Im gona comment about story vs gameplay today...

I think a game driven by story is a game such as Final Fantasy. Because my friend told me, its very exciting to play coz he wanted to see the storyline. I thought so as well. To me, i think the game is base on the story as the storyline is really good. Its like a very good TV series where you would want to catch it fast.

A game driven by gameplay is a game such as Mario Kart. Its pure fun and has no storyline. You just play and play without much objectives and not following any storylines and stuffs.

To me, i think the ideal game would be the combination of both story and good gameplay. Both must be very good or people will give comments like, "Cool and fun game, but the story sux. It ruins the whole game." The gameplay must be very addictive and the story must relate to the lives of people. So they can feel the characters and the things happening in the game.

To a certain extent, i think story should be derived from the player's experience in the game. It makes the game more interactive. But i also disagree to it because players might want to read more about other people's story than the story that they made themselves. So to a certain extend, a pre-made storyline might just be better.

10:08 PM;
I made my mark

Wahaha..
Munchkin is so fun :D

For those who dont know about Munchkin, its actually a card game. Let me describe it for you.
The game has 2 decks. One is the treasure deck and one is the dungeon deck. Players start by drawing a card from the dungeon deck. Theres curse card, monster card, event card, race and class card in this deck. Then if u got monster card, you need to fight it according to your level, which u start at lv1. Compare your level and bonus with the monster, see who higher, the higher one wins the combat. If the monster win, you need to do the bad stuff as printed on the monster card. But if you win, you can take treasure cards from the treasure deck. Then after killing the monster you gain one level!

While in battle, people can sabo you and make you lose to the monster so you wont level up and get nice nice treasures. Of course you can add bonuses to yourself oso. Then just play play play. Its really fun and addictive. The game features strategy and luck. Like if you are level 9, you need to wait for the right oppotunity to win. Example is that i will wait for people to spam all their sabo cards on one player first then i can strike my winning monster. Of course you would need a backup to keep people from winning. So its very risky and exciting. haha and guess what? There are expansion packs for Munchkins. Super fun~

Thats all for this post ^^ good luck. Below are the cards i made.
kinda spoofed 300 the movie. lol its balanced.

10:08 PM;
I made my mark

Video Games were first introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the basis for an important entertainment industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the United States, Japan, and Europe. After a disastrous collapse of the industry in 1983 and a subsequent rebirth two years later, the video game industry has experienced sustained growth.

The video game industry as it exists today primarily sprang from two independent sources. The first of these was the coin-operated amusement business, such as the jukebox which became the most profitable amusement device in 1948. But the most important game was pinball which begin in 1931. the pinball industry really took off in the 1950s during the post-World War II American economy boom.
American video game companies such as Bally Manufacturing, Williams Manufacturing, and Midway Games were all established for the creation of pinball and other coin-operated devices. In addition to pinball, these companies created mechanical sports games, driving games, and shooting games using light guns that were all forerunners of video game genres.
Soon the arcade business was taking hold, important advances in electronics led to the creation of the first computers between 1937 and 1945. The early computers were big, bulky and very expensive, and as a result, were only found at top university research facilities and government institutions. But soon computers began to shrink in size and come down in price, spreading across universities and being adopted by businesses in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was then that some university students begin to create games from the computer.

While the video game industry did not become firmly established until 1972, the three major facets of the market, computer games, home console games, and arcade games were all in place by the beginning of the 1970s.
A group of science-fiction lovers soon made a game operating in a computer. Developed in 1962, it was called Spacewars!. The game was spread around as a demo program with each PDP computer it sold, exposing university students across the country to the game. But in the end, these games disappeared into oblivion as old machines broke down and old tape was erased.

In 1971, two Stanford University Students exposed to Spacewar! became the first individuals to release a commercial video game product. It was named Galaxy Game, and was placed in the student union with a cost of ten cents per game. it operated from 1972 to 1979 when it was dismantled after the monitor began acting up. A far more important Spacewar! clone was created in 1971 by Nolan Bushnell. He constructed a custom dedicated system that played Spacewar! called Computer Space and then entered into a deal with a small coin-op company called Nutting Associates to create a production run of 1,500 units.
But in the end, it failed and Bushnell joined with co-worker Ted Dabney to found Atari Corporation on June 27, 1972 to continue making video arcade games.

Shortly after founding Atari, Bushnell and Dabney hired Al Alcorn as the company’s first game programmer. At the time, Bushnell was working on a racing game using the physics of Computer Space and was attempting to interest pinball giant Bally Manufacturing in the game. Bushnell told Alcorn Atari had a contract from General Electric for a ping-pong game and told him to design it. But what Alcorn came back with was a tennis game in which the paddle was divided into segments to vary the angle of return and which sped up during long rallies to make them more exciting. Bushnell decided the product was good enough to release and tried to talk Bally into taking it. Bally would not do so without a test run, so Bushnell set up a prototype in a bar. The response was overwhelming and thus Bushnell decided to sell it himself instead. The game, PONG, sold around 8000 units and began the rise of the video game. Soon after the release of PONG, Bushnell bought out Dabney to become sole owner of the company. After that Atari sold created many games and alot of them were very successful. At the meantime, Bally Manufacturing was also releasing big hits such as the Gun Fight. But after an initial period of success, the video game market began to decline in late 1976 as the novelty of the games wore off.

After a brief period of decline, the arcade industry entered its greatest period of creativity and popularity in 1978 to begin what has commonly been dubbed the golden age of arcade games.
Toshihiro Nishikado was inspired by a dream in his creation of Space Invaders, but whatever the origin, the game created a new craze with its simple, yet addicting game play in which the player controlled a gun battery at the bottom of the screen and had to destroy aliens advancing down the screen in rows one line at a time. It was the first game with a highscores system. To compete with Taito, Atari released a game called Atari Football which ended after the football season.
After the success of Space Invaders, a large number of established coin-op companies that had avoided video games altogether or pulled out after releasing a PONG clone or two chose to fully embrace the new medium including pinball giants Williams and Gottlieb and Japanese coin-op companies such as Konami and Namco. Space shooters, whether fixed like Space Invaders or multi-directional like Asteroids, remained the hottest arcade genre into 1980 and continued to be popular long after that.

While Space Invaders reinvigorated the arcade market, it was a 1980 game from Namco that elevated the video game firmly into American popular culture. Namco hired Toru Iwatani, a pinball enthusiast, in 1977 to design games. Iwatani was somewhat put off by the shoot 'em ups dominating the market after Space Invaders and wanted to create a non-violent game that would appeal to both sexes. Deciding to base the game around taberu, the Japanese word meaning "to eat," Iwatani came up with a maze game in which the player had to collect all 240 dots in the maze while avoiding a group of enemy ghosts.
The game is called Pac-man. An immediate hit in the United States, Pac-Man became the best-selling arcade game in that country to date with over 100,000 units sold, created a new craze for maze games that partially displaced the shoot 'em up, resulted in video games moving out of the arcades to locations such as convenience stores, drug stores, hotels, and airports, and resulted in Pac-Man himself becoming the first identifiable video game character and mascot.

In the 1970s, computer and video game development split to many areas, such as arcade machines, university computers, handhelds, and home computers. And the industry of games continues to expand till now. From 2-5 people in a development team to 50-100 people. This entertainment business is certainly going to grow to greater heights.