Friday the 13th by the writer of Last House on the Left, Sean Cunningham. It’s bloody, it’s goofy, and had Kevin fucking Bacon getting killed by that nice lady who was on Murder She Wrote a couple times. What more can you really ask for, on top of having your effects done by the legendary Tom Savini at that; what more could you ask for?
Gather round young people while Uncle Torsten tells you all the story of Camp Blood- and trust me, it’s in every damn Friday movie all the way down the line: long ago a young boy drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. His name was Jason. He was swimming out by himself, alone and drowned. The counselors were off boning each other while he drowned. The Camp shut down for many years until someone bought it and here’s where we begin. We have a group of young adult counselors that come early to set up. Ok, I can’t remember any of there names but I know a mysterious creepy fuck kills them one by one. One gets a ax to the face, another gets a pencil through the eye, and Kevin Bacon’s impressive death where he gets an arrow through his neck from under the bed. When were down to one girl left, nice old Betsy Palmer comes along. I’m saying this now, she is amazing as Pamela Voorhees, the deceased Jason’s distraught mother. She reveals that she’s the killer in revenge for poor Jason and that she is batshit insane. The girl fights Betsy and with some crappy slow motion, gets her head hacked off by a machete. The girl is off in a canoe, going merrily down the lake when Jason’s corpse springs out of the water and gets her!…but it was a dream. Oops.
Friday the 13th is a fun slasher movie that started a pop culture phenomenon and set the slasher standard for the modern day. The first is probably my favorite of the series. I had a few good laughs with the counselors whacky antics and Crazy Ralph spurting nonsense about the death curse of Crystal Lake. The kills are cool and memorably gory. Again, Betsy Palmer steals the show in such a small amount of screen time, being, sweet, crazy, and threatening all at once. I wouldn’t call it scary as much as a good party movie with friends. As always thank you and keep tuning in as I go through the whole saga of Jason Voorhees for our little Halloween special.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Freddy is back in the final battle with Nancy. This time however it is quite a bit different from the other movies as Nancy isn’t Nancy. She is Heather Langenkamp. Wes Craven plays Wes Craven and even John Saxon plays John Saxon. Many of the characters play themselves as the lines between fiction and reality become blurred. Heather is dealing with a stalker while her husband secretly works on a new Freddy project that Wes is writing. Slowly but surely things start to take a strange turn as things on the movie set start happening, people working on the movie start dying and of course Heather’s son starts to have odd dreams.
The explanation for all this sounds really odd but it comes together very nicely, and while back in 1994 the idea that a Freddy movie would take place in the real world and acknowledge the others as movies to bring him into the real world as an entity that has existed for millennia sounded insane. However, Wes Craven created a movie that both gave us another Freddy movie while leaving past movies intact. May he forever rest in peace, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Savior Gaming 