Game Breakers

1up is running a feature looking at some not-so-fun design decisions that have been made in games over the years. "Innovations" like pits, spawn points, and long FMV sequences are just some of the choices they take to task here. From the article: "Rumor has it that videogames are not, in fact, movies. This might seem obvious to anyone who plays them, but the entertainment industry — and even a few game designers — have yet to comprehend this. Developers like Metal Gear's Hideo Kojima insist on cramming their games with cut-scenes that are often inscrutable, occasionally entertaining, and almost never interactive. Sometimes, you can't even press the Start button to skip them."

Comments

Re:Yerp. Figure it Out, Already.

[Southpaw018]

If you want to see how cutscenes should be done, play through Half Life 2 and HL2: Episode One. Pay attention to the commentary in EP1. They addresss how they specifically create "live" cutscenes at several commentary points.

One example is early in EP1. As you approach a T intersection from the south, they have a lone soldier firing at you far off to the right. You can easily pick him off, but then your attention is forced to the right side hallway and a realtime event: a gunship in its final throes, banging into the walls and crashing before exploding. Bam, there's your cutscene, entirely done without even removing control from the player.

On the Topic of Not-So-Fun Design

[American AC in Paris]

Does anybody else find it just a tad rich that 1-up.com is dissing bad design decisions in a six-page, rollover popup ad-laden, narrow-column, cluttered article?

...I mean, the actual content of page one occupies maybe 10% of the page. The other 90% of the page is devoted to big, flashy ads, stripey backgrounds, a rat's nests of irrelevant links, and other stuff that really just doesn't add much to the experience of reading an article.

Re:On the Topic of Not-So-Fun Design

[XO]

Hmm, I didn't notice any of that. Looked fine for me.

Oh, yeah, I use Opera.

And I have a script that removes a ton of advertising elements automagically.