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?
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
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.)
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.)
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