ACTION

What's the Definition of an Action Game?

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Nintendo / All Rights Reserved 

By 

Nadia Oxford

Updated May 11, 2018

20

Video games in the "action" genre typically put emphasis on challenging the player's reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and reaction time. In fact, when you think about action games, you might immediately think of arcade classics like Pitfall and other titles that involved a lot of virtual running and jumping. That's because even the earliest arcade cabinets were home to some of the best-known action games of all time. Today's action games are typically more complex than those first offerings (but not always!), even though the genre's core mechanics — running, jumping, attacking — remain intact.

Many action games also share similar design mechanics, too. The player usually progresses from level to level while the game's challenge level creeps up at a steady rate. The terrain gradually becomes more treacherous to navigate, and the enemies become trickier to defeat. Most action games top off levels (or a group of levels) with a "boss fight," which involves going toe-to-toe with a particularly big bad guy that requires a little extra finesse and/or strength to beat. Some action games also plop a smaller boss mid-way through certain levels. These medium-level threats are often labeled "Minibosses," a term that still pops up in modern gaming jargon.

How Are Action Games Played?

Action games typically give the player multiple means of attack, though there's almost always a shared theme at work. An action game that's based around shooting, for instance, might give the player a multitude of upgradable guns, while another action game that's based on a fantasy world will provide swords and magical powers. As the player progresses through the game, he or she must remain mindful of the main character's health and lives. The main character can usually take multiple hits, but if too much damage is incurred, the character dies, and a "life" is lost.

If all the character's lives are wiped out, it's Game Over. The player can usually collect more lives and health on their journey. Modern action games have found ways to play with the health-and-lives reward and punishment system, as some developers feel that it's an archaic holdover from an age where people dropped quarters into arcade machines to keep on playing. In the independently-developed action game Braid, for instance, players can actually "rewind" the gameplay and correct the mistakes that led to the main character's death. Given the popularity and longevity of the action game genre, developers have played around with the formula quite a bit. As a result, action games have branched out into several different sub-genres. Some of these sub-genres include: 

• Shooter Games: Action games that challenge the player to target and dispatch opponents. These opponents aren't always human in nature: very often, the player is in a vehicle that scrolls from left to right (or from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen), and he or she must shoot down a seemingly endless barrage of enemy planes and robots.
• Beat 'em Ups: Action games in which the player moves from left to right and brawls with enemies using close-range melee attacks. Many Beat 'em Ups are based around martial arts. Good examples of this sub-genre are Double Dragon and Final Fight. 
• Platforming Games: Arguably the most well-known action game sub-genre. Platform games challenge the player's reflexes with obstacle courses filled with floating platforms, enemies, and boss characters. Super Mario 3D Land, Mutant Mudds, and Kirby's Adventure are all examples of great action games on the Nintendo DS and 3DS. VVVVVV is an action game that revolves around flipping gravity, and is, therefore, a good example of an action game that does something a little different with the tried-and-true formula.

ADVENTURE

Written by Marek Bronstring
February 12, 2012

It will take you 6 minutes to read this feature.

For over 40 years, adventure games have been the most story-driven computer game genre. Since its inception in 1976 with ADVENT (aka Colossal Cave Adventure, or simply Adventure), many have found adventure games to have a truly immersive quality that can be compared to reading a book or watching a movie. If you are interested in playing games that can be thoughtful, engaging and intelligent, and provide some mental challenge while they’re at it, you’ve just landed on the right website.

Adventure games are all about unraveling stories, exploring worlds and solving puzzles. Play as Ray McCoy on assignment to track down replicants in Blade Runner, embark on a four-year journey through the mystical Land Of The Dead in the Mexican folk art and film noir-inspired Grim Fandango, or travel the globe confronting ancient conspiracies in Broken Sword. When you’re playing an adventure game, you never quite know what you’re going to get. Fantasies, comedies, westerns, mysteries, horror, or sci-fi; there’s an adventure game for everyone.

In fact, there are so many adventure games that it can be hard to find a place to start. Fortunately, this article should help you along your way.

Genre definition

Adventure games focus on puzzle-solving within a narrative framework, generally with few or no action elements. Other popular names for this genre are “graphic adventure” or “point-and-click adventure”, but these represent only part of a much broader, diverse range of games.

Adventure games are not based on what the dictionary defines as “adventure”. Some are, but many forsake danger and excitement for more relaxed, thoughtful endeavors. They are also not: role-playing games that involve extensive combat, team-building and points management; action/adventures such as Uncharted and Prince of Persia where puzzle-solving is clearly a secondary focus; side-scrolling platform games such as Mario or LittleBigPlanet; pure puzzle games like Bejeweled or Tetris.

But labels can only take us so far. Many games push traditional genre boundaries in new and interesting ways while still remaining adventure games at their core. Dreamfall, the sequel to the point-and-click classic The Longest Journey, includes some stealth and fight scenes. Heavy Rain is a new breed of interactive movie-style adventuring featuring motion controls and Quick Time Events. At the other end of the spectrum, titles like Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove mix in plenty of Where’s Waldo?-styled scavenger hunts. Even Portal, which gives you a gun to solve physics-based puzzles instead of killing, has a right to be called an adventure.

Of course, stories, puzzles, and exploration are not limited to just adventures. More and more games outside the genre are incorporating adventure game elements, like Scribblenauts, Braid, and Limbo. Given their shared features, we will sometimes cover these as special “games of interest”, though always with the understanding that they fall outside the scope of our adventure game definition.

Characteristics

There are three characteristics that are always present in an adventure game to some degree. Certain sub-genres focus more on one aspect than another.

Narrative

In adventure games, the story is often essential. Plots range in scope, tone, and setting as much as movies and novels do. For instance, in Gabriel Knight, you are attempting to solve a voodoo murder mystery in New Orleans, whereas Day of the Tentacle tells the comic tale of three odd friends who travel through time in a portable toilet in a quest to defeat the toxically-tainted Purple Tentacle. Ideas are limited only by imagination, and adventure games are known for their original stories.

In some adventures, however, the story is more a blank canvas to fill in through open-ended discovery than a series of predetermined events unfolding around you. In The Last Express, you’ll eavesdrop on conversations, scour compartments, and engage your fellow passengers in conversation on rails between Paris and Constantinople. As a defense lawyer in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, you’ll spend much of your time in the same courtroom, pressing witnesses for answers and questioning suspect testimony. In games like these, what you do is far less relevant than what you learn through exploration, dialogue, and careful observation.

Puzzles

Puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, some better suited for organic integration into stories than others. Here are a few of the more common types of puzzles you’ll encounter:

Inventory puzzles: accumulating an inventory of items that are then used to solve puzzles. Some areas simple as using one item on another in the environment, but others are far more complex. Return to Mysterious Island allows for five or six items to be combined into a new object altogether before being used.

Dialogue-based puzzles: interacting with secondary characters to accumulate clues and directions, or persuade them to help your cause. The Secret of Monkey Island’s famous insult sword fighting requires learning all the best quips to beat the most quick-witted, sharp-tongued opponents.

Environmental puzzles: analyzing and altering your surroundings in the game directly, whether setting clock times in Machinarium or overflowing Flood Control Dam #3 in Zork Grand Inquisitor.

Non-contextual logic puzzles: standalone challenges can include anything from sliders to chess to jigsaws. This type of obstacle usually has little or no relevance to the game’s narrative, serving mainly as a cerebral interlude in puzzle-adventures like Professor Layton or casual titles like Drawn: The Painted Tower.

While a lot of adventure games contain basic inventory and logic puzzles, some games provide more exotic types of challenges. For instance, Bad Mojo is played as a scientist trapped in the body of a tiny cockroach, while in Stacking you acquire new abilities by leaping into new and larger stacking dolls to absorb their identity. Loom uses music as the basis for its puzzles. Regardless of type, the best adventures use puzzles creatively to advance the story rather than simply posing as arbitrary obstacles in the way.

Exploration

Adventure games usually require exploration to some degree, depending on the type of interface. In early text parser adventures, you had to navigate by typing in directions, such as “GO NORTH”. Modern adventures provide more intuitive ways to get around, often asking the player to move the cursor over the screen to find ‘hotspots’ (objects that can be looked at or manipulated). Others allow for more direct interactions still, highlighting objects of interest simply by moving your characters close to them. A few escape-the-room adventures like Samorost 2 are more streamlined than most, requiring you to complete all actions on one screen before moving to the next, though you must still carefully explore your immediate surroundings.

Next: different graphical styles

Telling them apart

Most modern adventure games fit into one of two distinctive types. (We are going to indulge in a few generalizations here just to simplify things a bit.)

First-person exploration adventures such as Myst feature graphically immersive worlds full of brain-teasing puzzles, but often with very little plot development and few characters to talk to. Puzzles are often mechanical or slightly mathematical in nature, and you are more likely to run into non-contextual challenges in this type of game.

Third-person adventures such as Sam & Max and King’s Quest tend to focus more on character interaction and narrative. Puzzles are usually of the inventory or dialogue type. The third-person perspective is usually integral to the experience, allowing you to see and identify with the main protagonist on the screen.

Some games do defy these trends, like the character- and story-driven, first-person Tex Murphy games and the quiet exploration of Syberia’s third-person quest for living mammoths, but these are rare exceptions rather than the rule.

SUDOKU

SUDOKU GAME

History of Sudoku dates back to an 18th Century Swiss mathematician’s game called “Latin Squares” (according to this article from the Economist) and some of the first number puzzles to appear in newspapers were published in France in 1895. But the modern game of Sudoku as we recognize it today was invented by Howard Garns, a freelance puzzle inventor from Connersville, Indiana, the USA in 1979 when it was published in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine. The puzzle was known as “Number Place,” since it involved placing individual numbers into empty spots on a 9 x 9 grid.

The game first appeared in Japan in 1984 where it was given the name “Sudoku,” which is short for a longer expression in Japanese – “Sūji way Kyokushin nkaguraru” – which means, “the digits are limited to one occurrence.” Sudoku continues to be highly popular in Japan, where people buy over 600,000 Sudoku magazines per month.

One reason that Sudoku puzzles are so beloved in Japan is that the Japanese language doesn’t work very well for crossword puzzles – so a number puzzle was much more successful in Japanese culture. Also, Japan tends to love puzzles, since it is a country where millions of people make lengthy commutes by train or bus, and they need to kill time while waiting for the next stop.

The man who reintroduced Sudoku “back” to the Western world was a New Zealand judge named Wayne Gould, who was on vacation in Tokyo in March 1997 when he discovered Sudoku in a bookstore. He quickly became a devoted enthusiast of Sudoku and spent the next six years developing a computer program that could generate Sudoku puzzles.

The Times of London began publishing Sudoku puzzles in 2004, and the first U.S. newspaper to feature Sudoku was The Conway (New Hampshire) Daily Sun in 2004. Within the past 10 years, Sudoku has become a global phenomenon. The first World Sudoku Championship was hosted in Italy in 2006 and the 2013 World Sudoku Championship will be held in Beijing.

Why does Sudoku speak to us in today’s fast-paced world? One possible reason is that it appeals to people’s innate sense of order; there is something very satisfying about filling out those empty squares on the Sudoku grid. Another reason is that the rules are simple and easy to learn – people of all ages can play Sudoku and can often learn quickly how to approach the puzzle. As Sudoku’s global popularity attests, the game is easy to share with friends all over the world, because it is numbers-based and so it does not require any translation.

As long as people love to test their brains with the fun and challenge of logic puzzles, Sudoku will be a popular and beloved part of millions of people’s everyday lives around the world.

MERCHANDISING BUSINES

Merchandising Business

In Unit 1 we introduced the three main types of businesses, merchandising, service and manufacturing. Merchandising companies purchase goods that are ready for sale and then sell them to customers. Merchandising companies include auto dealerships, clothing stores, and supermarkets, all of which earn revenue by selling goods to customers.

In a merchandising sales transaction, the seller sells a product and transfers the legal ownership (title) of the goods to the buyer.  A business document called an invoice (a sales invoice for the seller and a purchase invoice for the buyer) becomes the basis for recording the sale.

The following video provides an overview of the difference between Merchandising and Service companies and their respective accounting needs.

An invoice is a document prepared by the seller of merchandise and sent to the buyer. The invoice contains the details of a sale, such as the number of units sold, unit price, total price billed, terms of sale, and manner of shipment.

BRYAN WHOLESALE CO.			Invoice No.: 1258
476 Mason Street			Date: December 19
Detroit, MI 48823
Customer’s Order No.: 218
Sold to:	Baier Company		Shipped To	Baier Company
Address:	2255 Hannon St.		Address:	2255 Hannon Street
	Big Rapids, MI 48106			Big Rapids, MI 48106
			Date Shipped:	December 19
Terms:	Net 30, FOB Destination	Shipping Terms:	FOB Destination	Shipped by Nagel Trucking Co.
Description	Item Number	Quantity	Price per Unit	Total Amount
True-tone stereo radio	Model No. 5868-24393	200	$100	$20,000
		Total		$20,000

Do you see a due date on the invoice?  What about who pays for shipping?  This is all detailed in the terms.  You see two types of terms:

• Payment Terms:  tells you when an invoice is due and if a discount is offered for early payment
• Shipping Terms:  tells you who is responsible for paying for shipping and when the title of the goods passes to the buyer

Payment Terms

In some industries, credit terms include a cash discount of 1% to 3% to encourage early payment of an amount due. A cash discount is a deduction from the invoice price that can be taken only if the invoice is paid within a specified time. Sellers call a cash discount a sales discount and buyers call it a purchase discount. Companies often state payment terms as follows:

•1/10, n/30—means a buyer who pays within 10 days following the invoice date may deduct a discount of 1% of the invoice price. If payment is not made within the discount period, the entire invoice price is due 30 days from the invoice date.

•3/EOM, n/60—means a buyer who pays by the end of the month of purchase may deduct a 3% discount from the invoice price. If payment is not made within the discount period, the entire invoice price is due 60 days from the invoice date.

•2/10/EOM, n/60—means a buyer who pays by the 10th of the month following the month of purchase may deduct a 2% discount from the invoice price. If payment is not made within the discount period, the entire invoice price is due 60 days from the invoice date.

•Net 30 —means the entire invoice price is due 30 days from the invoice date without a discount.

Sellers cannot record the sales discount before they receive the payment since they do not know when the buyer will pay the invoice. A cash discount taken by the buyer reduces the cash that the seller actually collects from the sale of the goods, so the seller must indicate this fact in its accounting records.

Companies base discounts on the invoice price of goods. If merchandise is later returned, the returned amount must be deducted from the invoice price before calculating discounts. For example, the invoice price of goods purchased was $ 30,000 and the company returned $ 2,000 of the goods, the seller calculates the 2% discount on $ 28,000 ($30,000 original – $2,000 return).

Shipping Terms

Shipping terms are used to show who is responsible for paying for shipping and when the title of the goods passes from seller to buyer. To understand how to account for transportation costs, you must know the meaning of the following terms:

• FOB shipping point means “free on board at shipping point”. The buyer incurs all transportation costs after the merchandise has been loaded on a railroad car or truck at the point of shipment. Thus, the buyer is responsible for ultimately paying the freight charges.
• FOB destination means “free on board at destination”. The seller ships the goods to their destination without charge to the buyer. Thus, the seller is ultimately responsible for paying the freight charges.

We will look at how these items factor into journal entries for merchandising companies in the next sections.

MANUFACTURE BUSINESS

Manufacturing companies play an important role in the Indonesian economy. The company contributes to a large income to the country either through taxes or other contracts. Because of its size, the company engaged in manufacturing also has a large absorption of labor, that will lead to reduce unemployment.

Manufacturing itself has a different meaning than production, production itself has a broader meaning, namely the process of processing raw materials into a product such as gas, liquid or solid. While manufacturing is the process of processing raw materials into a product in solid form.

Manufacturing is a term refer to the process of converting raw materials, components, or parts into finished goods that meet customer expectations or specifications. This term can be used for human activities, from handicrafts to high-tech production.

Manufacturing companies in every work or operational activity have a basic reference and standard used by employees, usually, the standard reference is called SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

Those are some general understandings of manufacturing, but  in a manufacturing company there are several lines or business processes. Here are some business process in manufacturing companies :

Procurement process

This is a business process related to the procurement of goods and other needs in helping business sustainable. Not only materials or raw materials, but also includes spare parts, medical devices, cleaning equipment, building needs, employee needs, carpentry tools, and other materials and components. This process requires completeness as well as efficiency and effectiveness in the selection of these items.

In Out Inventory

Considering the business processes that process raw materials into ready-to-use products, there will automatically be many goods or materials entering and leaving the company. In Out Inventory is a business process that handles the entry and exit of these items, the key is control of goods flow.

Production process

The function of the production process is processing raw materials into finished goods and can be sold to consumers. In reality, there is wider division depend on the needs of the industry. For example, PPIC (Production Planning and Inventory Control) divisions and also QC (Quality Control).

Sales and Marketing

The function of this division is to make sales and marketing to get a profit. For example, the costs of marketing such as promotion costs, transportation costs, warehouse rental fees, employee salary costs when employees are conducting product promotions.

Administration and General

This division is responsible for determining policies, directives, and supervision so that ongoing activities are more effective and efficient. For example, in this department, there are several costs such as accounting fees, employee costs, employee salary costs and others.

Accounting and Finance

Accounting and finance ensure that the finances of a business entity are healthy and able to meet production needs, as well as control over debt. In addition, an accounting, in particular, has an obligation to regulate taxes that must be paid by the factory to the government.