Characters

Game Info

Title-Dungeons & Dragons

Type-Table Top Role Playing Game

Genre-Adventure, Fantasy, RPG

Age-13+ (Anyone can play, this is just a recommendation)

     A Little About The Game

Dungeons and Dragons, a personal favorite of mine. This game is all about your imagination and just really getting immersed in you character. You are playing a role, thus the reason it's called a role-playing game. When you play this game you are not just playing, you are making another person. The game it's self is very diverse but, in a normal game you start by gathering some players and creating or using a campaign. You can also just free play if you want. Everyone usually has a character in mind, and then they roll their stats using 6 sided dice. You then distribute your rolled stats among 6 categories, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and  finally Charisma. Each stat is good to focus for different fighting styles and classes. Some basic classes you can play are Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Paladin, Bard, Rogue, and Ranger. There are more but, these are the most common ones. After making the basics of your character you start going into personalization. He/She can be tall, short, old, young, long haired, no haired and everything in between. You can also pick your race. Many people tend to play elves or dwarves. There are of course stranger races such as minotaurs, or teiflings. There are all sorts of options to choose from. The game itself is all about losing yourself in the fantasy and really connecting with the character. You fight monsters and go on quests. You meet people and create tales of yourself. So you make the fun by just doing what you want to do (Within limits of course.).

What Makes It Special?

 

When you play D&D you are not just making a character. You are making an extension of yourself if you will. In some way they are a part of you imagination. You choose their lives and personality. Even if this person is nothing like you, you can always do what you want to do. basically if I can quote something it would  be "Our futures up to you, so whatcha gonna do?!". You make the future of you character. You made them and you can unmake em. You can make them great heroes, or evil overlords. The reason why I personally think that this game is so good for characters is the whole thing about being able to do anything with them. If you want to create a doctor who steals the souls of his patients go ahead. If you want to make a hunter with a fear of blood you can. You can even make a hero looking to avenge his murdered family who was killed by a band of marauding thieves. It's as close to a sandbox as you can get without it being one. You can make some of the coolest and most interesting characters ever in D&D. It's like writing a mini story while the epic is in the making. That is why D&D is perfect for making and falling in love with various characters.

Player Interaction

 Game Info

Title-Dark Souls

Type-Video Game

Genre-Action RPG

Age-Mature 17+

A Little About The Game

Dark Souls, a game well known to the more hard core population of gamers. It is known for being as rewarding as it is punishing. Dark souls is a game where you play as a chosen undead. An undead being marked with a curse that makes you unkillable. You live on the verge of death slowly losing your humanity. The only way to sustain yourself is to take the humanity of other living humans and beasts. So you roam the world in search of both maintaining your state and exploring the land around you (you have no prior memory of the world you are in.). The combat is also very calculated and difficult. You have to pick your every attack and block. You also must beware of other enemies who can be circling around you. You have to keep track of you limited stamina, and very easily lost health points. There are also bosses who are very difficult and each have their own unique attacks and tactics and if that's not enough challenge for you, other players can invade your world. They fight you and try to kill you to take your humanity. These battles are often hard due to the fact that they don't follow patterns like the AI and can use any item you can use. The world is full of wonder and battles to be had. Dark souls , while difficult honestly has a lot of things going for it. 

How Is It Special?

Dark souls has possible the most player interaction types in one game to date. Normally the game is PVE (Player versus enemy) where you fight the AI. There is also as I mentioned before PVP (Player versus Player) with the invasions. There is also cooperative play because you may summon other players to your world to help you defeat bosses and other minor enemies. They do this to gain humanity and money in game. Also since you can be invaded by three invaders while you have allies summoned so you can also fight on teams against a team of invaders. This game is very original in getting players involved with each other and the game in a multitude of ways. All of these are cool ways to get people involved without taking away from the game or making it seem like too much. Many people feel as if some of these features are unfair or stupid, but in a lot of ways it adds to the game and makes an already interesting experience better.  Dark souls makes player interaction, and many other aspects of a game work. This is why I did my post of Dark Souls this week.

Engagement

Game Info

Title-Mass Effect (one, two and three)

Type-Video Game

Genre- RPG, Shooter

Age- Mature (17+)

A Little About The Game

Mass effect is a game all about your choices and how they effect to changing world around you. You play as a created character that everyone refers to as Command Shepard. You and two other selected from a pool of slowly amassed allies travel around interacting to the random situations at hand. It can be as simple as helping a man find his ID or as massive as saving an entire race from a complete genocide. The cool part about mass effect is that you can move you character cross games. They won't keep their levels or equipment but, all of you choices made in the previous games carry over making the game feel much more tailored to your way of things. The game stay a game by challenging the player with intense fire fights that require quick thinking and micro management of your other two squad mates. The enemies get progressively stronger to match your increasing experience and better weapons that are acquired throughout the game. In the fire fights it all depends on what class you picked. Only certain classes can uses certain weapons and abilities. So everyone who plays this game will probably go through a different experience than some of the other people who played the game. You do have to worry about three things no mater who you play though. First your shields and health. If your health hits zero, game over. You go back to your last save point and try again. Second is your squads health. While normally they can do well on their own, you need to be sure to provide occasional support when it is needed. Lastly you need to worry about the objective. If it's to kill all of the enemies you only need to worry about you. If you need to guard a person or object then prepare to fight waves of enemies until you can leave the area. Overall the game has a balance of story and shooting so no matter what you consider a challenge it's there.

 

What makes it special?

 

I chose Mass Effect as an engaging game mostly because of the choices. You really see how you effect people around you and how you make a difference, for better or worse. While playing you get this sense that you are the character because the choices and questions you ask are all based on your actions. Relationships are formed, allies and enemies are made, people are killed and races can be saved. It's all based on what you pick. You decide what you become and how you effect the world around you. The gunfights also pick on this a little. Due to the fact that this game uses a skill tree you build yourself for your style of combat. Are you a sniper, A rough and tumble in your face kinda guy or even a powerful biotic( a biotic is a mage-like guy who uses mind powers!).  The game engages the player with limited choices but, without making you feel too forced down a linear path. This game probably get you as close to the game as you can be in today's gaming world. I think that this game is one of the more engaging games out there and all because of the choices. You even get to make little choices like, "do I want to explore this world and learn the lore?" or "do I want to rush through and kill as many people as possible?" or even a bit in between. This game trys to engage the player by letting them set their own path and priorities so you can really experience the game the way you want to. That is why the Mass Effect series gets my highlight of the week.

Innovation

    

Game Info

Title-Robocraft
Type-Video game
Genre-Action, Creative
Age Rating- Everyone

                             

A Little About The Game

     Robocraft is a building game where you build pretty much anything you want. Then you pit your creation against a multitude of other vehicles. You can win by either capturing the enemy's base or by eliminating all of the other vehicles on the other team. Depending on how well you do you can earn lots of in game credits and tech points to make your vehicle more and more powerful. You also get experience points for doing good. This lets you place more blocks and get into higher tiers. Tiers are used to you don't have to face vehicles that have more stuff than you. Also this game is free to play so if you don't like it you don't lose anything. 

What Makes It Special

     So let talk about the things that I think make this game so innovative. My favorite part of the game is the fact that anything that you put on your vehicle,armor,guns jets, wheels or even your pilot seat, it can be destroyed. The only technical way to destroy someone's vehicle is to destroy the blocks under the pilot seat(You are basically disconnecting them from the vehicle.). They also let you create almost whatever you want. You can literally create a cube with wheels. Another thing that you can do is that you can enter a practice mode to see how your vehicle can drive, and if you want to test fire power they have a bunch of other computer controlled vehicles driving around that get progressively more difficult as you destroy more and more of them. So if you ever decide to do something crazy and aren't sure if it will actually work you can test it out before trying to throw yourself into the fray of battle.