chronovore | Entries tagged with design

I played several Kinect games recently. The differences in front end implementation are stunning. Adventures! and the Kinect Hub have very similar models, where the "stickiness" of the cursor remaining on an interface icon feels similarly weighted, and the timing with which it initiates and processes item selection are nearly identical. Joy Ride seems to ape some of the conventions without actually understanding why it's doing it. Specifically, it makes the cursor stick when over a selectable area, but then the timing of initiating the "selection countdown" seems to trigger quite late. This works in negative conjunction with whatever tolerance they've built into the stickiness, so right when it seems like I'm going to get what I was trying to select, it instead leaps off the item and forces me to re-select.

Don't even get me started on the maddening, unclear, complete freak-out Joy Ride had when I tried to start a two-player race with my kids' accounts logged in. It managed to completely kill their enthusiasm for the game before it had even started.

Dance Central, OTOH, seems to have its ducks in a row. They made some very smart decisions about limiting the selectable items, and instead of using the "mouse pointer" and countdown timer model of everything above, there is a stack of selectable items, and then use relative limb speed to move between the selection. Did you ever own one of those cell phones with a jog wheel? This feels like that; you can very quickly move to the item you want, even within a large list. There is also simple and consistent separation between right-hand and left-handed operation, where a swipe with the right hand is "select" and left hand is "go back." Super simple, very low user stress.

I finished Portal last night. It is as exceptional as everyone else is saying that it is. What have we learned from this? That if you give the resources of Valve for two years to a talented group of game modifiers who already have a good idea, they can make a great game that can be played through in about three hours.

Yes, it's that short.

However you can go back and play through it a few more times; listen to the Developer Commentary track and hear just how much work went into making it as polished as it is [AND IT IS AS SHINY AS A NINJA'S HEART], as well as tuck through some particularly difficult levels which have been further optimized to be Even More Cunningly Difficult. I suspect that if you go for Gold Award times on all the corresponding missions, you could end up playing for 100 hours.

Or going completely batshit insane.

I think I would have happily paid US$40 for the game alone and not felt ripped off. I would have paid US$20 and felt like it was the game of the year. As it is I'm stunned that for the first time in years I was able to finish a game without once consulting
GameFAQs.com and still felt very, very challenged during the entire experience.

Of note: There is a song at the end; it is wonderful. It was penned by Jonathan Coulton, and it makes for my favorite end-of-game sequence evar. I'm not linking to it because it has spoilers about the ending. As for the game writing itself, I hear ex-OldManMurray.com authors wrote the script. It shows; there isn't a huge amount of story, but it's very engaging and helps place you in the role of the [TEST SUBJECT].

Just don't turn off "Portal Funnel" in the Options. That's bad news for Test Chamber 18.