Extended Practice Game Play and Collectibles Research: Gex

The next game series that I wanted to look into was Gex as these games where brilliant and offered so much for the player to do and explore while in the game. It was a very interesting experience to play through these games and they do play well, there are always a few issues with the camera controls not always matching up to the way that the player moves, but these are bugs with most games in this era and can be easily worked around. 

The game mechanics do control well though and the character can be moved fully around some very nice 3D environments and through some tricky mini games. The whole mechanics system is mainly based on being able to move around, jump and perform a slightly higher double jump and then attack your enemies in a few different ways. All of which perform well, although there are sometimes some slight issues with the way in which the jumping works meaning that you can't always line up your jumps, this results in some annoying misjumps and having to start an entire section of the level again due to one little mistake that was probably not your fault.

There are also lots of other mechanics to the game that enable more features to be added in terms of content. The game features a variety of mini game type levels and the levels work in stages much like the Mario games do. The stages then change depending on what the main goal of is, but there are areas that you can go to which feature mini game like situations that makes you for example be able to snowboard extremely fast down a hill, or fight enemies off in a tank. The game doesn't take itself too seriously which makes these random occurrences work even better.

Lastly I wanted to look at the collectibles in the game, and it does have a sort of collectible system, but not one that will inspire our game too much. The collectibles included flies medals, and if you collect 100 of them on a level you earn an extra remote, which acts like more life/health. You then have the lizard paws and if you collect 25 of them on each level and you get extra sections to your health bar meaning that you can survive for longer, and there also large coins which can be used in the bonus games in the Gex cave, which are like mini games.