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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?"
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.
In Republican America phones tap you.
For a Disgaea specific solution, look at the effects in play by pressing the triangle button. Figure out which triangle on the board corresponds to which effect, then play the game accordingly. Yeah it's kludgy, but it's probably the best workaround for this particular game.
The gene for colorblindness is tied to the X chromosome and is recessive. The reason that more males have colorblindness is that the Y chromosome is treated as having the gene.
On topic; Color difficulties usually come into play with puzzle games. I wish that Capcom would release a playable version of Super Puzzle Fighter II X someday. I've been able to play Puzzle Bobble and Columns by using shapes and got pretty good with Klax by using sound as an assistance, but SPFIIX is completely unplayable. For a game that only uses 4 different colors they could at least make them somewhat different.
For a better solution, check out Triptych which has a color select mode. I personally think that they should list that as one of their main features.
BTW, I am a colorblind female who plays games and frequents Slashdot. (How's that for rare)