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Kirby's Epic Yarn: A beautiful game with hidden potentional

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      Kirby's Epic Yarn is an action platformer Developed by Nintendo for the Wii. It was released in 2010 and is for all ages, but is primarily for young school-age children. It's a 2.5D sidescroller with similar game mechanics to previous installments in the Kirby series. The levels allow for exploration and treasure hunting, encouraging players to look for hidden items. This creates a game with high replayability.     The first thing I noticed about the game was the incredible art design. The environments and characters are brightly colored and fun to interact with. Unlike previous games in the Kirby series, Kirby is made up of yarn in the world, allowing for numerous new game mechanics.     Kirby's Epic Yarn is extremely easy to pick up and play. It's not even necessary to be familiar with platformers. This game is designed with young children in mind so it was clearly important to have intuitive controls. The player starts in a hub world and selec...

Bloodborne: Dark, Scary, and unforgiving

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      Bloodborne is an Action Role-Playing game set in the fictional world of Yarnham. It is an over-the-shoulder 3rd person game that follows "The Hunter" as they traverse the dark and dingy landscape to achieve their goals, violently.  The Hunter is fully customizable for the player. They can create a unique character that would live and battle the evils of Yarham.         The world of Yarham is designed with heavy Gothic and Lovecraft elements. Meant to appear dark and decayed, it's often hard to tell the difference between architecture, human characters, and horrific creatures. The majority of the game is lit by weak lamplight and/or campfires making the ambiance of the game very creepy.     One of the design traits of Bloodborne is its difficulty, it's an exercise in futility for most. While there is a main plot that the Hunter should progress through, the punishing nature of each enemy, let alone the 'bosses', is enough to mak...

Portal 2: How to create a sequel properly

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            Portal 2 is a first-person puzzle game developed by Valve Software. It's a sequel to the popular game Portal that was released in The Orange Box, a collection of Valve games. Portal is a puzzle game that allows its players to create two portals(blue and orange). When you go in one, you come out the other. It allows for fun and interesting methods for solving puzzles. Originally released for PC, Portal and Portal 2 have been released on all modern consoles.          While seemingly small compared to the wildly popular Half-Life 2, and Team Fortress, [artal quickly gained popularity with its easy-to-learn and fun-to-master gameplay. Portal allowed the player to learn mechanics on the fly without slowing down momentum. It gave hints of a larger world but never detoured from one of the core mechanics "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out".          Learning from the popularity of Portal,...