Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

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Mongrel
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jun 11, 2015 3:05 pm

*Someone shoves Sharkey off the podium*

*Wilhem Scream plays as he falls all of 18"*
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Joxam
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Joxam » Thu Jun 11, 2015 3:10 pm

This reminds me of the time I got an entire 20 minute section of a youtube video flagged because of a siren noise that was apparently stock and copyrighted.
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Friday
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Friday » Thu Jun 11, 2015 6:46 pm

There's a couple of stock sound effects I always recognize (specifically, the 'old rusty door opening' SE that plays in Castlevania 64 a lot) that also always completely ruin the immersion for me. The Wilhelm Scream isn't one of them, that one just always makes me smile.
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IGNORE ME
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Jun 11, 2015 6:51 pm

I'm surrounded by nerds so the idea that someone would spend their last moments on this mortal coil mimicking Wilhelm doesn't seem that unrealistic to me.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby François » Thu Jun 11, 2015 7:26 pm

Friday wrote:There's a couple of stock sound effects I always recognize (specifically, the 'old rusty door opening' SE that plays in Castlevania 64 a lot) that also always completely ruin the immersion for me.


As soon as I saw Sharkey's post I immediately thought of this exact sound. It's kind of a two-parter, right? The first short, sharp squeak, and then the longer hinge sound. I don't even know what sort of gate in the real world would make a noise like that.

Also the generic dinosaur-y dragon-y gravelly scream that Castlevania 64 uses for its final boss, that one's all over the place.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jun 11, 2015 7:31 pm

A friend and I borrowed a CD full of well-known stock sounds for a video project. On it was some bizarre noise that was supposed to sound like a animal howl but was more like a mournful jet engine.

We called it the nuclear wolf.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jun 11, 2015 7:38 pm

Since we're on the topic: Valero gas stations (I know they're at least in California as well as NY) use the Sonic ring get noise for the cash registers, and I just can't get over it.
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Friday
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Friday » Thu Jun 11, 2015 8:11 pm

As soon as I saw Sharkey's post I immediately thought of this exact sound. It's kind of a two-parter, right? The first short, sharp squeak, and then the longer hinge sound.


Yep, that's the one. I sort of love CV 64, so.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Jun 11, 2015 8:11 pm

It's Exxon/Mobile stations in parts south. Probably owned by the same company.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby François » Thu Jun 11, 2015 10:53 pm

Friday wrote:
As soon as I saw Sharkey's post I immediately thought of this exact sound. It's kind of a two-parter, right? The first short, sharp squeak, and then the longer hinge sound.


Yep, that's the one. I sort of love CV 64, so.


So do I! It did a lot of things wrong but there's still a bunch of stuff in there that just somehow works. I couldn't even tell you how many times I beat it, and I probably went through the remake even more than that.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jun 11, 2015 11:09 pm

nosimpleway wrote:It's Exxon/Mobile stations in parts south. Probably owned by the same company.

It's also possible they simply bought their POS systems from the same 3rd party.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Friday » Fri Jun 12, 2015 4:01 am

So do I! It did a lot of things wrong but there's still a bunch of stuff in there that just somehow works. I couldn't even tell you how many times I beat it, and I probably went through the remake even more than that.


If you can remember back to VvW3, (back when you went by ZedPower) I included Cornell and Ortega as the baner and Greater Wolf, respectively.

Cornell's final Dracula form remains one of my favorite final bosses.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby François » Fri Jun 12, 2015 6:08 am

Dang that would be hard to forget,. Back then I figured you included them solely because Castlevania canon isn't exactly overflowing with named werewolves (or were-anythings for that matter, unless vampires count as werebats), but now it makes an extra amount of sense in retrospect. :3

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Sharkey » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:42 pm

This applies just as much to UI design, but I'm putting it here:

If your game's tutorial, guide, store, or anything else is going to go and open a browser window instead of doing something within the game itself, you need to either tell me it's going to do that, or ask if it's okay beforehand. This one really, really pisses me off. Probably doesn't help that I tend to have a shitload of tabs open at any given time for projects and whatnot, and if I've closed chrome to free up memory to play a game, then unceremoniously reopening it means an awful lot of wait and hassle if it doesn't cause everything to outright crash and burn.

Seriously, don't do this. It's motherfucking rude and I take it personally.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:08 pm

I am not trying to be a BROWSER PREACHING DICK, but when you do this and have Firefox open instead of Chrome, it just adds a new tab.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Sharkey » Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:14 pm

Well, yeah. But I try to have everything that's not a game shut down when I'm not using it, just to squeeze a little extra memory out of this shitbox. I could also probably find an option to prompt whether I want to launch chrome when it gets a call from another application, but that's still going to cause the window to lose focus. Also, it shouldn't be incumbent upon me to find workarounds for someone else's rude motherfuckery.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:43 pm

Stealing focus is a whole subject in and of itself. It should pretty much never happen unless it's something absolutely critical, like a hardware failure, a dying battery, a single process maxing out my RAM or CPU, that sort of thing.

OpenSUSE has a nice granular setting where you can control which alerts are allowed to steal focus, but unfortunately it's a little on the buggy side; it more-than-occasionally prevents a window from grabbing focus when it actually should (like the other day when every time I opened a new file in LibreOffice it opened in the damn background).

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 12, 2015 11:41 am

Witcher 3 does that thing where when you load your game it recaps the story. Which is a nice feature to have.

What's not nice is that it is unskippable, and effectively forces you to deal with platter load times even if you're running it on an SSD.


(EDIT: I'm seeing multiple reports of people saying they can skip it just fine, so it looks like this is a bug that doesn't hit everybody, not intentional behavior. So I rescind my "unforgivable sin of game design" designation.

There's apparently a mod to disable the narration; maybe I'll try that.)

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:07 pm

Witcher 3, by default, maps your strong attack to a combination of keys: hold shift and press left click.

But it also allows you to set a dedicated button instead.

This is a great idea!

Unfortunately, the game doesn't take this idea to its logical conclusion. Using Detective Mode requires holding down a key (right-click by default). You can remap what key it is, but you can't change it to a toggle like when Batman does it.

And it occurs to me that, in addition to the hoary but still-true observation that every game should allow you to map every button Jesus Christ guys Mega Man X did it in 1994, every game should also allow you to change any control that requires you to hold down a button to one where you press a button to toggle it on or off.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jan 20, 2016 4:07 am

My brother bought me Korra for Christmas and I finally got around to trying it out.

Not only can you not change the mouse/keys (!), it doesn't even tell you what the mouse/keyboard controls ARE (!!!).

You're "supposed" to use a controller, but the only only allowable controller is a 360 controller. So I have to fuck around later and get one of my generic controllers to emulate a 360 controller, FFS, and I still don't know yet if I'll be able to change the inputs at all.

Christ, are you fucking kidding me?
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