Interactions with Games

I have been looking at different flash games over this week to help gain an idea of how different interactions could be used within a game.

Sneak Thief

Sneak Thief was one of the first games I looked at. It's a point and click adventure game where you have to escape from a locked room by using items that you find within the room. I did find some of the interactions pretty good with mini games that you have to get the combination correct in order to open a locked drawer etc. Although did find that it became rather frustrating after a while as every item is the colour blue and there is no indication what the interactions are or what can be interacted with. Sometimes you would click on an item thinking you had found something new to interact with only to be sent back to the previous screen as what you did click on would be the hidden back button.

The Curfew

The Curfew is quite an interesting adventure game presented by Channel 4. I thought the opening sequence was done really well and enjoyed the use of 3D models that they used to create the surroundings. I also thought the personal interactions with the characters were done pretty well and generally you are offered a choice of questions or responses to say, with the character you are interacting with responding differently to what you say to them. I really like the inclusion of background music within the different scenes, it adds a level of depth and immersion to the game that you don't even realise while playing it. The movie loops for the background characters was done well too, this creates the illusion that something is always happening in the scene, for example the assistant in tasty burger mopping the floor.

I liked the interactions that were used within the game, when you moused over an interactive object the cursor would change from the normal pointer to either an exclamation mark showing that there was information to be acquired by clicking on it. This could be as trivial as the menu for Tasty Burger or something more interesting like a video on how "The Party", the ruling party in government only allow government approved media and entertainment. The other interaction with the cursor would have it change to a speech bubble when you moused over a specific character, informing you that this character can be interacted with.

An interaction that the game made a lot of use was involved your character's mobile phone. By using your phone to scane the environment by moving it over the screen you would be able to discover and interact with 'Air Tags' usually icons left by the government, businesses or the occasional unauthorised ones left by individuals. These offered an additional source of information that helped make the game more interesting.

There were also mini games incorporated within the storyline, one of my favourite was the shooting range which had you playing the government approved game Terror Squad, where you click to fire your gun at the moving targets. They added variety to the game by incorporating lots of different minigames such as lock picking, finding a hidden object within the time frame, cleaning windows, choosing the right direction to run while evading the police, etc.

The only thing that I didn't enjoy about the game was it's linear storyline and that even if a character reacted differently the story always followed the same path.

Asylum 2

I wasn't too keen on this game as I found it to be rather dull and boring, the atmosphere they were trying to create would have worked a lot better if the pictures were darker and not completely bright and lit up. I also didn't like that the game just used a series of photographs as it's locations with little or no interactions contained within each. The navigation interactions were Up, Down, Left, Right or only some of these depending on the location. I think that the game was very poorly made and the quality mirrors that.

I did however like 1 feature of the game, it was the fact that you could pick up items from different locations and drag them into your inventory to be used at a later date.