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Blog Response #4
Well to be perfectly honest, I pretty much disliked both the games I had to play. I was utterly confused with the whole thing at first. Even with the hints I was unsure of what to type sometimes. I think the reason I disliked the games so much is that you have to speak it’s language to get anything accomplished. If it were me programming the game, I would make it so that if someone typed in something incorrectly, the program would suggest things to say that would push the game forward. I just got, “this story doesn’t recognize this,” which was basically the program saying, “You’re shit out of luck pal!” Currently I’m learning the programming language known as action script. Just like these two games, you have to speak the language of action script to get anywhere. Lately I’ve been trying to accomplish more complicated tasks in Flash to get things done. Every once in a while….okay a lot of the times I won’t speak action script’s language correctly and an error will come up. Most of the time these errors don’t help me, they simply let me know that I screwed up. If I had to choose one game that I liked more than the other it would have to be, Dead Like Ants, for several reasons.
Dead Like Ants appealed to me, not necessarily because of the game-play but the whole feel of the story. The images that my mind created when I played this game were of Zelda and the middle ages. The rooms felt somewhat like old-school Myst. I didn’t really care for the queen that much. The fact that she ignored me or wouldn’t give me the information I wanted made me think that she was kind of a bitch. Again, that’s because I really couldn’t speak the question. Hell, maybe she was a nice gal!
In the end, if I spoke the languages correctly and knew what the hell I was doing, I would probably like the games. I almost think that if a book and a puzzle had a baby, this is the kind of game that would come out. There’s obviously a point that we are supposed to reach but we can take our time in reaching it. Rather than have images do all the talking, the player makes up the images in their head.
This may be why people tend to like a book better than the movie that was made from it. All of us probably have different images in our head when we play this game. For instance, when I read, “the tree moving in the wind,” I saw a tree slowly blowing in the wind in my head. The fact that it was slowly blowing could have been because my mind created a specific feel for the game when I read the first few sentences or it could have been because I was moving through the game so slowly. It definitely feels to have for depth than just an interactive fiction. I had conversations with a bitchy queen! I felt a sense of space when I was walking in and out of rooms.
I couldn’t really see much of a difference between the games. The language of each was equally frustrating. If anything, the dialogue seemed much shorter in Death Like Ants.
