Rachet and Clank Future:Tools Of Destruction- "A pixar-styled game"

During the early 2007, the new generation of consoles had just begun with the PS3 and Wii less than a year old. With this the year was an exciting time for the PS3 to show case upcoming games which utilize its powerful Cell Processor, and prove its power to the industry. One of these games that caught my eye was Ratchet and Clank Future:Tools Of Destruction. Not only because the PS2 games R&C were on of my favorite games, but also because of it unique animation/visual style.

Here is a pretty hilarious cut scene early on in the game, which should be enjoyed by anyone
Exaggeration is used in the time it takes for ratchet to fall asleep, as Ratchet gets knocked out abruptly. Exaggeration and staging are used again to knock out Clank, with the camera shifting to show the glove, and the silly "Bong" sound. Not to mention there is a follow through where clank falls on the chair, fast asleep and slouching. Staging used later with the cloud and dream like atmosphere to make it mysterious. Also there is a focus on the main building where clank must go, which is seen in this part a lot. Finally timing is also used the 3rd part of the cut-scene, to make it look like clank is disoriented and just woken up from a dream. Also notice that Ratchet's face is being squashed and stretched as he talking to Clank, giving the audience the feeling hes yelling at Clank. All of this gives this scene a great cartoonish feeling.

Here's another great in game cut-scene. 
Staging is used here,first with the fact that we see the camera zoom in on his face when we hear the 2 robots voices, and rachet looking in anticipation of each direction the robots. Also with staging ratchet's position seems to be inbetween the two old robots, but he was actually behind them. When Tawlyn (the girl) comes in, she shows anticipation of touching down on the ground when her jet packs were done. Following through is done on Tawlyn's hair, on the robot's antenna and armor as they react according to their movements. Tawlyn shows exaggeration through her face, and body when she tells of how she dislikes the sounds of bodies popping in airlocks. A bit of timing shows awkward Tawlyn feels that Ratchet doesn't know his race. Finally Clank's abrupt but right answer appeals to the audience  how witty and intelligent he is.

Now for some gameplay

One of the game's major praises was how the game engine could handle huge amounts of the game's currency, Bolts, at once. Theses blots, seen to be done through particle effects, can be seen to spawn every time ratchet breaks boxes, or later on destroying enemies. These bolts once, spawned, will be attracted to Ratchet, flying towards him in a huge swarm. However through careful analysis, not all the bolts will go to Rachet the same way. Some will go directly, while other arch around the other bolts, and some will even come after all the initial bolts have come.

There seems to a bolt manager involved here, only allowing a specific amount of bolts to be attracted to rachet at once, stored in some sort of linked list. Once Ratchet collects his bolt(s), these bolts will be destroyed, removed from the list and give Ratchet their value. Once this happens the manager looks for any other bolts which are collected by the player, but have not yet been attracted towards the player and activates them. Also this manager will constantly look for any bolts within the range of Rachet, checking if the player has collected them or not.

When Ratchet collects a large golden bolt, there some designs of animation shown here. Large golden bolts give you money, however they main purpose of it is a collectable used to unlock awesome cheats. Collecting the bolt at 0:52 of the video shows 3 animation techniques of  anticipation, appeal and secondary action. The anticipation is Ratchet getter ready to accept the bolt, secondary action is him cheering after he has received the bolt, and appeal is the 2 previous techniques, combined with the music.

The animation technique "follow through and overlapping action" used for ratchets ears/tails and the smuggler hat when he speaks to ratchet. If you look carefully when ratchet walks, his tail and ears will sway and flap in the wind, giving him life. Also the smuggler, in the upcoming cut scene, will have his head moving alot, similarly his hat will react in a similar manner.

At 2:30 a cutscene starts and with every word they say, they use body language, as a form of exaggeration, convey their emotions. At 2:57 when Clank asks who didn't kill the last cragmite, the camera zooms in as act of staging, to emphasize how important the Lombaxes are. 

Finally we can see animation being incorporated as a game mechanic after the cutscene. 4:38 as the little cop bots seem to notice the player, there is an animation executed, to show anticipation of the bot charging Ratchet.  Also at 5:00 if you pay attention to the robot fish guards, they have a secondary animation of the fishes jumping up and down after their suit is destroyed. In fact if you play the game you can even kill these fish for extra gold.

With all these examples of good animation, the game won many praises from reviewers and currently holding a 89 on Meta critic. The game had a great engine which gave it a visual style said to be similar to Pixar movies. This game was a great edition to the PS3's small library at the time, and was one of the reasons why I bought a PS3 later on in the year.

Sid Meier's Civilization 4

Assignment- Review your most favorite game

When I was younger, one of my first played games was Civilization 3, a game of epic scale, and immense value. In 2005, I saw on the store flyers that my favorite game had been given a equal and I immediately went out to purchase this game. At first I was overwhelmed by the amount of new concepts that they had implemented, but there was a force which kept pushing me forward, to keep playing. One of the driving factors was how beautifully the game had evolved, from plain isometric  game in Civ3, to a living and breathing world in Civ4.

 One thing that was improved was the units, not only did they have new animations, but now they also spoke too. With this improvement, the developers used a new 3D engine, Gamebryo, instead of using the existing one. With the units, they are basic 3D models, mostly likely animated using key frame animation, due to the number of idle animations which they have. One positive advantage of 3D,as the developer said, was it was easy to modify units for different scenarios. For example if we wanted to make a race specific version of the archer unit, we could just apply another texture for the skin and armor.When a unit is selected, there is a 3d circle rotating around that unit, to do this the circle rotates around the center of the tile, which is where the unit is centered.

  With the units, they truly show their animation when they are in combat. First off the unit's model will rotate on the spot to face the direction of the unit which they are being attacked from, or attacking. In the situation the unit is mechanical, a tank or helicopter, and is losing the fight, its textures will change to show it is more damaged with bullet holes and fire. Fire is shown as a particle effect when the units are dying/dead, always rising from the center of unit's body. When the unit dies, it will show its death animation, made using keyframes,  usually resulting in their body falling to the ground or blowing up. Strangely enough the infantry in general all share a similar death animation. 

Finally the game's immersiveness was fully enhanced with the living and breathing environments of Civ 4. In Civ 4 the developers decided to give life to their game tiles, whether it be the many land masses, the improvements in the , or all 32 resources by animating them. As seen in the video, the forest tile seems contain many tree objects, and these trees will disappear if it is in the way of a road or a unit is on the tile. With resources they will have 2 different animations, 1 without being used and one which is not being used, such as the pigs in the video. With time, technology advances, and land improvements will change, such as a aluminum farm, instead of wooden shed. For this change, a model change is involved whenever a civilization advances in the game's 6 technological eras.

With all this in mind, the creators wanted a more modifiable game, to allow fans to create easier, but better Mods. Game data and rules are stored in Civ 4's XML files, and a SDK for the game was released in April 2006 to allow for AI customization. Major parts of the interface, map generation, and scripted events are written entirely in Python and can be customized. With this, 3 expansion packs, containing new scenarios, units and Civilizations were released, on a yearly basis along with the dozens of amazing mods.

That year Civilization 4 receiving many near perfect or perfect reviews, while being nominated for many awards including best PC game and game of the year.The jump from Civilization 3 to 4 was such a great leap, it sets a great example of what any game should do for an excellent sequel. In the end Civilization 4 is truly an amazing game, one which will suck you in and make you waste hours on the game. A game which will truly make you say the words