Half Life 2 is now available on the Mac, so I thought I'd revisit what I thought was my favourite game of all time. I'm surprised by what I found, and wonder whether this suggests that my UX demands have increased and become more nuanced since I originally played it.
Mac specific issues
Pro: Instantaneous switching between game and any other application.
Con: Disappointing frame rate (<30fps), especially for such an old game (2004)
Game issues
Annoyed by having to replay the same section over and over again because I don't understand how the game wants me to complete the puzzle, or move on through to the next section of the game. It's presented as an semi-open world, but in reality the only interesting paths are linear. I find myself unintentionally and unknowingly backtracking sometimes because I find it hard to read where I'm supposed to go, or what I'm supposed to do. Sometimes these backtracks can be very long and tedious, giving me a very large amount of game world to explore. Ideally redundant paths should be blocked, thus helping to guide me along the intended path. Alternatively, provide dynamic, non-linear gameplay where previous parts of the gameworld still have interest and fun, and where I really can chose my own way through the game.
Loading screens. Maybe back in 2004 this was acceptable, but these days it's not. I expect background loading at all times. If you're going to insist on a loading screen, at least make it interesting, perhaps interactive in a way that's relevant and plausible. Especially you should avoid interrupting the player while they're doing something highly interactive and feedback driven, such as piloting a hovercraft! After the loading screen has completed I often go a bit out of control with the sudden return to gameplay.
Showing posts with label play diary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label play diary. Show all posts
Friday, 28 May 2010
Monday, 24 August 2009
Play Diary: Mirror's Edge
I tried it out on the PS3 and enjoyed the experience of linking together moves to run over the cityscape, but was disappointed that the PS3 version didn't let me save multiple games - I'm told that you can do this if you 'log in' as a different user in the PS3 menu. I don't have a PS3 myself so didn't know this was possible, but it strikes me as a pretty bad idea. Is this how most games work on that console? How do you know which user you're logged in as? What's wrong with the traditional method of giving you several different slots to save in?
Anyway, it was cheap on Amazon so I decided to buy it for the PC as I'd heard this was the best version available.
First problem: Saving. On the PC I expected this to be easy (choose a filename, click save) but it looks like they've tried to replicate the console style. First of all you have no option to save multiple games, which is clearly a bad idea! Secondly the location of the save games is hidden (so how do I know what to back up...?) While most games default to saving in their installation directory, ME puts it into My Documents. Unfortunately there's a strict limit on how much data I can put here on my PC at uni as it's on a shared drive. As such I often log in to the computer rather than the domain, in which case My Documents is actually in a different location. The upshot is that the second time I played the game it didn't find my save file. Hugely annoying. As usual the internet had the answer as it seems other people were experiencing the same problem.
Discussed on IGN as Save file location.
An improvement over the console experience is combat and navigation. With a mouse you're able to move and react in a speed appropriate to the game. Looking around the environment with analogue sticks is slow, and trying to aim at enemies is inaccurate.
Personally I really like the use of colour and pixel effects. The enemy textures aren't terribly good though.
Overall impression so far is ok. I think they could have done so much better with a more free-roaming environment, or at least made the game less binary - currently I get the feeling that there's one correct route to take, and if you don't get it precisely right you die swiftly and without negotiation. To me this is pretty dull and breaks up the key aspect of the game: flow. Even something as simple as Prince of Persia's time rewind would be an improvement. Ideally though I'd like to feel like I had much more choice about how to navigate around with much more margin for interpretation and improvisation.
A typical scenario would be: Enjoy running and jumping to location X, take one false turn and die. Wait for reload, repeat the now boring navigation to get to the same point as before, try another option and probably die again. 3rd time lucky. Overall experience: tedious frustration.
An ideal scenario would be: Enjoy running and jumping to location X, take a false turn and have to run / jump / bounce / climb away, try a different option then run / jump / bounce / climb away again. 3rd time lucky. Overall experience: embodied flow.
I've started to watch the cutscenes now. I don't know whether this is because I'm interested in the story or am becoming disillusioned with the game...
Yahtzee's review.
Elevators are basically dull loading screens. Surely they can come up with something better than this? Especially on PC.
Got stuck in chapter 7 (the Boat). Had to read walkthrough.
Chapter 8 climbing the tall scaffolding is so annoying! How many times must I die!?
Anyway, it was cheap on Amazon so I decided to buy it for the PC as I'd heard this was the best version available.
First problem: Saving. On the PC I expected this to be easy (choose a filename, click save) but it looks like they've tried to replicate the console style. First of all you have no option to save multiple games, which is clearly a bad idea! Secondly the location of the save games is hidden (so how do I know what to back up...?) While most games default to saving in their installation directory, ME puts it into My Documents. Unfortunately there's a strict limit on how much data I can put here on my PC at uni as it's on a shared drive. As such I often log in to the computer rather than the domain, in which case My Documents is actually in a different location. The upshot is that the second time I played the game it didn't find my save file. Hugely annoying. As usual the internet had the answer as it seems other people were experiencing the same problem.
Discussed on IGN as Save file location.
An improvement over the console experience is combat and navigation. With a mouse you're able to move and react in a speed appropriate to the game. Looking around the environment with analogue sticks is slow, and trying to aim at enemies is inaccurate.
Personally I really like the use of colour and pixel effects. The enemy textures aren't terribly good though.
Overall impression so far is ok. I think they could have done so much better with a more free-roaming environment, or at least made the game less binary - currently I get the feeling that there's one correct route to take, and if you don't get it precisely right you die swiftly and without negotiation. To me this is pretty dull and breaks up the key aspect of the game: flow. Even something as simple as Prince of Persia's time rewind would be an improvement. Ideally though I'd like to feel like I had much more choice about how to navigate around with much more margin for interpretation and improvisation.
A typical scenario would be: Enjoy running and jumping to location X, take one false turn and die. Wait for reload, repeat the now boring navigation to get to the same point as before, try another option and probably die again. 3rd time lucky. Overall experience: tedious frustration.
An ideal scenario would be: Enjoy running and jumping to location X, take a false turn and have to run / jump / bounce / climb away, try a different option then run / jump / bounce / climb away again. 3rd time lucky. Overall experience: embodied flow.
I've started to watch the cutscenes now. I don't know whether this is because I'm interested in the story or am becoming disillusioned with the game...
Yahtzee's review.
Elevators are basically dull loading screens. Surely they can come up with something better than this? Especially on PC.
Got stuck in chapter 7 (the Boat). Had to read walkthrough.
Chapter 8 climbing the tall scaffolding is so annoying! How many times must I die!?
Play Diary: Dead Space
Started playing on Sunday 24th August.
Initial problems: huge mouse lag in menus and game. Searching the internet suggested that turning off vertical sync would fix this. This is a serious usability problem. After fixing that I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to its maximum in order to get the kind of performance I'm used to (I enjoy FPS games like TF2 and L4D.) Maybe this is due to the game leading on 360 and only being ported the PC. As such they may have balanced the enemies with the assumption that the player couldn't react very quickly as they had to control the avatar using a control pad.
Second problem was the perspective. Why does it use a 3rd person view? Enclosed interior environments are better suited to 1st person. Currently the character takes up a considerable amount of the limited view with no real benefit that I can think of. This not only causes problems for the player but also for the machine (extra texture & vertex processing.) My early impression is that this is an FPS, and my feeling is that a first person view would improve the experience. I believe the 3rd person view is more popular with Asian markets, but the realistic visual style and uninspiring grey/brown colour palette doesn't strike me as being very appealing in the East.
There are more control issues though. For example why am I obliged to continually manually press "B" in order to bring up a HUD showing me where my next objective is? It's pretty tedious. I feel like I'm being punished. In free roaming, open areas it wouldn't be so bad as you could see a long way into the distance, so wouldn't need to press it so often. But in small, enclosed interior environments it seems silly as there are such short distances between doors / bends in corridors, etc that the indicator is only useful for extremely short navigation, and hence has to be frequently repeated.
So far the narrative has been pretty predictable too.
I was a bit annoyed with the "Press E to get rid of the monster" QTE. I pressed E but nothing happened and I died. Turns out you have to *mash* E. Why?
Overall I'd say it is worth the £5 I paid for it, but that's all.
Yahtzee's thoughts.
Initial problems: huge mouse lag in menus and game. Searching the internet suggested that turning off vertical sync would fix this. This is a serious usability problem. After fixing that I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to its maximum in order to get the kind of performance I'm used to (I enjoy FPS games like TF2 and L4D.) Maybe this is due to the game leading on 360 and only being ported the PC. As such they may have balanced the enemies with the assumption that the player couldn't react very quickly as they had to control the avatar using a control pad.
Second problem was the perspective. Why does it use a 3rd person view? Enclosed interior environments are better suited to 1st person. Currently the character takes up a considerable amount of the limited view with no real benefit that I can think of. This not only causes problems for the player but also for the machine (extra texture & vertex processing.) My early impression is that this is an FPS, and my feeling is that a first person view would improve the experience. I believe the 3rd person view is more popular with Asian markets, but the realistic visual style and uninspiring grey/brown colour palette doesn't strike me as being very appealing in the East.
There are more control issues though. For example why am I obliged to continually manually press "B" in order to bring up a HUD showing me where my next objective is? It's pretty tedious. I feel like I'm being punished. In free roaming, open areas it wouldn't be so bad as you could see a long way into the distance, so wouldn't need to press it so often. But in small, enclosed interior environments it seems silly as there are such short distances between doors / bends in corridors, etc that the indicator is only useful for extremely short navigation, and hence has to be frequently repeated.
So far the narrative has been pretty predictable too.
I was a bit annoyed with the "Press E to get rid of the monster" QTE. I pressed E but nothing happened and I died. Turns out you have to *mash* E. Why?
Overall I'd say it is worth the £5 I paid for it, but that's all.
Yahtzee's thoughts.
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Play Diary: Wii Sports Resort
Instructional Video: Nice, though play control (pause, rewind, etc) would be useful - it goes so fast through the steps that I expect many people will panic! Good that you can replay it in sections, but d-pad forward / rewind control through them would be appreciated.
Place Wii remote on a steady surface - I was holding mine in my hand, and it just automatically skipped through as if I'd pressed A.
Swordplay duel
Round 1: spam downward thrust, won
2: defended, draw
3: spammed attack, won
Wakeboarding
Free: 516 points? level 52
Frisee Dog
level 123 (430 points: blue, blue, orange, blue, purple, orange, x, x, orange+bouncing orange splodge, purple)
Bow
Stage 1: 27 points
2: 25
3: 24
F: 3 (2 misses, one was a miss-draw, i.e., I wasn't holding the Wiimote vertical, so it screwed up the orientation of my camera, and I ended up pointing into the sky - wanted to undraw but released Z, shooting instead.)
Total: 70 points (level 61)
Basketball
3 point contest
Thought the diagram of how to hold the remote showed buttons on the wrong side...?
Scored 1 pt (level 4)
Table tennis
6-2 (level 100)
Power cruising - slalom - beach
151.9 pts (level 98)
Didn't get boost - does it reallly only last for half a second? And what's with the power-up bar?
Canooing - speed challenge
Feels great! played in the lake for ages, couldn't find 2 ducks though.
100 pts (level 60)
Cycling - Road race
Around the island.
Didn't get into it too much. Was 7th, went for the sprint but ran out of breath and came 14th (2:40.06)
Level 5
Air Sports - Skydyving
Didn't understand scoring mechanic - how do I get more than 1 other Mii in my shot? None of them seem to want to hook up after the 1st
38 pts (level 40)
Golf three holes - resort a
Played first hole: birdie
Bowling - 10 pin game
Auto throw style is a good idea (thinking Age Concern)
149 (level 144)
Surprised at how similar it is to the Wii Sports version, though at least spin seems to be easier to control.
Place Wii remote on a steady surface - I was holding mine in my hand, and it just automatically skipped through as if I'd pressed A.
Swordplay duel
Round 1: spam downward thrust, won
2: defended, draw
3: spammed attack, won
Wakeboarding
Free: 516 points? level 52
Frisee Dog
level 123 (430 points: blue, blue, orange, blue, purple, orange, x, x, orange+bouncing orange splodge, purple)
Bow
Stage 1: 27 points
2: 25
3: 24
F: 3 (2 misses, one was a miss-draw, i.e., I wasn't holding the Wiimote vertical, so it screwed up the orientation of my camera, and I ended up pointing into the sky - wanted to undraw but released Z, shooting instead.)
Total: 70 points (level 61)
Basketball
3 point contest
Thought the diagram of how to hold the remote showed buttons on the wrong side...?
Scored 1 pt (level 4)
Table tennis
6-2 (level 100)
Power cruising - slalom - beach
151.9 pts (level 98)
Didn't get boost - does it reallly only last for half a second? And what's with the power-up bar?
Canooing - speed challenge
Feels great! played in the lake for ages, couldn't find 2 ducks though.
100 pts (level 60)
Cycling - Road race
Around the island.
Didn't get into it too much. Was 7th, went for the sprint but ran out of breath and came 14th (2:40.06)
Level 5
Air Sports - Skydyving
Didn't understand scoring mechanic - how do I get more than 1 other Mii in my shot? None of them seem to want to hook up after the 1st
38 pts (level 40)
Golf three holes - resort a
Played first hole: birdie
Bowling - 10 pin game
Auto throw style is a good idea (thinking Age Concern)
149 (level 144)
Surprised at how similar it is to the Wii Sports version, though at least spin seems to be easier to control.
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Play Diary: Virtua Tennis 2009
Nice title & main screen. Simple.
Training:
When choosing the training session, I thought the big right / left arrows would move the whole set (page) of sessions. Instead it just moves them one by one. This is an example of a developer implementing their own version of a scroll bar, but in so doing they break consistency with other scroll bars (which have lots of usability testing already done on them.) - some kind of visual feedback would help; it's very hard to see any difference in the boxes as they all look very alike. Even a sliding transition would help - currently box A is immediately replaced with box B. Maybe indicate the ones you've already done successfully?
"Select your control method"
Why doesn't it remember my previously selected controller (MotionPlus)? Also why can't I see all the options at once (there are left/right arrows for controller type, but L/R handed are both shown simultaneously.)
The three part "VT Coach" screen is a nice idea, but really doesn't help with the training. "Twist your body" - I did that *loads* but it didn't seem to make any difference. The little pictures don't do a good job of showing the necessary *movement*.
"The Wiimote should be held on it's side" (does that mean with the buttons facing left instead of the normal up?)
Also, this screen uses a button "Ready", but there's no pointer control. Confusing - tried to point at the screen and click on it. Until you've seen that this button automatically goes orange after a (long) time it's not clear that this indicates that it's inactive. In a windows environment this only makes sense when seen next to other items that are in the different state; this screen only has the one button so there's nothing to compare it to that would indicate that grey means "unavailable". Why does it take so long for the button to turn orange anyway? (again, might be my version of the disc)
Not clear how to make the opponent serve the ball. There's a bit 1 in a circle on screen. I tried pressing the 1 button but that doesn't seem to work. Tried the A button but that doesn't work either. Seems like you have to press A many times while pointing at the screen. Weird, inconsistent behaviour with no feedback when you press the right or wrong button, so I have to just mash a lot.
Lag between motion and avatar is disconcerting. Doesn't appear to be 1-1 motion...?
Targeting left & right - no idea if I'm doing it right, and why not. Would like some feedback (other than binary Success/Failure - repeatedly saying "Fail!" to a student is not good encouragement!) Wouldn't it be possible to analyse the player's stroke, visually represent it relative to the kind of stroke they're supposed to do, then allow them to practice with this 'ghost'? Would be much faster than going through the whole process of receiving the ball, returning, seeing "Fail!" then starting again. Assume they'll fail for the first few times and help with it! Also passing the training should be based on being able to reproduce the move consistently. I finally got 3 successful shots (but mixed in with about 8 failures) - this means I can do the move sufficiently well?!
Would be a good Usability question to ask the player to describe how they do each shot after they've passed - good test to see whether they really learnt anything.
When trying to do a soft shot:
Annoyed at how the avatar runs around like a nutter! Also how sometimes he'll stand further away from the ball than necessary, so when I swing he's not close enough to hit it; he had plenty of time to get to the ball, he just ran around stupidly. Seems that when I move the Wiimote back he'll stop running - but then he'll actually initiate the swing even if I haven't! Grr!
Training's frustrating and boring. Gave up after intermediate 9. Why not incorporate training as part of the first play through? I feel like it's optional (and not going to help me anyway.)
Player selection screen: Good that it has equal male / female split. Would have liked to order by country. Also would have liked to see player stats (what does "various shots" mean? "Tactical player" - surely that's up to my performance...?)
After selecting player 1, why am I asked to select player 2 in a 1 player game? Is this for the computer? Then why does it not indicate that?
What's with the cheesy rock music? Horrible!
Game is slightly more interesting than training. At one point I started to feel like I might actually be getting it.
Frame rate seems pretty low, but the graphics are quite low quality, so I don't know why this would be.
---
According to IGN you can control the avatar with the Nunchuck - I didn't see any mention of this in the game at all! They also say that this is a better option because the AI is pretty poor at it.
They also confirm that the MotionPlus controls are difficult.
They also comment on the low framerate, poor quality graphics and annoying music. Glad my thoughts are echoed by pro reviewers!
Videogamer also comment on the lack of auto-detection of Wiimote type.
---
Options -> How To
There are Back / Next buttons (in grey - doesn't this mean unavailable...?) but the screens also automatically switch over after a time period. This is annoying as it's too short for me to read and absorb all of the information.
It looks like I am supposed to hold the remote on its side, with the buttons pointing to the left. Why is that? Why couldn't they write the game to allow me to hold it the normal way?
They mention the "Visual Assist" - but where is it? How do I enable it?
---
When setting up an Exhibition mode (in the Play option on the main screen) there's a button in the top right called "Rules" (greyed out, but still available...) but it doesn't tell you the rules, it just toggles between a screen with Game mode, type, players, court ... and a screen with games, sets, tiebreaks, server, ai.
---
Session 2:
Played through remaining Intermediate tutorials. Emphasised orientation of Wiimote upon impact (also held with buttons facing left / on the side.)
Couldn't get the hang of slices in Advanced.
Played a match, felt much more in control. Won 1 game, lost match.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Play Diary: Plants Vs. Zombies
Loading Screen
Help - letter from the zombies.
Furious clicking (casual games paper) - Why Is Peggle So Addictive? Sumantra Lahiri, 10th March 2009
Analysis: The Universal (Brain-Eating) Appeal Of Plants Vs. Zombies
by Kris Graft, May 20, 2009.
Analysis: The Universal (Brain-Eating) Appeal Of Plants Vs. Zombies
by Kris Graft, May 20, 2009.
Compulsion (cybernetic feedback; sympathetic nervous system, "flight-or-fight" - physiology paper, Grodal?). c.f. Tetris, Pokemon. Kris Graft (May 29, 2009) Analysis: The Psychology Behind Item Collecting And Achievement Hoarding. Gamasutra
[Shop] First click on icons sometimes doesn't respond.
[Zen garden] Accidentally clicking on background removes action icon. Would bubble cursor help? Didn't realise for a long time that right click removes action icon too (useful) - think this applies throughout other areas of game too?
In-game
Scaffolding - introduction of plant types. (plants chosen by Chris)
Game Modes
Adventure
Core
Bowling
Survival
Puzzle
Vase Breaker.
Almanac
Didn't use it much. Sometimes reveals important data (weaknesses.)
Does narrative matter? (e.g., zombie backstory.)
Shop
Plants
I use a lot of walnuts, especially useful with splash damage weapons and slow-speed plants.
Zen Gardens
Leave the snail to automatically collect coins (screensaver mode - HUD slides off screen)
Coins spawn & snail sleeps after X seconds (even while paused when focus lost.)
Tree of knowledge - didn't use it, too expensive. Finally got all of the upgrades (50ft tree) - apparently at 1000 ft you get the real final piece of wisdom. What's the point? Less visible, less reward than traditional highscore table.
Customisation: Move tool (aethstics only, not mechanics.) - with full screen of plants you can't move any; move tool requires an empty space to move a plant into.
Uncollected coins are lost if you move to a new screen. Annoying.
Click-fest doesn't work so well here (is it because there's no challenge, no urgency?)
Watering plants is binary state, based on timer - if you water it 1 second before its timer expires you'll still have to water it again. Dumb. Reduces the screen to mindless click-fest.
Golden watering can has little use: no timer or resource constraints on use of original can; difficult to select 4 plants anyway, even when circle appears over them all (it has to cross their centre point, 1 pixel off and the plant is de-selected.) - sometimes difficult to notice that a plant isn't selected.
Audio
Turning off audio when game loses focus is a great idea. Very important when Zen Garden is running on automatic to accumulate coins.
Loading Screen
Sunday, 29 March 2009
Play Diary: De Blob
Is this a Blue Tongue game? I know people who work there :)
Cute attract film / title sequence, with the coloured blobs brightening up the grey landscape.
"This game automatically saves progress." Thank god!
Options screen -> Gameplay.
I tried to click on the "Back" text, but this resulted in Applying the settings (Back was next to the - symbol, to indicate that you need to press - to go back, the word itself is not clickable.)
Choose Blob's mood - nice touch (presumably this affects the soundtrack?)
Really nice FMV for the game's intro sequence. Love the lighting, really smooth blobs, like the pastel coloring.
I like the way the blobs speak, with the occasionally recognisable word (blog, INKT)
How To Get Colour: Instructional rather than embodied, but pretty colours, simple instructions, make it friendly. Also the "Do you understand?" with Again (left arrow icon) and Got it! (tick icon) - very clear.
Finished first level.
I often didn't understand things - like, do I need to complete all challenges before moving on? Do I need to paint everything before moving on? Is moving on to the next stage what I should be doing at all? What does the transform object do? (I think I have to slam it...)
Ah, I see, it tells you how many challenges, etc you achieved when you finish a level (so you can replay it to beat your best performance.) Looks like there's lots to unlock.
I like the soundtrack :)
Cute attract film / title sequence, with the coloured blobs brightening up the grey landscape.
"This game automatically saves progress." Thank god!
Options screen -> Gameplay.
I tried to click on the "Back" text, but this resulted in Applying the settings (Back was next to the - symbol, to indicate that you need to press - to go back, the word itself is not clickable.)
Choose Blob's mood - nice touch (presumably this affects the soundtrack?)
Really nice FMV for the game's intro sequence. Love the lighting, really smooth blobs, like the pastel coloring.
I like the way the blobs speak, with the occasionally recognisable word (blog, INKT)
How To Get Colour: Instructional rather than embodied, but pretty colours, simple instructions, make it friendly. Also the "Do you understand?" with Again (left arrow icon) and Got it! (tick icon) - very clear.
Finished first level.
I often didn't understand things - like, do I need to complete all challenges before moving on? Do I need to paint everything before moving on? Is moving on to the next stage what I should be doing at all? What does the transform object do? (I think I have to slam it...)
Ah, I see, it tells you how many challenges, etc you achieved when you finish a level (so you can replay it to beat your best performance.) Looks like there's lots to unlock.
I like the soundtrack :)
Play Diary: Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop
Session 1: Player 1
Intro movie was surprisingly long for an action comedy game. Also quite lame, bad lip syncing, melodramatic acting, strange, dead or shiny lighting on the characters.
Speaking to Carlito: Why both Z & A to talk? Also, you have to press them in that order - if you press and hold Z, then press A the game won't acknowledge it.
What's up with the lo-fi speech mode anyway? Where the action stops, and you have to read just a couple of lines on the screen before pressing A to get to the next screen.
OMG, I'm going to go nuts if there's a loading screen every time I go through a door...!
Why are there pieces of fruit laying around on the floor?
Without any kind of goal, what am I supposed to do here? I know the avatar's a journalist of some sort, but surely I'm supposed to have some kind of idea what to do?
Feel like I'm inconsequentially driving an empty avatar between small cutscenes. Why can't we just start in the action?
I don't like the combat training - static, instructional images with text and screenshots. Would prefer to learn in an embodied rather than cognitive manner.
Text like this keeps appearing on the screen, "So-and-so is Dead!"
So what? Why should I care? Seriously, does this have any effect on my game, and if so then why wasn't I told about it in advance?!
I hate the gun shot sound, it's far too weak. Sounds like a pea-shooter. Also I don't seem to be able to do any significant damage to the zombies (though sometimes they fall down, but they get straight back up again), nor they to me (I just shake them off - nothing to be scared of really.) Also, I've run out of ammo surprisingly quickly for a game called "chop till you drop"...
"Head for the stairs - I did, but there was a sign at the top which blocked my way.
Died pretty quickly. Guess I respawn and the story keeps going. So there's never any real threat of death? Strange, I wonder why I'm supposed to care.
Why is my gun now broken...?!
Man, I hate this starting area. I go through doors and there's nothing in the room on the other side! Annoyingly I have the loading screen each time I go through.
First mission to save a guy and his wife through the air ducts. Even after I get to the guy the arrow keeps pointing at him. Is there something more I need to do with this guy? He only says one thing over and over again, "Hey, anyone around?" It's really annoying. So I run round the other side of the rooftop and find his wife, still within earshot - why didn't he look over there for her?!
Getting them both into the lift was tricky - for some reason Natalie just stood outside, so I had to go right inside for her to come in a little way. Then I press the button and it tells me this isn't the right way to go. Ok, so I follow the arrow again.
To take the shotgun you must reorganise your inventory. Ok. Takes me to the inventory screen, so now what, how do I "reorganise it"? I picked and used and apple, then quit the inventory. It told me I now had the shotgun (and some money.)
After completing second mission (28 mins play time) I got bored and tried another game.
---
Intro movie was surprisingly long for an action comedy game. Also quite lame, bad lip syncing, melodramatic acting, strange, dead or shiny lighting on the characters.
Speaking to Carlito: Why both Z & A to talk? Also, you have to press them in that order - if you press and hold Z, then press A the game won't acknowledge it.
What's up with the lo-fi speech mode anyway? Where the action stops, and you have to read just a couple of lines on the screen before pressing A to get to the next screen.
OMG, I'm going to go nuts if there's a loading screen every time I go through a door...!
Why are there pieces of fruit laying around on the floor?
Without any kind of goal, what am I supposed to do here? I know the avatar's a journalist of some sort, but surely I'm supposed to have some kind of idea what to do?
Feel like I'm inconsequentially driving an empty avatar between small cutscenes. Why can't we just start in the action?
I don't like the combat training - static, instructional images with text and screenshots. Would prefer to learn in an embodied rather than cognitive manner.
Text like this keeps appearing on the screen, "So-and-so is Dead!"
So what? Why should I care? Seriously, does this have any effect on my game, and if so then why wasn't I told about it in advance?!
I hate the gun shot sound, it's far too weak. Sounds like a pea-shooter. Also I don't seem to be able to do any significant damage to the zombies (though sometimes they fall down, but they get straight back up again), nor they to me (I just shake them off - nothing to be scared of really.) Also, I've run out of ammo surprisingly quickly for a game called "chop till you drop"...
"Head for the stairs - I did, but there was a sign at the top which blocked my way.
Died pretty quickly. Guess I respawn and the story keeps going. So there's never any real threat of death? Strange, I wonder why I'm supposed to care.
Why is my gun now broken...?!
Man, I hate this starting area. I go through doors and there's nothing in the room on the other side! Annoyingly I have the loading screen each time I go through.
First mission to save a guy and his wife through the air ducts. Even after I get to the guy the arrow keeps pointing at him. Is there something more I need to do with this guy? He only says one thing over and over again, "Hey, anyone around?" It's really annoying. So I run round the other side of the rooftop and find his wife, still within earshot - why didn't he look over there for her?!
Getting them both into the lift was tricky - for some reason Natalie just stood outside, so I had to go right inside for her to come in a little way. Then I press the button and it tells me this isn't the right way to go. Ok, so I follow the arrow again.
To take the shotgun you must reorganise your inventory. Ok. Takes me to the inventory screen, so now what, how do I "reorganise it"? I picked and used and apple, then quit the inventory. It told me I now had the shotgun (and some money.)
After completing second mission (28 mins play time) I got bored and tried another game.
---
Play Diary: Madworld
Session 1: Player 1.
Comic book intro was ok (subtitles or even better, speech bubbles, would have been good. I like the sound effect text, like "Kapow!")
Liked the change to animated 3D.
Monochromatic style looks great (presumably really low texture budget too.)
Map / Options screen is a bit incongruous. No explanation of why I'm at this screen.
I can't read which button it is for "Return" (presumably B) - Note I have a widescreen SD CRT TV. Maybe it looks ok on LCD or HIDef?
Controls look straightforward, but I'm not sure I can remember them all right away. Would have preferred to have them introduced one at a time, in-game.
There is a Subtitle option which is good.
On the map / Stage Select screen it's quite hard to read the Information text. Also, there's an icon for the D-pad with the word "Select" next to it, but it doesn't do anything - maybe later on you open up new areas and this feature becomes active then, but wouldn't it be better to only display it when it's active? At least ghost it out? Or perhaps this was only applicable to choosing either "Map" or "Options" (and not with the full D, only up / down)? Either way it's misleading.
Combat tutorial was ok, though I did panic a bit when the first enemy came up to me - perhaps it would be better for him to stand still. I quickly hammered some buttons to dispatch the oncoming enemy, but this inadvertently skipped through a couple of the help-text screens. Might be nice to have the ability to 'rewind' them? Mind you, the tutorial was really straight forward so it might not be such a big deal.
I do like the Manhunt 2 style "B Finish" moves. Really over the top, grotesque stuff :) Also reminds me of No More Heroes where you stun an enemy before swinging the Wiimote to finish them off.
I fought the respawning enemies for a while until I realised that I might have missed something - in the heat of the battle I hadn't been watching the help text, or had assumed it was something other than what it really was; I should have been doing A finishes instead of B finishes, and presumably nothing else would have indicated that I was doing it wrong, so I could have been there for ages! It was fun for a while, but I would have liked more direction.
In general I don't like the way help-text automatically disappears after a short duration, or if you move and some other help text appears in response to a closer object. This makes it easy to miss the text, and requires the player to constantly be monitoring it, which distracts from the action. Better would be player-controlled advance through the text, or a pause when the text first appears to allow undistracted reading.
Rose Bush was really fun- "More!"
Quite hard to listen to the spoken commentary, read the help text, and fight off the enemies all at once, especially as moving around changes the help text in response to whichever item is nearest.
Turbinator was fun. I liked the intro sequence where the commentator got thrown in by the chick.
Don't really like the movement / camera controls too much. Would have appreciated additional D-pad control.
There's even a toilet execution! This is way better than Manhunt 2 :)
Game seems to have crashed! After Big Bull intro sequence, cut back to on the railway platform. Last section of audio loops forever, screen is frozen, controls do nothing, not even Wiimote power button or Wii Reset button (Wii power button does shut the console down though.)
---
Session 2: Player 1
Didn't find an option to load my old game...? Rebooted. Damn! I have to go through all of that again?
Still, it didn't take long. Stopped playing when I'd finished the first level.
---
Comic book intro was ok (subtitles or even better, speech bubbles, would have been good. I like the sound effect text, like "Kapow!")
Liked the change to animated 3D.
Monochromatic style looks great (presumably really low texture budget too.)
Map / Options screen is a bit incongruous. No explanation of why I'm at this screen.
I can't read which button it is for "Return" (presumably B) - Note I have a widescreen SD CRT TV. Maybe it looks ok on LCD or HIDef?
Controls look straightforward, but I'm not sure I can remember them all right away. Would have preferred to have them introduced one at a time, in-game.
There is a Subtitle option which is good.
On the map / Stage Select screen it's quite hard to read the Information text. Also, there's an icon for the D-pad with the word "Select" next to it, but it doesn't do anything - maybe later on you open up new areas and this feature becomes active then, but wouldn't it be better to only display it when it's active? At least ghost it out? Or perhaps this was only applicable to choosing either "Map" or "Options" (and not with the full D, only up / down)? Either way it's misleading.
Combat tutorial was ok, though I did panic a bit when the first enemy came up to me - perhaps it would be better for him to stand still. I quickly hammered some buttons to dispatch the oncoming enemy, but this inadvertently skipped through a couple of the help-text screens. Might be nice to have the ability to 'rewind' them? Mind you, the tutorial was really straight forward so it might not be such a big deal.
I do like the Manhunt 2 style "B Finish" moves. Really over the top, grotesque stuff :) Also reminds me of No More Heroes where you stun an enemy before swinging the Wiimote to finish them off.
I fought the respawning enemies for a while until I realised that I might have missed something - in the heat of the battle I hadn't been watching the help text, or had assumed it was something other than what it really was; I should have been doing A finishes instead of B finishes, and presumably nothing else would have indicated that I was doing it wrong, so I could have been there for ages! It was fun for a while, but I would have liked more direction.
In general I don't like the way help-text automatically disappears after a short duration, or if you move and some other help text appears in response to a closer object. This makes it easy to miss the text, and requires the player to constantly be monitoring it, which distracts from the action. Better would be player-controlled advance through the text, or a pause when the text first appears to allow undistracted reading.
Rose Bush was really fun- "More!"
Quite hard to listen to the spoken commentary, read the help text, and fight off the enemies all at once, especially as moving around changes the help text in response to whichever item is nearest.
Turbinator was fun. I liked the intro sequence where the commentator got thrown in by the chick.
Don't really like the movement / camera controls too much. Would have appreciated additional D-pad control.
There's even a toilet execution! This is way better than Manhunt 2 :)
Game seems to have crashed! After Big Bull intro sequence, cut back to on the railway platform. Last section of audio loops forever, screen is frozen, controls do nothing, not even Wiimote power button or Wii Reset button (Wii power button does shut the console down though.)
---
Session 2: Player 1
Didn't find an option to load my old game...? Rebooted. Damn! I have to go through all of that again?
Still, it didn't take long. Stopped playing when I'd finished the first level.
---
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Play Diary: Manhunt 2
Session 1: Player 1.
This is an odd one, because I was one of the developers for this game, though you won't find my name - or the names of the other 55 people - on the credits list. If you look closely you can still find my name in the assets though.
I worked on the PS2 & Xbox versions, though the latter was canned during development. I'm interested to see how the Wii version is different, and whether Rockstar London's port from RenderWare to R*'s internal engine has anything to contribute to the game.
Attract video is different, though I recognise some of the geometry.
Control tutorial worked well. Definitely test that you can do the moves, though it would be beter pedagogically to have the tests in context. Moving the controllers without context is a test that you can read the icons and react to them, but does not inform the player how to use them in game.
---
Session 2
Players 1, 2 & Spectator
P2 does tutorial.
Giggles at squelching sounds.
When Danny looks in the mirror, P2: "Is that us?" Leo walks into frame. I say nothing.
Loading screen takes a while.
First level looks ok.
P2 accidentally walk-walked (but that's ok as it taught him how to do it I guess)
I like the change in colour of health bar - but maybe a bit too subtle?
"How do I change my weapon?" (got it)
Went to execute, but didn't realise how to do it. Punched him to death instead.
When he took down the first melee guy didn't realise he was dead (so couldn't punch) but kept kicking him anyway.
Laughed that he could pick the body up.
Got lost and went the opposite direction.
Didn't seem to understand that he had to lure the guard.
Melee'd him again.
"You can get combos, I see!"
(some audio stuttering, maybe just because it's a backup disc?)
Tried to pick up a weapon but didn't understand that you can only pick up one thing at a time.
Took ages to work out you had to shut all the cell doors before you could go on.
Was walking up to a guard, stealthy, then ran and alerted the guard. Don't think he realised that's what happened.
Didn't understand the significance of the skull on the mini-map.
"It's all the memories of him being Fritzled as a child."
Spectator cried out when dream vision appeared.
Didn't understand what the yellow brick icon meant, even when P2 had picked it up.
No kind of indicator to help out in the mission where you have to open all cupboards, etc. Tediously have to just go round them all, and feel unsure if you've been everywhere or not.
Tried to break down wooden barrier with a crowbar - 'Why can't I get in here?"
"I'm pretty sure I just picked up some drugs" (he hadn't)
Jump execution failed - help text didn't display for long enough. P2 still hasn't commited an execution, just playing by melee.
Accidentally skipped through a cutscene.
"Anyone else want a go?"
---
This is an odd one, because I was one of the developers for this game, though you won't find my name - or the names of the other 55 people - on the credits list. If you look closely you can still find my name in the assets though.
I worked on the PS2 & Xbox versions, though the latter was canned during development. I'm interested to see how the Wii version is different, and whether Rockstar London's port from RenderWare to R*'s internal engine has anything to contribute to the game.
Attract video is different, though I recognise some of the geometry.
Control tutorial worked well. Definitely test that you can do the moves, though it would be beter pedagogically to have the tests in context. Moving the controllers without context is a test that you can read the icons and react to them, but does not inform the player how to use them in game.
---
Session 2
Players 1, 2 & Spectator
P2 does tutorial.
Giggles at squelching sounds.
When Danny looks in the mirror, P2: "Is that us?" Leo walks into frame. I say nothing.
Loading screen takes a while.
First level looks ok.
P2 accidentally walk-walked (but that's ok as it taught him how to do it I guess)
I like the change in colour of health bar - but maybe a bit too subtle?
"How do I change my weapon?" (got it)
Went to execute, but didn't realise how to do it. Punched him to death instead.
When he took down the first melee guy didn't realise he was dead (so couldn't punch) but kept kicking him anyway.
Laughed that he could pick the body up.
Got lost and went the opposite direction.
Didn't seem to understand that he had to lure the guard.
Melee'd him again.
"You can get combos, I see!"
(some audio stuttering, maybe just because it's a backup disc?)
Tried to pick up a weapon but didn't understand that you can only pick up one thing at a time.
Took ages to work out you had to shut all the cell doors before you could go on.
Was walking up to a guard, stealthy, then ran and alerted the guard. Don't think he realised that's what happened.
Didn't understand the significance of the skull on the mini-map.
"It's all the memories of him being Fritzled as a child."
Spectator cried out when dream vision appeared.
Didn't understand what the yellow brick icon meant, even when P2 had picked it up.
No kind of indicator to help out in the mission where you have to open all cupboards, etc. Tediously have to just go round them all, and feel unsure if you've been everywhere or not.
Tried to break down wooden barrier with a crowbar - 'Why can't I get in here?"
"I'm pretty sure I just picked up some drugs" (he hadn't)
Jump execution failed - help text didn't display for long enough. P2 still hasn't commited an execution, just playing by melee.
Accidentally skipped through a cutscene.
"Anyone else want a go?"
---
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Play Diary: House of the Dead: Overkill
First session: solo
Confused about the menu screen to select play mode / options / etc. Thought I was choosing a character to play as.
Couldn't enter a profile name, always returned to previous menu whenever I pressed A or B, even on the keyboard.
Wasn't clear what the Nunchuck did, thought it might have something to do with changing camera orientation (read it on a review), but then thought it might be a selector for branching camera paths - as in Dragon's Lair (Arcade).
Crashed when I first killed Jasper.---
Second session: solo
Completed game with no issues.
Disappointed by the short play-through time. Was hoping for more extras or unlockables (e.g., in Resident Evil 4.) However, did notice the tiny number of coders, artists and animators in the credits :-)
---
Third session: 2-player co-op
Both players were really annoyed at not being able to skip cutscenes!
Second player particularly found their content to be annoying.
Guesstimated that cutscenes occupy about 1/3 of the total "play through" time. Considered this to be a pretty cheap trick to extend the apparent duration.
Yahtzee's take on it.
---
Fourth Session: with player 2, and new players 3 & 4.
Much more fun being had!
(alcohol consumed)
Prior in the evening had been playing alternating 2-player Mario Kart (without steeringwheels).
Playing Director's Cut.
Seems harder, more interesting. Quite engaging and exciting for the players and spectators. Myself and Player 2 instructed player 3 while he played. Player 4 watched.
Being able to skip the cutscenes helps greatly, allowing play to continue to the fun parts of the game.
Sound track commented on to be good. "I like this music ..." (repetitive dance tune) "... Ok I'm bored of it now."
"Can we swap sides?" (of the settee, because Players 2 & previous session's Spectator (now playing) were playing on opposite sides of the screen (i.e., blue left, red right).
Players 3 & 4 have left.
Play Diary: No More Heroes
First session: Solo with spectator.
Funny difficulty levels, Sweeet & Mild.
Didn't realise the change in control as soon as you start the game - camera pans out from cinematic to wide angle shot of NoMore motel. No indication that I noticed to suggest that I was now in control of the avatar. Nunchuck analogue stick moves him though.
RUn along the corridor then right back into another cutscene (the one from the attract video... have I quit and gone back to the main menu ...?!) - what's the point, is it just to teach me how to move the avatar? Not an elegant tutorial.
Tutorial really long and complicated. Would have preferred to have individual moves introduced one at a time throughout the first few levels.
After tutorial I immediately tried out the Nunchuck analogue stick to control avatar, and D pad directions to change orientation. Ran up the stairs, then immediately lost camera control ?!
Didn't understand when the screen went dark after showing three flashing cherries (or whatever) - friend looked up in the manual about the dark side modes. Still don't really understand how to trigger it.
Lol:
Recharge the sword = masturbatory
Save point : on the toilet.
Maybe a bug? When my phone rang, the avatar answered it, and just walked around for a while (instead of running) without any apparent conversation going on, just the spooky music in the background. Now I really don't know what's going on, what I'm supposed to do. Maybe I just missed an important introduction?
Trippy 8-bit ranking screen.
Spectator really likes the game, I guess mostly due to style (& tongue-in-cheek references to gaming?)
Rubbish driving simulator.
1:50
When getting to rank 9 (killing the old man in the football field - Dr Peace) - you finish him by a Quick Time Event (press Z) - that feels a bit anticlimactic.
---
Second session:
Annoyed by lots of loading screens, having to drive across the city (why can't I just warp, driving's no fun).
In particular found the reverse / forward bike "leap" annoying when I was trying to make small adjustments to my position in order to navigate around an object blocking my path.
Thought there might be some intersection with objects or something preventing me from moving, but in retrospect think this might just be due to the problem I had with forward / reverse 'sticking': Press and hold forward from stationary and you'll go forward. Then press and hold reverse and you'll decelerate to stationary. To actually go in reverse you have to release then depress backwards again. This was awkward for me because I'm used to an automatic transition into reverse without having to release then depress again (e.g., from Midnight Club: LA - Xbox 360)
Thursday, 17 July 2008
Play Diary: Okami 2
I've played about 8 hours now and have just defeated my first big boss.
It did take me a while to understand how to defeat it - I tried normal combat, celestial brush, etc. Eventually a big cylinder rose out of the spider's back and Issun suggested I hit it with the brush. It took me some time to realise that I could hook the vines onto the enemy spider at almost any point during the fight - that I didn't have to wait for this big cylinder again. Not sure if that was communicated well enough.
When I get my new weapon there doesn't seem to be any way to determine if it's more powerful than my current one, which I think is also a bit of a problem.
Shortly afterwards I'm on a log racing down the river and I have to attach vines from the bank to make it stop. This mini-game was quite tedious. Purely an exercise in reflexes that felt separate from the rest of the game, overtly scripted. I could understand if it were an excuse for a training exercise immediately acquiring that ability, but it was well after you have to have mastered that ability anyway.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Play Diary: Okami 1
The title sequence uses closed captions with a pretend spoken language voiceover. The first thing that strikes me is that visually impaired are disadvantaged here. Real spoken language would have let them hear the story (but increased localisation time).
+ To start the story
Why do I get a 'continue' option when I haven't started yet?
After a while of trying to load it complains that there are no available saved games.
"Return to title screen without loading?"
I say 'no' (which is the default action), but then it just tries to load the (absent) saved game again.
The game starts, a new title sequence shows but pauses after each subtitle with a downward facing arrow. I press the down arrow on the Wiimote but nothing happens. It wants me to press A.
It's a bit annoying that I have to press the A button after every 6-12 words or so. I wonder if it'd be better to let this run an automatic cutscene, but provide rewind / forward controls like when you watch a real movie.
Not sure I really understand the back-story:
Kamiki is cursed by a monster, Orochi, to whom a villager is sacrified every year.
Nagi goes instead of his love, Nami. He fights Orochi but just as he's about to die the wolf Shiranui turns up and fights the beast, creates a tree, and blesses his sword. Nagi kills the monster but Shiranui dies.
Villages erect a statue to Shinarui and put Nagis sword in a cave.
Later someone finds the sword, which unleashes Orochi again.
Tree spirit Sakuya asks (female) Okami Amaterasu to fix the world.
Wandering artist / bug Issun has a sword called Denkomaru.
Villagers spirits inside the fruit of Sakuya's tree must be released.
We come to realise that Amaterasu is Shiranui reborn
Sometimes you can speed up the display of subtitles by holding the A button, but not always. For example, talking to Yomigami for the first time. But when Issun speaks immediately afterwards I'm able to speed up the display of his subtitles.
Cutting the fruit: I tried my celestial brush several times but couldn't get it to drop and had no idea why. Randomly I managed to get it to work - perhaps it was because I was slightly closer, or did a slightly better line? No feedback why this technique was better than the others I tried.
Drawing the sun - I tried to do a filled-in sun, but eventually I did just a circle and that's what seemed to be required.
Throughout all of this early stage I feel a little patronised. I'm basically on rails having to try out all my new skills without any real context - these tasks exist purely to make sure that I know how to perform them. It feels too obvious. I'd prefer to test my skills on my own terms, in pursuit of tasks that I'm personally involved in through choice, not ones that I'm obliged to do because I'm on rails. And I've spent quite a long time doing this now (1:30hrs)!
Kind of bored with it all now. The story's nice but the game's not engaging me. I feel no personal motivation to continue. I feel like I have to do what the game wants me to do, which is a bit tedious and not what I like about games.
Quitting.
+ To start the story
Why do I get a 'continue' option when I haven't started yet?
After a while of trying to load it complains that there are no available saved games.
"Return to title screen without loading?"
I say 'no' (which is the default action), but then it just tries to load the (absent) saved game again.
The game starts, a new title sequence shows but pauses after each subtitle with a downward facing arrow. I press the down arrow on the Wiimote but nothing happens. It wants me to press A.
It's a bit annoying that I have to press the A button after every 6-12 words or so. I wonder if it'd be better to let this run an automatic cutscene, but provide rewind / forward controls like when you watch a real movie.
Not sure I really understand the back-story:
Kamiki is cursed by a monster, Orochi, to whom a villager is sacrified every year.
Nagi goes instead of his love, Nami. He fights Orochi but just as he's about to die the wolf Shiranui turns up and fights the beast, creates a tree, and blesses his sword. Nagi kills the monster but Shiranui dies.
Villages erect a statue to Shinarui and put Nagis sword in a cave.
Later someone finds the sword, which unleashes Orochi again.
Tree spirit Sakuya asks (female) Okami Amaterasu to fix the world.
Wandering artist / bug Issun has a sword called Denkomaru.
Villagers spirits inside the fruit of Sakuya's tree must be released.
We come to realise that Amaterasu is Shiranui reborn
Sometimes you can speed up the display of subtitles by holding the A button, but not always. For example, talking to Yomigami for the first time. But when Issun speaks immediately afterwards I'm able to speed up the display of his subtitles.
Cutting the fruit: I tried my celestial brush several times but couldn't get it to drop and had no idea why. Randomly I managed to get it to work - perhaps it was because I was slightly closer, or did a slightly better line? No feedback why this technique was better than the others I tried.
Drawing the sun - I tried to do a filled-in sun, but eventually I did just a circle and that's what seemed to be required.
Throughout all of this early stage I feel a little patronised. I'm basically on rails having to try out all my new skills without any real context - these tasks exist purely to make sure that I know how to perform them. It feels too obvious. I'd prefer to test my skills on my own terms, in pursuit of tasks that I'm personally involved in through choice, not ones that I'm obliged to do because I'm on rails. And I've spent quite a long time doing this now (1:30hrs)!
Kind of bored with it all now. The story's nice but the game's not engaging me. I feel no personal motivation to continue. I feel like I have to do what the game wants me to do, which is a bit tedious and not what I like about games.
Quitting.
Sunday, 22 June 2008
Play Diary: Psychonauts 2
I've begun my second play session with Psychonauts and I immediate notice a change in my style. I've enabled subtitles as I've been interested in accessibility recently and have had some conversations with other developers about the pros and cons including captioned text in their games. Now when I come across cutscenes I can read the subtitles quicker than the characters speak their parts, and I can skip ahead to the following sentences without having to listen to all of the audio. The result is that I'm less attentive to the characterisation and more concerned with the ludic aspects of the game: what do I have to do now?
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.
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.
Play Diary: Psychonauts 1
I just started to play the critically acclaimed Psychonauts for free on GameTap.
I don't like the camera very much. Moving the mouse turns the camera, as does WASD. That I can handle, (though I prefer independent control) but when the game tries to fight me by applying it's own turn to the camera too it starts to get annoying. It's literally like sometimes I'm battling against the game to look in a certain direction. There is a workaround: switch to first person view, but it's quite annoying to have to switch camera modes just to be able to get a good look at the world - especially because it seems like a lot of this game is going to be about looking around to find the treasure hidden outside your normal route / view.
I do, however, like the characters, plot and humour.
I also like the way I can just start to play the game. I tried out Deus Ex and Hitman the other day too (also for free on GameTap) but I got bored with the explicit tutorial sections that lacked any broader narrative setting. In Psychonauts I got drawn in by the characters and diegetic idea of the game even before I got to Basic Braining, the ostensive tutorial mission.
When I was running around the starting area and would encounter a special object for the first time some help text would appear on screen, but when I moved away it would disappear and in some cases not come back even when I returned to the object. Sometimes this is annoying as I'd accidentally move away from the object as soon as the tip appeared, but there doesn't appear to be any way to see a log of previous messages.
Another section I had difficulty with (and maybe this is another case of missing some help text) was in Basic Braining. There's a section where you have to swing on a series of poles, jumping upward from one to another. At one point you have to turn around while hanging onto the current pole, but I didn't know how to do this, so I spent ages trying to use combinations of buttons and the environment to try to achieve this. I finally worked it out by accidentally hitting 'f' when I meant to press 'd'. I should have tried this earlier as 'f' is one of the main control keys. The settings screen tells me that 'f' is for 'use'. I think you could understand that I wouldn't associate that verb with turning-around-while-hanging-on-a-pole. A few minutes later I came to another section that required the same technique. This time the help text was displayed. Great. It would have been nicer to see it in the earlier section, when I first needed it. To get to this part of the game you must have mastered the technique already.
Similarly later on I got stuck and couldn't find a way to progress. I resorted to my previous tactic of button mashing everything in the environment, which worked as it turned out I could smash down a bit of wall. Now in fairness the wall did have cracks in it, but it didn't suggest itself as being especially different to the other, non-destructable walls elsewhere. From now on I'll try to hit all walls that look a bit weak.
Finally, when I tried to quit the game the only option I had was to return to the title screen. Once there I could exit the game. Why's this? It reminds me of how much effort it is to quit Assassins' Creed:
I do quite like Psychonauts though.
I'll report back another day.
I don't like the camera very much. Moving the mouse turns the camera, as does WASD. That I can handle, (though I prefer independent control) but when the game tries to fight me by applying it's own turn to the camera too it starts to get annoying. It's literally like sometimes I'm battling against the game to look in a certain direction. There is a workaround: switch to first person view, but it's quite annoying to have to switch camera modes just to be able to get a good look at the world - especially because it seems like a lot of this game is going to be about looking around to find the treasure hidden outside your normal route / view.
I do, however, like the characters, plot and humour.
I also like the way I can just start to play the game. I tried out Deus Ex and Hitman the other day too (also for free on GameTap) but I got bored with the explicit tutorial sections that lacked any broader narrative setting. In Psychonauts I got drawn in by the characters and diegetic idea of the game even before I got to Basic Braining, the ostensive tutorial mission.
When I was running around the starting area and would encounter a special object for the first time some help text would appear on screen, but when I moved away it would disappear and in some cases not come back even when I returned to the object. Sometimes this is annoying as I'd accidentally move away from the object as soon as the tip appeared, but there doesn't appear to be any way to see a log of previous messages.
Another section I had difficulty with (and maybe this is another case of missing some help text) was in Basic Braining. There's a section where you have to swing on a series of poles, jumping upward from one to another. At one point you have to turn around while hanging onto the current pole, but I didn't know how to do this, so I spent ages trying to use combinations of buttons and the environment to try to achieve this. I finally worked it out by accidentally hitting 'f' when I meant to press 'd'. I should have tried this earlier as 'f' is one of the main control keys. The settings screen tells me that 'f' is for 'use'. I think you could understand that I wouldn't associate that verb with turning-around-while-hanging-on-a-pole. A few minutes later I came to another section that required the same technique. This time the help text was displayed. Great. It would have been nicer to see it in the earlier section, when I first needed it. To get to this part of the game you must have mastered the technique already.
Similarly later on I got stuck and couldn't find a way to progress. I resorted to my previous tactic of button mashing everything in the environment, which worked as it turned out I could smash down a bit of wall. Now in fairness the wall did have cracks in it, but it didn't suggest itself as being especially different to the other, non-destructable walls elsewhere. From now on I'll try to hit all walls that look a bit weak.
Finally, when I tried to quit the game the only option I had was to return to the title screen. Once there I could exit the game. Why's this? It reminds me of how much effort it is to quit Assassins' Creed:
I do quite like Psychonauts though.
I'll report back another day.
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