Console Games And Color Blindness

Hinoki writes "Atlus' PlayStation 2 SRPG Disgaea seems to be taking off in the console gaming community. A friend of mine strongly recommended the game, so I decided to chase down a copy and bring it home, only to find that one of the key elements is color coded. Now, this is a problem for me, since I've got color-blindness, which means under the majority of circumstances.. I can't tell the difference between red and green. The geo-panels in Disgaea are more widely varied than simple red-green-yellow-blue.. there are subtle shades and different colors altogether. How big a problem is this for other gamers, and what, if anything can be done about it? Surely it can't be that hard to code in an option that changes a color to a given shape, for those of us that're color-impaired?"

Comments

GBA Zelda

[Samus]

In the Four Swords part of the GBA zelda game color is very important. All my brothers have some color deficiency but not me. Its nearly impossible to play that game with them because defeating the enemy bosses requires cooperation based on color. There are things like hit the red side of the monster if you are red or green side if you are green in order to damage it. This isn't too bad except that one of the monsters will only display a color of your partner and you have to tell him which of four to hit. The rest show up grey. Its bad enough that the color of the tunics is the only way to tell your character apart. Then they tie beating the game to something that 13% of males are handicapped in. One last color point to the game. You can play with up to three other people but can't pick which color you get. The first 2 colors used? Red and green.