Game Categories

Game Categories

           

            After reading the chapter in Game Design: Principles, Practices and Techniques, I began to think about the games that I play and enjoy and where they fall in the categories discussed.

L.A. Noire has very realistic graphics. The character models look like real people with amazing facial animations thanks to new facial scanning technology. Along with a great cast of actors, you really feel like you’re in 1947 Los Angeles.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has very abstract graphics. The game has colorful and stylized art form making the player feel like they’re looking at a painting. Because of this, it is one of the most visually stunning games I’ve ever seen (which is ironic considering it is for the Wii.)

Super Meat Boy is a 2D side scrolling platform game. In each level, you must guide Meat Boy to Bandage Girl through many obstacles presented in a 2D perspective.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a 3D role-playing game. In it, you are given a huge world to explore in a 3D perspective.

Banjo Tooie is a third person action adventure platformer with some first person segments. For most of the game you control Banjo and Kazooie in a third person perspective but there are some parts in the game where you switch to a first person perspective as Banjo takes Kazooie out from his backpack and holds her like a gun as she shoots eggs from her mouth (Games were weird back in the Nintendo 64 era).This gave the game a great sense of variety and making it one of my favorite games when I was a kid.

There are many games that use real-world activities as means for gameplay. One that comes to mind is Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii. This game came with the console in order to show the audience what it is capable of. The game shows off the Wii’s motion sensing technology to make the player feel like they’re actually playing the sports, such as baseball, tennis, bowling and boxing.

There are many games with memorable storylines such as Mass Effect and the Metal Gear Solid Series. However, one that seems to come to my mind is the game Psychonauts. The story revolves around Raz (short for Rasputin), a boy with psychic powers who was raised in the circus. He decides to escape to a U.S. government base disguised as a summer camp where he can learn to control his abilities. It was there when he learned that one of the counselors is stealing the brains of the campers and using them to build psychic death tanks to (you guessed it) take over the world. While that may seem cliché, it is only a setup. While trying to stop the counselor, Raz meets many funny and interesting characters such as Dogen, a kid with head exploding powers who believes squirrels are telling him to him to kill everyone. For a number of these characters, Raz must enter their minds and sort them out in order to proceed. (My favorite being the Milk Man Conspiracy. It’s just so hilarious and awesome.) With smart writing by one of the best video game storytellers, Tim Schafer, this is one of the best stories I’ve seen as well as one of my favorite video games of all time.