Another Review on the internet.

In the process of moving on and reviewing a book I came across another review of the game “Battlefront 2” on the internet.

Link – http://www.gameplaymonthly.com/reviews/battlefront2.htm

This article is a short review on the different aspects of the game and why it links in with the franchise and also why it beats it predecessor Battlefront 1. It focuses on Gameplay, Graphics and Sound plus with a little sarcasm as always in a game review.

“The Star Wars franchise is well known for butchering its franchise with cheap games designed to capitalize upon the success of the movies and many, many shoddy games have been released under the Star Wars logo. However, every once in a while a decent game comes along that makes full use of the franchise and actually becomes a stand alone game that could succeed without the Star Wars overtones.”

Research and Analysis for Report (Life after Screencast)

After completing the screencast it was important to carry on researching and analysing different sources of information for evidence to support our report. I decided to start off with the internet and searched for articles about Star Wars games and how they are linked to the Star Wars franchise and worlds.

When gathering research we as a group decided to split our research into two categories. The first category was the content of the research and how much relevance it had to our proposal. The second category was the type of research we use e.g internet sources, books, magazines etc. We felt that if we had these two categories included in our research then our research would be strong.

The following is some research I undertook for the screencast:

Internet source

Link- http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/910/910000p1.h

This source is a review for the game The Force Unleashed by IGN. The main points that it contributes to support me answering my proposal are “The game’s story takes place between Episodes III and IV (or the new and old trilogy for you number-phobic readers out there), though much closer in the timeline to A New Hope than Revenge of the Sith. It’s hard to talk about exactly why without spoiling anything, but I’ll just say that the tale does a very good job of tying the two trilogies together and nicely sets up the current state of everything that you see in A New Hope. Kudos to the team for crafting a story that not only extends the fiction, but in a few small ways even expands upon the existing content”

This review includes interesting views and is very understandable on the negative points it suggests about the game. However this article could only suggest that it was made by 1 persons view which was not a strong enough case.

Magazines

I then decided to research into magazines that associated with my proposal and my results are as follows:

Link-http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uOoDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA44&dq=star+wars+games+and+franchise&cd=10#v=onepage&q=star%20wars%20games%20and%20franchise&f=false

Above is the link to the magazine “Game Axis Unwired ” although its only a small article about the game “Star Wars – The force unleashed” on page 44 it has some useful reviews towards the game and the franchise.

“For every and utterly worthless addition to the franchise, there always seems to be a counter force balancing out and restoring our geeky love for the Star Wars games”

Looking at other candidates Blogs

During the screencast process we were partnered up with a a random person in our lecture to exchange and discuss ideas and comments on each others blog. I was paired with Naser (Mohammed Ali) and looked at his blog in progress as he did the same with mine. We marked each others blog with mine being a low mark and his being a little bit higher. Due to this we both decided that our blogs needed more content on it and I myself felt that a proper kick up the arse was needed. Therefore I decided to analyse different content that relates to our proposal such as videos, books, magazines and articles on the internet.

Analysis of Completing the Screencast.

Overall the screencast went ok but no further than that. We had completed the task which was asked but I felt as a group we could have done more and inputted a bit further instead of leaving things such as rendering the movie until the last minute. The content of the screencast was positive because we said some useful things and made good points about the two games (Star Wars Force Unleashed and Battlefront 2)  However the quality of the videos and some images were relatively poor which significantly dropped my opinion on our success. The clarity of our voices were not too quiet but on little parts of the screencast you can struggle to make out what were saying (mainly due to accents)

Other than the reasons I have stated our screencast was to a standard that I am fairly happy with due to the negative reasons over riding the positive reasons but nevertheless we worked with what we had and knew to the best of our abilities.

Settling down to complete Screencast.

During our screen cast we had a lot of problems that kept popping up because originally we were going to use the software Windows movie maker but because my laptop is windows 7 it was not compatible and only worked with XP/Vista. We quickly resolved the problem and went with a familiar software that as a group we were comfortable which was Adobe After Effects; As we began to get our video footage we had to think of games that actually do coincide with the Star Wars movies because originally we wanted to use Knight Of The Old Republic which is one of the best Star Wars games but had to rethink because it didnt really link with the Star Wars films because our proposal is as follows “To what extent do star wars computer games link in with the Star Wars franchise/world?” Therefore games such as Star Wars : Battlefront 2 and Star Wars: Force Unleashed are much better games to analyse and produce material that we have researched on due to their link with Star Wars Films.

Star Wars : Battlefront 2                         Star Wars : Force Unleashed

Planning and Preparation

Week One (22/02): Familiarize ourselves with Windows movie maker and plan a rough idea of what sort of content will go on our screencast.

Week Two (01/03): Discuss and write down content that will actually be put in our screencast. Look at gameplay videos on youtube to consider using.

Week Three (08/03): Rip videos off youtube and complete research that will support our content for our screencast.

Week Four (15/03): Put all our information we have gathered together and create a script for recording. Record straight after and put video together with audio to complete our screencast.

Week Five (22/03): Keep research ongoing and analysing videos we see and information sources we find.

Week Six (29/03): Finish analysing videos and information and keep work to discuss with team before writing the draft report.

Week Seven (05/04): Start writing draft report.

Week Eight (12/04): Finish Draft report and get feedback.

Week Nine (19/04): Start and finish final report going by what we have from the draft correcting any mistakes given when given feedback.

Week Ten (26/04): Finishing touches to our final report.

Final Week (03/05): Finish Final report completely and Hand-In.