HeuristicEvaluationforPlayablity
by Next 2 Generation
Got a question to ask you guys
nowadays, there are 3 powerful plateforms-- PS3, Xbox , Wii. PS3 Xbox have the greatest graphic performance and Wii has the most unique game playing style.
So my question is why PC game is still exist?
my answer : because of the FPS games and third person games. they really need a mouse..
what's your answer?
My WoW Character
This is my character in the character creation, he's a rogue troll...
For this one, he's my character after I spend my first day to playMy new character in World of WarCraft
Canon game report-----WarCraft By Lawrence 2172
War craft I Playing Report
This is kind of dairy, it won’t like a report, and it will contain more about my feeling of the game War Craft. War Craft I is so classic that it’s not only a simple RTS, it’s kind of iconic signal and remarkable milestone for the whole game industry. For me it’s a large story, a story about Azeroth and the two regions on it, a story about the Blizzard.
For starting this report, I would like to write something about the manual. I want to ask a simple question to you: What would u first do after buying a new PC game? For me, I will start to destroy the package, take out the manual and spend a couple hours on it. I think the game introduction and the principle of the game will be all written in the manual and because of the good writing and great graphic showed in it, the manual is always fun to read. After you reading the manual you will feel to roughly understand the whole game, especially the back ground story. You can’t say the story in War Craft is really good like an epic, but it is still nice compiled and of course it is the start of War Craft II, War Craft III and World of War Craft. I have to say that since every new War Craft game released the background story became better and better.
Ok now let’s go back to the manual of War Craft. The manual I read is a digital version; I think it is a little different to other game manuals in that age of time, many of which is straightly read. In this manual you can decide your race first, which is divided in to Human and Orcs, this little setup impressed me a lot, for people who is about to play the game, it will make them into the game much quicker. Sometimes people will ask why Blizzard become the best game(not one of) produce company in the world in the past 10 years since now, and I believe that kind of elaborate detail is a exposure of their attitude of a game and their ambitions. After I chose the Human as my race the page directly goes to the titles for the humans. Of course for a manual there will be lots of introduction of the requirement of the system, trouble shooting that kind of things… yea, yea, yea, it’s important for the players. But for us, hard cores, we never read that useless information, let’s just skip it and go straightly to the story of this game (Humans Perspective).
In my opinion the most essential part of a game is the story. A good story leads to a successful game. The story of War Craft is a little bit old fashion in our time but at that time I think it is still good. What impressed me a lot is their character design. Every important character has their own name, from the king of Azeroth to a small villager they all have a remarkable name and all of the land names are well designed. You know, after playing the World of War Craft you will find that every story in it has a strong relationship with the original version- War Craft that makes the whole story become integrated. No matter how boring the story is I will read it and get to know what the game is about, that is my rule. The story from the Humans perspective is about some strange aliens- Orcs once come to their land and want to conquer them and what humans want to do is began to organize the army and beat the strange creature they never seen before. Compare to the story itself I’m more interested about the personality of the character in the story. It is really well design. For example, the child prince Llane who became the king later in the story always had some dark dreams in his childhood, it is said that the dark age is coming, some strange things well happen in the later years. Another person is the conjurer Medivh, a mysterious man, who is suspected as a main reason of the arrival of Orcs. After reading the story I still don’t know if he is a good person or not, he is really mysterious.
Unit, in RTS game unit is always an important element in the game. How they work individually and how they became powerful when they combined together is always discussed by the designers. I think the unit in War Craft is nice, especially the warlock, the necrolyte and the conjurer. It’s a new thing at that time. What you can do with these units is really different. For conjurer, you can summon elemental, summon scorpions. If you are using the warlock, you can even summon daemon. In my opinion this is a great innovation, in the later 10 years a lot of company just follow the principle of these units and create many more great magic characters. I think I can divide the unit in to three groups: melee unit, ranged unit and magic unit. In the ranged unite there is a weapon called catapult. When I’m playing the game I’m really surprised of the damage it produced, extremely powerful.
Buildings. The function of the buildings is all about producing your army and upgrades their abilities and some of them are foundation building which provide you the gold and food such as mine and farm. Without the buildings you can nothing and it means the game will game over very soon.
Now let’s go deeply inside the game and see why War Craft is a moderate critical and commercial success.
First of all, let’s see the graphic. When you see the two pictures below you will find out that the Graphic of War Craft had been improved a lot at that time. Actually the first picture is dune II, one of the most important RTS game in the history, which set the general rules that are still followed today—Mouse control, resource management, technology trees. Compare to the graphic of Dune II, War Craft had been made much more vivid. For example, the unit in the game such as raider, you can see every movement clearly. Other things like buildings and the map also show a very good graphic quality.
The music and sound is nice in the game. Once you go into the game the music
would never stop, and every time you click your unit and want them to do something or attack someone they would always reply you “your command” “yes my lord”. The first day after I finished play it for couple hours and go to sleep I even shouted in my dream “yes my lord”, how classic the sound is… every time the enemy is near to you or about to arrive at your village they would also give player a warning “your enemy arrived”. I think this makes the game much interesting when it combines the good graphic together and make the game consecutive and tense.
The control. Be honestly I hate the control in the game. It’s totally different in the game nowadays. Not much short cuts in the game. I think this is the only think that I really don’t like in the game… I think the move movement in the game is just useless. I use auto attack instead. It will give a quick reaction to hour units when they meet the enemies in the map.
Balance between the units and AI. Melee unit always has the great power when they close to their enemy and ranged unit gives a great damage when they are in the range. I have to say the AI in the game is kind of stupid but it is still classic at that time. Your enemy will always send some spy walk around the whole map, looking for your village once he found it he will go straightly in to your village and begin to attack anyone there without thinking even there are 10 melee units in front of him.
Mission, I think the mission of War Craft make it really different to other RTS games. the missions all have a very good introduction and some of them is quite interesting when you are playing. If you are using the Orcs, there is a mission about Black Hand’s daughter. The story is about the daughter run away with an outlaw and hide themselves in a very famous dungeon “dead mine”. The funny thing is the outlaws band was some rebellious pigs and what you need to do is kill them all beside Black Hand’s daughter. In Human, there is a mission about Medivh the person I mention before what they want you to do is go to his tower and kill him. I think the mission demonstrate the background story very well. At this point I know that Medivh is not only a conjurer but also a warlock .
Multi-player and customize game, Multi-player system is absolutely an innovation at that period of time. When everybody is play the game individually and enjoying the battle with some simple Ai, Blizzard already reckons the future. War Craft have a multiplayer option in the game, using the modem and Lan to combine real players together and fight with each other. This is the beginning of game competition nowadays and it is kind of milestone in the game industry. I don’t have a chance to test the multi player system but I believe it should be good and the player in the past will thought it very fresh and interesting. Another good thing is the customize game. In this mode u can choose any map that already setup in the game I think there are around 30 customize map in the game and also you can choose the unit you want to start. For instance, you can have four knight four conjurer and four farmers instead of just starting with two farmers in the mission battle. It give player more freedom two play this game and make the game replayable especially for some players who never want to finish the game, they have a good opportunity to test the whole building, unit system and the balance between the unit. Actually if you played War Craft III you will noticed that editing map system has been extremely powerful and you even can make your own game inside the game. the most famous one now is DOTA.
Playing the game:
The first mission of the human is kind of tutorial. What you need to do is get familiar with the control and build six farms. When I’m building the farms I found that you can’t build anything without the road, you must build any of your building near to the road otherwise the system will ban you to build. Another essential thing is you have to read through the mission introduction at the very beginning of the mission because you won’t be able to see it anymore during the mission. Because of skipping the introduction, I had to restart it again… When you finished the tasks the mission will automatically finished. When I’m playing the game, I get confuse about the control. It’s quite different than its series. If you want to control more than 1 of the unit you need to press ctrl+left button and there the maximum number of unit that you can control is 4. Actually I did a little bit more. I went through the whole map and attack every troop in the map. The funny thing is the AI, when your unit is killed by the Orcs, the next thing they do is go to your village no matter how far away they are. So I always make a trap and wait for them to come to my village and kill them. After finished the mission there will be a score board some records will be show there. You can see how many enemy you killed, and also your score for the whole mission.
The second mission is about defense. You build your farm, barrier as usual, and this time you can build another new building Lamb. With this building, you can upgrade you arrow and of course you got a new unit archer which is extremely powerful after upgrading their arrows. The Orcs will come to your village every 2, 3 minutes. Actually what you need to do is just produce some foot man and archer and defense their attack—it is pretty easy and once you have maybe two or three little groups with 2 foot man and 2 archer you can clean up the whole map to kill the rest of the Orcs, you don’t need to wait for them and it will help you finished the mission quickly. In this mission I found that the road is very important. It’s kind of strategy, you should build your road in the right place, otherwise the worker would not know how to go back to their town hall and when they are stuck by some place they will waste some time to relocate their position… and player should also be careful about the building position as well don’t put in front of the way that workers always work through. I think in this mission the game company just introduces player the combination of unites. Once you have a good group then it’s really powerful.
The third mission is asking you to destroy a Orcs village. It is time to do some serious damage to the Orcs now. In this mission we are able to produce the cleric which I think is not very powerful if you already have lots of money and wood. The cleric can attack the enemy by the fire ball and also heal other people who are hurt. However, their stamina is really low and another problem is they move too slow…you can’t catch up with your little party. So I think it is not very useful in the beginning maybe in the later mission it will became a main power of the battle. They have a magic bar and once you use the skill the bar will reduce quickly.
The fourth mission is a little bit different to the three before, you don’t have any farmers you don’t need to build. You only have a small party to complete the mission. In this mission you need to save your knight who is injured in the Dead mine controlled by some Orcs. I think this is the original version of the dungeon which will be used in lots of games in the future. It is different and somehow makes the whole game more interesting not only producing units and kill the enemies. As I mentioned before if you are choosing the Orcs as your region, what you need to do in this mission is to find your daughter and kill some pigs. I think that will be much more interesting. After I rescued the knight and came back to the place I started the mission, I find that there are some pointers there show you the way to finished the mission. I thought that was a really smart idea, and really surprised me.
OK, I got to stop enjoying the game now, because there are lots of other assignments waiting for me… I think my overall game playing is about 4 hours however I don’t have the time to test the multi game but I think it will be really interesting when you fighting with another player. In these 4 hours I knew how to play the game in the basic way, and I have to say after mission and mission War Craft continuous surprising me and I actually want to play more. Let’s get back to the topic:”why is War Craft a canon game?” in my view, I think it is because of his 1.unique back ground story which became very huge after releasing the War Craft II, War Craft III and World of War Craft. 2. The mission, if you don’t like the normal mission such as building and defending, you can still find some interesting one’s that you only need a small party to complete the mission and I think the mission is combined to the back ground story very well. 3. Sound and Music. You will never forget “your command. My lord”. 4. Multiplayer and customize map. I have to say it is a intending system which will be widely used in the future from then. Maybe we can’t see this system in an Intuitionistic way. But I still think this must be a milestone in the game industry especial the RTS games. The influence given to the game now is huge. Nowadays you can’t find any RTS game with out the multiplayer system. And customize map has became much more powerful than before.
WOW Steve Character
Then you can move your character and show the tutorials. This game is about making quests complete so after you with the given quest, the first quest is to kill 4 Young Nightsaber slain and 4 Young Thistle Boar slain.
Let's GO!! Kill it.......
2325 SimCity
SimCity published in 1989 by Maxis’ and become a classic game with the series.
Before start, you are the God of the land. The objective of SimCity, as the game’s name of suggests, is to be a mayor to build and design a city which you like. You start out with nothing but a bit of money, and a piece of land, and it's your job to create and maintain a city. You must create the perfect balance。
The player can design the zone as commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate of commercial, industrial, or residential, build transportation systems like bus and train, and so on.
The first step is usually to create a power plant without power because everyone needs it.
Next step is laid out zones with growing road in your city.
Look out: you are the mayor but not the owner of factory or house.
So, you can just make a plan of your land but not built house by yourself.
A lower tax rate. No one likes to pay more money to his mayor.
But low tax rate always leads to budget lack.
Good environment of your city: no traffic jam, good police, schools and hospitals…
But you can not afford too much facilities of your city at the beginning…
The core of your design is balance.
Iridium Satellite LLC 15 years ago. They had the best facilities of Mobil phone but also the most expensive…So the company crashed like his satellites.
So you must be care of your budget balance but not ignore appeal of your citizen.
City will grow up.
Also, we may face disasters including flood, flash, fires, earthquakes and attacks by monsters. As a mayor, you must repair the city after disaster and take care of your citizens.
How long time can you play in this game? It depends on you performance in city design. To heavy tax will leads to depression in industrial and commercial but to low tax can not afford to built the city.
Prototype : Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II released in 1991 and yet follows several of the rules from its original from 1987. Once, when I was in around year 4 in primary school, I had played this game, but in the Super Street Fighter II version, the sub series of this game. At that time, it did not catch my attention at all. In my opinion, it was not that good, compared to another one on one fighting games such as “Garou Densetsu” or “Fatal Fury” in Europe, anyway, those one on one fighting games were likely to followed the layout and the way of Street Fighter. In this writing, my view and opinion might be stand off from what the assignment expected, but I would try to give a point of both advantage and disadvantage of this game.
Graphic & Layout
For the graphic of this game, of course, I can not say that it was really good, because I have played a lot of better graphic games recently. Although, if we step back to the past in 90’s, graphic for any games at that time were not really different. 2D of course, can not catch an attention from new gamers in these days. Including that I played it in emulator name “DOSBox”, and yet played in DOS mode, the window was small, the graphic was in a low resolution and pixelate. Anyway, at that time, this game was released for consoles then it was not looked bad as in DOS mode on computer.
Movement of all characters were quicker than reality, as it was a 2D game, of course not looks real but in my opinion, it was too quick. Although, if we think about an over natural power and it was a game, then reality is nothing.
In the game, while you are playing, you will see a health bar that show how much health the fighters have left and the fighter’s name under the bar. Under the middle between the two fighters health bar was a time count down. If you had played some others one on one fighting game, you would see that they had the same layout in fighting mode as you can say that this layout is the best for fighting game.
Gameplay
The player will fight against the other fighter in one on one close quarter combat in a series of best two out of three matches. The objective of each round is to beat the opponent up before the timer runs out. If both of the fighters knock each other out at the same time or the timer runs out with both fighters having an equal amount of health left on the health bars, then a “double KO” or “draw game” is declared and additional rounds will be played until sudden death. In the first Street Fighter II, a match could last up to ten rounds if there was no clear winner; this was reduced to four rounds in Champion Edition and onward. If there is no clear winner by the end of the final round, then either the computer-controlled fighter will win by default in a single player mode or both fighters will lose in a battle mode.
After every third match in the single player mode, the player will have a chance to gain a bonus points in a “bonus game”. The bonus games includes a car-breaking event similar to another bonus round featured in Final Fight, a barrel breaking bonus game where the barrels are dropped down from a conveyor belt above the player and a drum-breaking bonus game where drums are flammable and piled over each other.
Controlling
It might because of that I played it on computer and I could not use a joystick to play, then it was really hard to control the character perfectly. On computer, you have to make a critical hit on the buttons to make a special moves of any characters. Since when I was young, the character that I always use was “Dalsim”, because he was easy to make a special move and you could to make a good long range attack by just press forward and punch or kick buttons. The first time that I started to played the game for this assignment, I chose to played as “Ryu” and “Chun Li”, because of that I was not used to play the game, I had won just a few times and lose for more than ten times. There were a lot of one on one fighting games that use the same set of buttons to make a special move, because it was easy to remember and press.
Characters
In my opinion, the best part of this game was a character design. The lead character, “Ryu”, used Karate to fight, of course that made sense because this was a Japanese game and he was a Japanese. Although, if you were a western players, you could used the other character that really similar to “Ryu”, he was “Ken”, with the same move and everything looked the same, just hair style and cloths color that made them looked different. All of these characters were unique and stylish. Then, I will mention a little bit about those characters that I had used to played.
“Ryu”, Japanese fighter who had a not clear past and only one thing that was in his mind was “How to be a real fighter?”. Karate uniform and his name showed that he was a Japanese. The special moves that he used were famous such as “Hadoken” or “Shoryuken”. Only bad thing about this character was his special moves were easy to avoided.
“Ken”, American fighter who once was Ryu’s training partner and yet after he went back to USA, he came back to Japan again as Ryu’s only one friend and rival. His cloths, style and move were all the same as “Ryu” and those were the bad part of this character. Why they had to added this character into this game, if there were no any different between this one and another one.
“E. Honda”, Japanese Sumo fighter who was one of “Yokotsuna” or the best of Sumo fighter. After he retired from being a Sumo fighter, he attended to fight on the street. One of his special move was really easy to made, just pressed a punch button quickly many times, then he would attacked by a his palm like a machine gun.
“Dalsim”, Indian yoga master who was trying to find some good place for orphan children to live. His special moves were easy to made and control. I could remember that when I was young, some of my friends were like to used this character as well.
Conclusion
What this assignment expected from me was explained my opinion about why this game is a canon game. I accept that in my opinion this game was not that good, although after it released, most one on one fighting games used the same layout, style and sets of buttons for special moves. Then, the best part of this game was a character design which out off the box and creative. Anyway, this game had to be really famous at the time, fighting game is not easy to catch a gamer attention and being on the top, because there are not many gamers who love to play this kind of game.