Tiny Nitpick

A tiny menu nitpick:

When the currently selected menu option is simply a different color, and doesn't have a final-fantasy-style pointing finger or whatever, you cannot tell what option you are highlighting on a two-option dialog when hitting down at the bottom of a list brings you to the top of this list, as it commonly does. This should not annoy me as much as it does.

Have you got any tiny nitpicks to share?

Quick-Time Events

Quick time events exist for pretty obvious reasons. The developers want Action Dude to jump off a building while shooting Death Guy and somersaulting and eating a hot dog because it will look cinematic (cool) as hell, but the game isn't really built for it (there's no eat hot dog button). They also don't want to just show the cinematic and take you out of control, so they do the damn Simon Says song and dance. Unfortunately, they fail on both fronts.

1. Control is taken out of your hands anyway! This stupid minigame is not what I signed up for! The manual dexterity portion of your modern videogame has advanced way beyond this hokey crud! It is about turning the actions your brain wants your little man to do into Action Dude's exploits, not hitting the button the screen tells you to hit. The difference must seem like splitting hairs to devs who think my thirst for screen-to-brain-to-hand-to-screen interaction will be sated by Simon. (It won't.)

2. QTEs are only cinematic (cool) when everything goes right! What do you have happen to the player when he fails a QTE? Will you lose a life? Will you get another chance to do it immediately? Will it change your path through the game? Will it just show a different cinematic(Action Dude hits Death Guy with a somersaulting hot dog and eats his sidearm)?

For the most part, 'try, try again' is the very opposite of cinematic. It's actions-without-consequences meets hey-I've-seen-this-before. Even when you lose a life(or a widget or some HP or whatever), that just changes it to you-are-punishing-me-mercilessly meets hey-I've-seen-this-before. Branching paths, I will admit, can be cool. But when the path selection is done through this metagamey psuedomechanic, it comes with a bad aftertaste. Specifically, I often will hit the reset button instead of soldiering on in the 'you fail!' path. And lastly, while I would love to accidentally toss food at supervillians, this plan has the unwanted side effect of making half the cutscene artists' efforts unseen by a given player.

What does this leave us? Without QTEs, you can either have the scene happen in a normal cinematic, or drop the scene entirely. I'll concede that these aren't fantastic solutions, either. If I can think of something more elegant, I'll make a later post.

So what do you think? Hate 'em, love 'em, or like 'em when they're done right? (Despite the tone of this post, I think they can be okay when you do them right.)

A Theory in Need of More Evidence

I'll pretend I'm in school and start with my thesis: Japanese developers almost never say interesting (an admittedly loaded term) things about their games. This is caused by a translation problem or a cultural difference, or some combination of these or other factors.

If your reaction is "well, duh" then I guess you can stop reading. If your reaction is "that's not true" or "what are you talking about?" then read right along. I'll provide an example or two of articles that made me think this, but keep in mind that I'm aware my tiny pool of anecdotal data keeps this observation very far from being a proven phenomenon.

I think the uncanny valley is an interesting concept. It's easy to understand and see examples of it, so I bet a lot of others think it's interesting, too. When I saw this Joystiq article a while ago, I was eager to see a take on it from an art...making...guy (thanks for the hard-hitting journalism, Joystiq) at Square-Enix, since the uncanny valley could be seen as having a big part in Old Square's fall, ie. Spirits Within. So what does the team try to do about it?

According to Kamikokuryo: "In terms of the uncanny valley, that is something we have to fight against. We can't go there -- that's basically how we feel about it. For all the things we create, many of the section creators get together and we make adjustments so this uncanny valley phenomenon doesn't happen. We don't usually use that phrase, because all the staff has this in mind while we do our work."

Seriously? You can't 'go there'? There's a problem, and you want to... avoid it?

I wouldn't have thought much of it at first, but the next article I read happened to be the latest of the Iwata Asks: Smash Bros Brawl. I don't know if you've read any of these, but it feels like sometimes they go out of their way to discuss something without actually conveying any information. In that link, for example... I get that Sonic and Snake play differently than the Nintendo characters, but despite some puttering around talking about auras or whatever, there's a distinct lack of information. I don't even want hard details here or anything. But they're "molded differently", they have a "distinct feel", they "account for characteristics that can’t be obtained simply by increasing the number of Nintendo characters?" Seriously? what am I supposed to take home there? And here I had thought that the non-Nintendo characters was potentially a point of discussion for really interesting comments.

The only English-speaking mouthpieces that are this uninformative are PR drones. Maybe we're just more specifics-driven? Maybe it's culturally inappropriate to talk about business specifics? Maybe it's all lingual? Maybe my examples and personal experience are abnormal? Have you ever noticed this?

And have you ever seen a Japanese dev lay it all out like this?

Kwari

I feel like an ass for my posts to get the reek of a linkblog, but this one is too information-heavy to pass up.

Interview with Kwari marketing director

Kwari, the game I keep mentioning that mashes up FPS and online poker, is going to be like printing money. Interesting stuff there. Most interestingly to me, I get the impression that the game is being made by a very small team. (Just 16 maps, after all.) If they can advertise the bejeezus out of it, it'll be a huge success. Otherwise, it may be lost in the mess of non AAA games that come out every month.

Of course, I wouldn't touch a game like this with a 10-foot pole. Would you? Do you think that idiots and gambling junkies will make a cash cow out of it anyway?

How does this shit get by QA?

At first, I was going to start this post by asking, "Seriously, is there anybody on the planet that doesn't think that the 'boss battles' in Guitar Hero 3 are a miserable, miserable feature?" but in the end it's a stupid question. Obviously, someone at Neversoft thought it was a good idea. It must have gone through enough people that said, "okay, looks cool."

But there just has to be some sort of disconnect. Something we don't know. Like, if people gave it the go-ahead without knowing it'd be in the critical path of career mode. Or if it just got out of hand and was un-dumpable once Big Names got involved (Tom Morello was involved with the creation of his 'guitar battle' piece).

So I guess the question that I really want the answer to is, "exactly how much opposition did this feature face during game development?" If the answer is none, then I just don't know what to say about that team of developers, and the QA team involved (although I appreciate that most of QA is just bugfinding). The answer is more probably "some," though, and I'd really like to know why this opposition was ignored.

I guess I could be off base on the whole thing, but most people I've talked to either think battle mode is total shit and go into a huff (well that later part's actually just me) or just don't really mind it. Far and few between are those saying, "I really like how the Mariokart-like items inject some variety and randomness into a game that was heretofore based solely on mastery."

Oh well. My questions will never be answered. But what do you think happened there?

...and you should, too.

Apparently, you're allowed to now. Some background on me: I have no programming or developing experience. I'm in my mid 20s. I grew up with a NES controller in my hands. I went to college, have a full-time job, spend way less time on videogames than I used to, and spend money only when I have to. I'm part of what appears to be a growing number of Adult Gamers With Lives And Jobs, and if my impressions of this demographic are correct, you may well be one one too.

I try to end my posts (well, not this one) with a question to facilitate discussion. Please, comment your little hearts out.