Sunday, 23 February 2014

Game Art and Machinima Research: Madagascar 3

By Meg Sugden
The next game that I wanted to look at is Madagascar 3 the video game, based off the first film that came out in 2012. The game features the four zoo animals, Marty the zebra, Alex the lion, Gloria the hippopotamus and Melman the giraffe as they continue their adventure and attempt to escape Captain Chantel DuBois and return home to New York City.

The overall character design is fairly good following the same look as the characters from the film and it is easily recognisable as to who is who. The game characters do not obviously look as well polished as the film ones but they have done a good job to give them that same cartoony look that is appealing to the child audience and others. I choose to look at the third game which came out more recently as the graphics are more polished and the characters have been given more life than the original games, something that we want to try and convey into our own characters. Although still cartoon-looking there is no blockiness to the characters any more and they have a much smoother appearance which works a lot better along with more fluid movement to them when they run. Another reason I like these characters so much is that they all have there own personalities as well and two of them do walk like humans would as well on there hind legs, again giving them that little extra special trait about them.



The environments throughout the game take you all around Europe taking you to Monte Carlo, Rome, Pisa, Paris and London before finishing the game. The places that you visit throughout the game are all very well designed and fit in the same kind of genre of cartoon so that the character appear to fit in, apart from the first level as the environment appears to look slightly more realistic than cartoony. However as soon as this level is passed the environments get better and give an essence of each city that they visit trying to get in key details that make that city famous, which really works. This is something that we will have to do in our own environment as we want to bring a little bit of Australia and what makes it famous into our level.



Lastly. the cut scenes scenes that are used throughout the game aren't particularly that exciting and are usually just tutorials about what to do next delivered by the four penguins. But however at the beginning and end of the game, and sometimes randomly in the middle there are proper cut scenes hosted by King Julian, and occasionally the two monkeys Mason and Phil, that are very humourous and use the characteristics of that person from the film to give that little bit of laughter into those scenes, something that we would like to do as well in our own cut scene.

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