Machinarium Analysis

 

Machinarium Analysis

Machinarium is a puzzle/adventure games where the player must solve a series of brain teasers such as, finding all the pieces of the main character, an extendable robot, and building him. The start screen of Machinarium has an eerie soundtrack. There are also some mechanical sounds filling out the ambience.

Metal clangs , water drops, steam engines, fireworks and various machine sounds make up most of the sound in this point-and click adventure.

 One of the coolest parts of the game is the Hint Book Mini-Game. The player now becomes a Key that fires lasers at spiders. Only when the player beats the mini-game will they gain access to the hints inside. (Which are still a little vague.)

Created by Amanita Design Studios, Machinarium focuses on the adventure of a robot who has been exiled to the scrap heap.

Players must use "logic, collect important items and solve environmental puzzles to get the robot back to the city of Machinarium so he can rescue his robot girlfriend, save the head of the city and defeat the bad guys from the Black Cap Brotherhood."

 http://amanita-design.net/games/machinarium.html 

Guitar Hero III Analysis

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Analysis

Guitar Hero III utilizes motion capture to recreate each band member's movements onstage and to show how they interact when playing different songs. The recorded movements and facial expressions are then digitized and placed into the game.

The sound team for the Guitar Hero games spends hours in the studio recording various instruments and lots of different songs. Each instrument of each song in the game has to be recorded individually before being placed into the game. Sometimes the actual musician plays it but for the most part its the sound engineers of Guitar Hero.

The number of buttons assigned to musical phrases and riffs are what lend to the various levels of difficulty. The player can choose to be on of the Rock Legends or they can battle against them. GH3 is the first of the Guitar Hero installments to feature player vs Rock Star battles and online play.

Harmonix Team of Engineers

The music tracks, on-stage motions, stage lighting and effect synchronization were created by the Harmonix team of developers who were all musicians and had previous experience in note tracking. The note tracks were developed by placing notes in time with the song; for sections that had difficult parts to track within the game's engine, they opted to use sequences of notes that would seem to the match the music but still be playable. Hammer-ons and pull-offs ("HOPOs") for the previous games were automatically placed by the software. This allowed the engine to manually place HOPOs to make it easier to create certain effects in songs, such as sustained string bends. A separate team came up with the concepts for the various stages and arenas in the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero_III:_Legends_of_Rock

Donkey Kong Analysis

 Nintendo's Donkey Kong

Created in 1981, Donkey Kong was one of the first platform games and one of the first games to have a storyline. In this game, Jumpman, the hero, must rescue a damsel in distress from a giant ape named Donkey Kong by jumping over obstacles and climbing ladders to reach her.

The game has 4 levels, and total of 100 meters. With each level the game becomes harder and harder, for example, Donkey Kong will throw the barrels faster and faster or even diagonally. The pulsating music of the game is pretty catchy and the tune varies as the player progresses through each level. Simple sound effects play as Jumpman, later known as Mario, jumps and climbs towards Paulina.

For those who weren't around for the original release of DK, some of the sound effects are very "Super-Marioesque." When Jumpan picks up his axe, the music is alot like when Mario catches a star. Smashing barrels, walking and all the obstacles have the typical 1980's "beep-boop" sound.

Donkey Kong was originally released as an arcade game and was later able to be played on Atari home consoles.  The game employed a Zilog Z80 microprocessor and sported an advanced sound circuitry for its time. The visual display unit was a vertically oriented raster graphics monitor that displayed up to two hundred and fifty-six colors.