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?
Showing posts with label nitpicking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nitpicking. Show all posts
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.)
Thursday, February 7, 2008
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?
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?
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