23 posts tagged “dotw”

Grabber: Put some adventure in your studies!

Platform: PC, Nintendo DS, iPhone

Selling Points: Interaction makes language learning more meaningful. I've studied memory and encoding on a neurological basis in school and the more types of encoding you have while you process information, the more ways you can trigger it. When I studied languages, I found myself speaking aloud as I wrote.

Game Play: Standard text adventure format. I'd use a UI and format similar to Phoenix Wright or Monkey Island, whichever focus tests as being more usable.

Their words would appear on the touch screen. If you thought you knew the word, you could try and translate it. If you are right, you'd start seeing the word in English. That way, you'd be focusing on the words you're having trouble with.

I'd add a crutch like you could always ask "how do you say [word] in [language?]" and possibly an image-based dictionary. Point to an object, see the word as long as you're touching/mouse overing it.

Fun Factor: Add some meaningful context to your language! Ever get to a game and you needed a bit of info to get to the next level? That type of motivation is amazing and effective. 

Grabber: Puzzle game for the

Platform: PC, Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox Live Arcade

Selling Points: Easy to play yet challenging. Players can enjoy this game in both short spurts and extended marathon sessions. Algorithmically generated levels allow for infinite replayability.

Game Play: Players are given a closed area. Their objective is to pick oddly shaped pieces from a large pile and fit them into the closed area and score points for all the positive numerical values contained in the individual squares that comprise the oddly shaped pieces.

As the game progresses, some of the square clumps may contain negative number values which will penalize from the player's total score. The areas players have to work with will start simple sunch as a large square or a pyramid then move to more abstract shapes.

Fun Factor: It's a simple, spacial puzzle, kind of like Tetris if it had a black-hole gravity. 

Grabber: Record your surroundings and document discoveries. Use your brain, it's your best tool of all!

Platform: PC

Selling Points: Open ended and creative problem solving abound!

Game Play: Players play an aloof wanderer that has journeyed to a small, uninhabited island. Record info about the island and return home with a wealth of knowledge to share!

Players will be placed in an environment with loads of objects they can manipulate various ways. Players must use and process these objects in order to survive and study their surroundings.

For example, players start out with a cutting tool like a knife and a heavy blunt rock. If their objective is to get a vessel to keep water, players can do a multitude of things:
=Knock down a coconut with a rock, use the rock to bash the husk apart and use a knife to hollow out the flesh.
=Hollow out a pineapple with the knife. The player will earn some points towards the water holding challenge, but the pineapple cup will go away after a few, in-game days from rot.
=Players can carve a segment of a hollow branch and then plug the segment with a rock.
=Players use the rock to dig for eggs of a reptile and clean the egg shell into a cup.

As the game progresses, the objectives get more advanced. Players must try making ink and paper to write their exploits down. Players will be challenged to create an accurate map of the island too.

Devise a system to test whether or not island plants are poisonous or not. There's plenty of opportunity to expand!

Fun Factor: Players have multiple ways to complete in-game objectives. The objective doesn't absolutely have to be fulfilled(such as the rotting pineapple cup) encouraging the player to try new things.

Grabber: Feel the rush and catch a breeze!

Platform: Wii

Selling Points: Simple, open-ended action using the Wii's motion sensing remote and nunchuck. Rich environment graphics and controls make for an immersive game experience.

Game Play: Players take control of a wind sailor, navigating from one area to another in the game world using the ancient art of wayfinding. To be true to the art, the game has absolutely no user interface elements at all. Players can read the direction of the wind relative to their position with a flat on the top of their mast, the intensity of the wind from their character's hair blowing, the white caps on the water and the shape of the clouds. The game will offer the player a number of environmental hints to help the player navigate, but it is up to the player to learn.

Advanced players can have their game synchronize to the Wii's weather channel for realtime weather updates and download new areas to naviate through Yahoo! Maps or Google Earth.

Players use the remote to change the direction the sail is facing. The nunchuck will control the direction the craft itself is facing.

Fun Factor: How attune are you to the world around you? There's a lot of interesting things going on in the game world to keep the player engaged. Players create their own objectives on a map, but then they're free to explore the game world as they fit once they set sail.

Grabber: In this quirky shooter, bullet hit you!

Platform: PC Download

Selling Points: Brings quirky and unusual presentation to a genre long thought as "dead." Adds a layer of non-twitch strategy.

Game Play: This game ia shooter where you play as...a preadatory plant! As a plant, you can't control where you move. The winds may jostle you around a bit, but otherwise, you're stuck in the ground. What you can do to capture your targets is lure them!

You have several ways that you can get attract or repel various creatures out there: change your color to look bright and appealing to bees, butterflies and humming birds. Smell sweet to attract mosquitos. Smell fetid to attract earwigs. Watch for slugs that can gnaw away at your body.

There's still twitch gaming here, as player must snap their jaws on their unsuspecting prey before it flies off! Grow bigger and manage multiple, individually configurable trap jaws to maximize your feasting.

Fun Factor: Ikaruga has to be one of the neatest shooters out there and one of the crazy, "counter intuitive" systems it introduced was the need to fly into certain types of enemy fire. While challenging, it made you check to see what type of shield you had up before ploughing through a great big beam.
Pitcher Venus combines a bit of strategy and twitch gaming at a pace that more casual games can enjoy.

I've had this one on my mind for a while. I suppose it's my first attempt at what many are now calling a "serious game." Yeah, this post is rather minimalist, but I just need to get the basics off my chest.

Grabber: Re-enforcement for battling one's own inner demons comes in a fun, simple stratgy RPG.

Platform: PC, PSP, new gen. home consoles pending map-sharing/expansion feasability

Selling Points: As recent studies have pointed out, activities players do in games can be very meaningful to them. Games have value as theraputic tools as they force the player to solve a problem or overcome a challenge in order to advance.

Game Play: Pretty much a rip of existing strategy RPGs such as Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem. More likely FFT than FE since character customization is going to play a huge role here.

Players set up a small band of combatants based on aspects of their cognisence/personality that tend to be "at war" in life. Instead of the usual series of opposing elementals like fire/water, etc. you'll have opposing forces within the mind. positive thinking/defeatist attitude, etc.

Fun Factor: The basic game play is taken from well-rated and top-selling games. There's no shame in being a theif as long as you're a bad theif, taking the bad and leaving the good. This game is taking proven, enjoyable experience and changing the settings and metaphors to help those who have depression battle it. Literally!

Note: This is partially dedicated to a friend who was able to get off medication that had terrible side effects by keeping a watchful on the voices in her head and telling which ones to STFU and when.

Grabber: It's easy to generate and share your drinkingg ames

Platform: Nintendo PC+DVD-ROM, 1500ml of Tequila

Selling Points: Who doesn't like making up their own little games, especially with alcohol involved?

Game Play: Pop your favorite DVD into the drive and Drinking Game Maker will analyze the closed caption titles for words or phrases of the drinking game designer's choosing. The designer must also allocate how many drinks one must take when each event occurs.

For ease of drinking game design, Drinking Game Maker will automatically parse through the movie's script for 2 and 3 word combinations that occur the most frequently.

After selecting phrases and how many drinks, play the DVD. When the phrases set to trigger drinks come on screen, bright floating text appears over the movie prompting everyone to consume.

Fun Factor: Booze and friends over make everything better.

Yeah, I know this idea totally licks earwigs. I've been rediculously depressed lately, neglecting friends, family, pets, self, you name it except my MMORPG crack of choice. As terrible as I've been feeling, this idea was conceived without the use of alcohol. Yes. I was completely sober when I thought of this. Sad huh?
It's hard not to establish emotional attachments to a project, especially when you start working on it from pre-production. As a tester, watching bugs slide through was a bane but didn't bring about any emotional hurt.I'll get over this. I really have no choice.

Grabber: Find out what's inside those enigmatic gift boxes without even shredding the papper!

Platform: Nintendo Wii + Cardboard Box

Selling Points: Simple, fun, easy to pick up and play. Blind person friendly game play!

Game Play: Start out by placing the tip of the Wii remote to corners of a box when prompted to "calibrate" the remote. Use any old box lying around the house. Now it's time to explore!

Place the Wii Remote on faces of the box and shake it, turn it, etc. A noise will play in the remote's speaker depending on how the object in the box got jostled.

Use the remote as a "sonar scanner" and the speed + pitch of the beeps in the remote will help players visuals the object contained in the box.

Fun Factor: Guessing games are among the first games people will ever play and they've persisted for ages. 

Grabber: It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's an Extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeme Skier!

Platform: Nintendo DS

Selling Points: Simple, fun, easy to pick up and play. Crazy dual screen stunt animations liven things up.

Game Play: Use the stylus to draw the mountain as your Extreeeeme Skier goes down it! Add some large smooth bumps to build up speed. Draw a bunch of jagged moguls to rattle him around. Draw a huge ramp if you want him to get big air! The right speed and slope combination can launch the skier and he'll do some crazy tricks!

Careful not to hurt your skier too badly by slamming her up against a wall or not giving him a place to land after he jumps.

Fun Factor: Extreeeeeme Skier combines a few activities that I find fun: building my own track, watching something(in this case, your skier) fly through it and see if the skier does a cool trick.