Another cutscene-related point is that I realised that I don't mind continuity errors when transitioning between in-game and cutscene. For example, I was walking along a path when a cutscene started. The pre-rendered scene had my avatar positioned in the middle of the path, but I was on the far edge of the path, facing a different direction. This kind of discrepency would be annoying for someone watching the game, but as a player I really don't care - as long as it's approximately correct.
I thought I'd report some functional bugs too: I had trouble running the game. I launched GameTap, selected Psychonauts, watched the advert, the game launcher started, went fullscreen black with a busy pointer but got no further. This might be because I tried killing lots of processes before launching GameTap. I rebooted and didn't mess about with my default processes and was able to start it up properly. On a couple of occasions there was no spoken audio in cutscenes though the subtitles displayed correctly. I just played through about 15 minutes and got a crash
during a cutscene (just as I approached Sasha Nein's secret lab when Lili says "Hey, was that you? Looking at me?"). This was 100% repeatable on 3 attempts using 3 different routes into the level. Whenever I approached a certain part of the path the cutscene would trigger and crash when Raz began to speak that sentence. The only way to avoid the crash is to press Esc and terminate it early.I find the number of loading screens a bit annoying. They disrupt the flow of the game but actually in this context it's maybe not so bad as it results in my concentration defocussing on the game and gives me a bit of a break where I can be reflective and even write up these comments on my laptop. Funnily enough, there are parts of the game where you come across NPCs chatting to one another, and you can't skip their conversations. It's these that I'm more likely to stick around and listen to because I don't have any option to skip them.
I'm also not sure about the main screen when you start up the game after having played once already. You see Raz on top of a brain and can appear to run around but the other buttons you're used to from the main game don't work, so you can't punch for example. Furthermore there are Figments that you normally try to catch in the main game, but here nothing happens when you jump into them. In fact you have to run around to find the Continue / Load / New game options. These are represented as doors into the brain. Cute idea, but it's a bit annoying to have to run around for a while before being allowed to continue the game. What's more Raz faces on top of the brain. Nothing else is visible so the natural thing to do is to run forward. What you should actually do is run backwards, to the side of the brain that you can't see where the doors are.
To open the GPC you have to hit it. Kind of like the section earlier when I had to hit a bit of wall to break it down. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
In the Action Bindings screen there's are up and down arrows to scroll through the options, which look similar to the up and down arrows used to scroll through subtitle text in the main game. However you can't use the middle mouse button or up & down arrows on the keyboard to scroll, you have to press the button icon on the screen. A bit incongruous.
I needed to check my inventory so I pressed "i" on my keyboard as this is the typical key used by lots of other games. In Psychonauts the default is "[". I have no idea why. I'd also expect to get to the inventory screen from the "Journal" (Esc - the key used by many games to get to settings and / or screens about the current mission, score, inventory, etc), and although there are lots of game-related things there (map, current mission, etc) there's no inventory tab. And damn! Once I'm there it's really hard to select the right object. There are 8 slots displayed and you can use the keyboard arrow keys to select objects in the top, bottom, left and right hand positions, but that still leaves the corner slots - how do you select them? Well, the position of the arrow keys mimics their function, so the up arrow is higher up on the keyboard, the right arrow key is furthest right, etc, so there's a hint. We'd want to press the key that's above the right-hand arrow, and to the right of the up arrow wouldn't we? Of course there is no key on the keyboard like that, so I tried the WASD keys as they often have the same function as the arrow keys. Bingo, that works, so now I infer that QEZC should be the top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right positions, right? Wrong. They don't do anything. So I try using the mouse and it does jump around to those other slots, but I can't work out how to control it, so I just wiggle it about until it eventually lands in the slot I want. Moving it up, down, left or right selects the appropriate slot, but moving up-left, up-right, down-left or down-right doesn't always seem to get me to those slots. After some more wiggling it turns out that you can cycle through them if you move the mouse in a big circle, but it's not terribly accurate. I did eventually work out that if I press both left and up I could get to the top-left slot, and so on. Weirdly you use space to select the slot, not 'f' (confirm this). Once I had the object selected it returned me to the game, but I had a quick look back at the inventory screen and was surprised to see that the other two objects I had have now disappeared, but there is an arrow pointing left (where I think previously there was one pointing right) which makes me think that somehow I might be looking at a second 'tab' of my inventory, and to return to the one with the objects I'd have to go back left to the previous one somehow. But how?! Ok, so it turns out that now both 'i' and ']' select the inventory, but they select different parts, and you can use them to switch from one the other.
More about the camera: I often find that objects come between the camera and my avatar which is quite annoying. This might be because I have "Smart Camera" disabled. Interestingly inside Sasha Nein's secret lab the Brain Tumbler doesn't block my view of my avatar, it ghosts so that I can see where I am, which is better and I'd like to have that throughout the game. The options screen has sections for "Controls" (icons of a keyboard and mouse), "Graphics" (icon of a character on the monitor) and "Sound" (icon that looks a bit like a WiFi signal rotated 90 degrees clockwise). I thought the camera would have been in the graphics section, but it's actually in controls. I tend to prefer games where my avatar is always facing in the direction the camera looks, so that if I move the mouse both the camera and my avatar rotate to point in the same direction. This mixed mode takes a little getting used to. If I rotate the camera around to look at my avatar's face then press forward he actually turns around, then walks forward (in the direction the camera's facing), but it takes a couple of frames of adjustments before he's facing the right way. This has been a bit annoying when I'm standing on top of a small piece of geometry and trying to pick up an object. Rather than being able to rotate on the spot with mouse control I have to edge forward and back, left and right, frame by frame until I can get the avatar to face the object. Pretty awkward. A side-effect of this is that you can't walk backwards, which feels wrong.
Another embodiment / control issue that I find annoying is sliding, specifically if I try to jump onto an object and only land on its edge then I start to slide off and don't seem to be able to jump again immediately. I find this annoying because the game's taken away control of my avatar. It forces me to slide for a while before I can jump again. And as with many other games (WoW, Oblivion) you can't walk on polygons that have a steep gradient, you always slide down them. That's fair enough, but I always wish I had an idea that I'd slide on a surface before I reached it. In the real world I have a good idea about whether I could be stationary as I get traction feedback from my feet, and I associate this with the visual angle of the object that I can see. In games I only have the visual data so I have to guesstimate whether the angle is beyond what I suspect is the sliding limit. How to resolve this? what about embedding that traction data in the visuals? e.g., colourise sliding polygons slightly differently to the rest of the scene. Think about the way some games colourise active objects differently to background scenery. For example I think in Manhunt 2 we had some doors which were purely background and some which were real doors you could open. The background ones were muted in tone so the active ones stood out more as they had more vivid colours. It looks a bit like cell coloured cartoons where the background and active objects look a little bit different. For example you could always predict that, say, a certain rock in The Flintstones was going to get broken because it was a slightly different tone to the rest of the background rocks. I don't see this is breaking the fourth wall as we're not watching a movie (and anyway, movies have certain conventions to signal that something is more significant than just the background scenery - like holding the shot on a particular object, adding a bit of sparkle to it, etc). Rather it's conveying important information about the game-world through an alternative channel.
Map: dragging on the map doesn't work so well. When I click-drag the map moves less than the pointer. They're not synchronised so I have to move the mouse a lot more than I expect to get the map to drag to the section I'm interested in, and if I move my pointer off the main main area while still depressed it ceases to continue dragging. Why not lock the pointer and map while dragging? This is a normal convention in other games.
I'm starting to think about categorising usability issues. We have control / embodiment, level design, and front-end so far.
An example of a combined issue is getting around in Ford's lab. To get up from the floor to where Agent Cruller is you have to jump up a series of platforms. I'm not so good at this, it's quite bright in the room where I'm playing and I can't see the edges of the platforms very well so I keep falling off. There doesn't seem to be a useful reason to have to perform this careful jumping routine. All I want to do is get from A to B, but I keep falling back to A again. The space of this level isn't designed to be easy to get around and I wonder why? Compare with the teleport options (the wormy thing, and the wooden-stump mine-shaft cart for ways to quickly get from A to B: the space in between isn't important).
And now for something I really like: the black and white cartoon slide-show memories. No audio, no speech, no text, just a picture story.
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