Modesty Studios

99% of all games made seem to have some sort of combat theme. Okay, that's so not an accurate percentage, but that's how much it FEELS like. There are obviously several very awesome games not based on combat. One of which I'm currently playing now, Harvest Moon. But enough of that pacifist style storylines, let's talk battles. OH, and I'm totally zeroing in on Fantasy stories too. Two birds with one stone and all. :) Dealing with Conflict Every story needs conflict. That is what a story is after all: a series of conflicts and resolutions. In story writing books or classes, there are 3 very basic forms of conflict. They were: Man vs. Man Man vs. Nature Man vs. Self Many stories have these conflicts and when they do, it boils down that the only way to resolve the conflict is physical force. Fighting. Violence. Etc. At the very least in games and fantasy it does. The reason for this is that it's simply the easiest and most exciting method of solving the conflict....

Back to games. Sorry for the odd detour. This time I'm going to talk about INPUT methods for games. Intro Granted I'm just over two decades old, but I have seen my share of unusual controllers. Although I've not used them all. They ranged from keyboards to joysticks and buttons. There are some things that I like and dislike about some of the more recent controllers. But being the nostalgic git that I am I'm going to look back before looking forward. Joysticks/Keyboards Early games on computer systems used a keyboard. (Yay for text based games). And there's not much to expound on that. The keyboard remains a staple example of a game input device. Although now it's often combined with a mouse. In the past, I remember that it was ONLY the keyboard that controlled everything or only the mouse. (Or you could switch between the options.) Now very often I have to combine them. Now on the surface there's nothing particularly wrong about this method of input. Howe...

So inspired by something I noticed in my previous rant, I'm going to write about cameras in games. Which is strange because there's actually (usually) NO cameras using in game production. But it comes from 3D animation which uses "virtual cameras" to shoot scenes. Well you could argue it came from 2D animation too but you actually do use cameras for that. :) 3D Space and Camera I got a degree in film and video...which I only say to validate the amount of money I spent getting said degree in hopes that it validates what I type. VALIDITY! Now that most console games and many casual games have gone 3D camera position and angles are important. But the camera (from film) has a language! A cinematic language. And there are also rules of thumb or rather things like rules of thirds (which photographers should also be familiar with. It's about framing a shot for those unfamiliar). However, only in-game cinematics (out of the player's control) use this language. A low ...

So I'm not great at "gaming" although I spend many hours in the activity. I'm not trying to be awesome or really think too much about the game play or strategy until I get stuck. I've started playing Kingdom Hearts which I got for Christmas a couple years back. I started it and had to put it down for school and other games. I have been meaning to play it and now I am. But there is so much I HATE about this game that I must complain about here. We're going into rant mode. Controls This is a classic example of a game where there are too many control options for battles. I've played the game for several hours and usually after the first couple of hours things become second nature. I fear it may take more like 10 hours or more before I get used to these blasted controls. First off they don't make much sense. It's as if they were trying to combine action based combat with menu-based JRPG battle. Which CAN work, in certain cases but usually there...