Machinarium and The Visitor

Hey, it's Aztec Warrior Everitt1968 here. Thankfully, after the issues I had last week with downloading games I finally managed to overcome the problem so I could finally start my assignment. The games I decided on were Machinarium (Aminata Design, 2009) and The Visitor (Zeebarf, 2008). There are a few comparisons and contrasts between the two. As already mentioned, both are point and click games. In Machinarium the player controls a little robot through the stages whereas in The Visitor the player controls a parasite stow away on a meteor that crash lands on earth. There is alot of pointing and clicking here so without the guide to help the player along in either game, there can be endless pointing and clicking if you are not sure what to do.

Contrasts that are worth a mention here are genre (the type of or theme of game) and the level of violent activity involved. Machinarium, even on the second stage shows a medium to low level of violent activity but overall this game would be more suited as a discovery of adventure game as the little robot needs to navigate his way back to the city after being discarded with the trash. The Visitor on the other hand has a really scary feel about it right from the get go so this game could be classified as another type of adventure but a point and click horror adventure.

My feelings and emotions towards the games were mixed and varied. Machinarium was funny and made me laugh and I was happy to have figured out the first three introductory stages. I was a bit disappointed though to only get so far on the Demo to discover that if I wanted to continue I would have to subscribe to the game. That was about my only disappointment of Machinarium. The Visitor is filled with violent activity right from the establishing scene when the bullfrog spontaneously combusts from eating the alien visitor and from that emerges a bigger, scarier looking parasite and after eating other people and animals the parasite gets bigger and scarier. I felt sorry for the cat and the bird that flew out of his cage (homage to The Blob and Species III). It looked like something from out of a horror flick. Overall however, despite the emotions I felt while playing these two games, both Machinarium and The Visitor are worth playing and I think if players are like me, there always seems to be a sense of satisfaction about getting through and completing different stages of a game.

Next week I’ll be talking about a gaming website that I have been a member of since the beginning of the course. I don’t want to be a spoiler so once I have the hang of uploading a few things I’ll have ready by next Weekend. Cheers

Aztec Warrior Everitt1968