Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
- Mongrel
- Posts: 21391
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
- Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
*Someone shoves Sharkey off the podium*
*Wilhem Scream plays as he falls all of 18"*
*Wilhem Scream plays as he falls all of 18"*
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
- Brantly B.
- Woah Dangsaurus
- Posts: 3679
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 2:40 pm
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
- Mongrel
- Posts: 21391
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
- Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
We called it the nuclear wolf.
- beatbandito
- Posts: 4314
- Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 8:04 am
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
- nosimpleway
- Posts: 4727
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:31 pm
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
It's Exxon/Mobile stations in parts south. Probably owned by the same company.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
- Mongrel
- Posts: 21391
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
- Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
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.
- Mongrel
- Posts: 21391
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
- Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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).
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).
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.)
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.)
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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.
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.
- Mongrel
- Posts: 21391
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
- Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line
Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design
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?
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?
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests