Tag Archives: usability

Review: Rayman Origins (PS Vita)

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Another game which I played a lot during my holidays was Rayman Origins – the beautiful 2D-Jump’n'Run game with Ubisoft’s Rayman (but without the ravin’ rabbits, which I did not miss at any time). And when I say beautiful, I mean it: The game looks like a painting coming alive. The backgrounds are full of wonderful details and the level themes offer a lot of variety. In addition, the animations of Rayman and all enemies and other characters look great and fluent all the time.

The only downside of the fluent animations is that the player sometimes doesn’t exactly know where the collision box of the character ends. It often happened to me that I missed a jump by a few pixels or was surprised that an enemy hit me before I could hit him. This happens not all the time but often, so I think this is a trade-off for having those beautiful fluent character animations.

Although I played quite some time without collecting all the coins, the campaign still continues with more and more great level designs and I highly recommend you to buy this game if you got a weakness for 2D Jump’n'Run games. Rayman Origins is available not only for PS Vita but for all other major home consoles.

Review: Resistance – Burning Skies (PS Vita)

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During my summer holidays I spent some more quality time with my PS Vita. One of the games I played through was the mobile adaption of the Resistance series: Resistance: Burning Skies.

It doesn’t matter if you played the PS3 games of the series or not – this is a pretty straightforward FPS game, which will be easy to pick up for anyone playing FPS games on a console thanks to the twin analogue sticks of the Vita. The game looks really great and has a high frame rate, which seems to drop only a bit in the multiplayer matches. The game is more linear than its PS3 predecessors and has some small usability flaws you don’t wanna see in a 2012 release: The cut scenes cannot be skipped, some save points are too far away from critical scenes and require the player often to run a bit more than necessary and running controls are messed up (you gotta press down on the d-pad and up on the left analogue stick simultaneously…).

Despite these small flaws the game is great fun and I really enjoyed playing through the campaign which took me around 6 or 7 hours. After that I jumped into the multiplayer deathmatches, which caught me by surprise because it really feels like playing a good FPS multiplayer game on a home console. I played a lot of games on my previous mobile consoles but THIS is the first game, where the multiplayer part is on par with the rest of the game.

If you own a PS Vita and like playing FPS games on the console, I highly recommend to buy Resistance: Burning Skies.

Everything’s better with lasers…?! My first weeks with SWTOR

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I spent some quality time with Star Wars: The Old Republic during the past weeks and want to share some thoughts on Bioware’s fresh-faced MMORPG. Although I did not expect a revolution of MMORPG game design, I was surprised that Bioware took very little risk by sticking to many well-known and established MMORPG standards. On the other hand, Bioware did a great job of capturing the atmosphere of the Star Wars Universe. Sound, art and character design are top-notch, although the texture quality is some years behind. Another thing that bothers me is that in the vast openness of the galaxy, the space combat runs on rails (here’s my hope that Bioware will release a full-fledged space combat add-on).

Surprisingly, Bioware did not so well with the whole graphical user interface (GUI). There are only a few options to modify your GUI, but it is far away from the freedom of interface modifications within games like World of Warcraft. That wouldn’t bother so many players, if only Bioware delivered a great GUI right from the start. Here are some examples for what went wrong:

The sum of your characters’s and companion’s actions grows fast and with them the need to organize all the fancy little icons across the screen. With only three control bars on the left, right and in the middle, Bioware offers only little room for placing all those action icons or additional items like medipacks. Especially the companion’s standard interface is far away from being intuitively understandable and easy to control.

Several pop-up menus like the inventory or the skill trainer options feature tabs, which can be found at the bottom of the pop-up window and not – as most users would expect them – at the top. Futhermore, they are comparatively small, with a dark font (cause it is a deactivated tab, right?) on a darker background and for this reason quite difficult to spot. It took me 10 minutes of searching and asking other players to find the mission items in my inventory (which have their own tab).

Another flaw is the button for leaving a flashpoint (instance) – it’s so tiny, that I wouldn’t have registered it without the help of my guild mates. The beauty of an MMOG is that you can ask people if you do not find the right button or option (which people do a lot in the general chat), but especially for MMOG newbies it would have been helpful to provide a more intuitive GUI.

But there are also some interface improvements in comparison to other MMORPGs. I really like the vertical beams of light, which direct you to the NPC’s loot.

After some weeks with SWTOR I have mixed feelings about the game. On the one hand I really enjoy the whole Star Wars atmosphere, the great character and art design and the dialogues. But on the other hand the characters and dialogues cannot draw off the attention of the fact that this a standard MMORPG that has a lot in common with the last generation of MMORPGs – except the great Star Wars license. In addition, the interface is neither intuitive enough for beginners nor offers enough modification options for experienced players to adapt their interfaces to their play style. Hopefully, Bioware will fix this soon – because if there is one further common ground in MMORPGs, it’s the regular updates.

In the grim dark future is only war… and annoying grenades?

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Last weekend I played through Warhammer 40K: Space Marine on my PS3 (yeah, I know I am bit late with that one). First I have to admit that I always enjoy visiting the Warhammer 40K universe with those fancy space marine servo suits, orks in space and the over-sized weaponry. Sadly, the story and the dialogues are completely forgettable and the game would have been more enjoyable with a bit more variety within the level and art design.

But we’re in the grim dark 40th century and looking for some action, right? In most cases you start approaching the enemy’s forces by some short-range shooting with your guns but end in close-combat surrounded by a group of enemies. That’s not only because your Space Marine rocks in close-combat but also due to the fact that the only way to regenerate health is dropping finishing moves on your enemies at close range.

Sometimes the third-person camera comes so close to your servo suit hero that you have to manually zoom out, while bashing buttons or continue bashing buttons and pray to the emperor that you’ll hit some foes. You may get used to this issue, but close-combat has a much more serious problem. If you’re starting a finishing move a fixed animation starts and will last some seconds with optional quick-time event button pressing to overwhelm your combatant. During this fixed finishing scene no other enemy can touch you in close-combat, which works similar to the quick-time events and finishers in God of War or other hack’n slay games. I am ok with the fact that other enemies can shoot at you during the finisher, but which really annoyed me was the fact that – especially later on in the game – there was a high chance that someone would throw a grenade right to your feet during the finisher phase. You see the grenade landing nearby, hear the warning – and can do absolutely nothing. Neither can you stop the finisher nor can you kick back the grenade or evade it. You just sit there and watch your Space Marine die. Dear Relic Entertainment – why not include another quick-time event to add a chance to escape this situation?

Shooting works out pretty fine until you come across a stationary weapon that is even larger than your super-sized weapons you already carry around. To use the weapon you have to approach the weapon and press a button, which shows up when you stand in the right area of interaction. Sounds pretty easy. But the tolerance for the area of interaction seems to be pretty small, so I often walked back and forth several times to exactly hit the right spot in order to use or rip-off the super-sized weapon in front of me (ripping it off is always better to keep moving and make a use of cover). Being veteran gamers we all know that big guns are there for a reason (e.g. large waves of enemies or boss fights) and that’s why it is a frustrating experience when you approach the weapon and cannot use it immediately because those enemies won’t wait until you are ready. Come on, Space Marines are not known for their fine motor skills, so why do I have to take several attempts to use the big guns?

That said, Space Marine delivers great combat action but it would lead to less frustration if someone would have taken care of these issues.

Nintendo DSi Review

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When I pre-ordered Nintendo`s new version of the enormous successful handheld (>100 million sales), I already knew that the changes on this successor wouldn`t be revolutionary (which matches perfectly the slightly changes of  the console`s name) but would give the handheld some interesting additional features.

After unboxing I first did a few tests with the camera and the audio tools which are nice to play around for a few minutes but which can – from a technical point – beaten easily by any mobile phone. It will be interesting to see how many good games with camera support will be released – the first one, Wario Ware Snapped, is nice but not does not work very well if you are on tour. Or if your face has the same color as the wall behind you. Or the poster. Or the blue sofa. IF you have good light AND contrast conditions the game works and shows some opportunities what to do with the new feature. But the game is far away from being a system seller (see the video for some impressions of the game).

The whole GUI of the DSi is pretty well done, except some minor issues. One of these issues I came across is the Wireless LAN setup. The console has 6 slots to save different wireless connections BUT only slots number 4,5 and 6 work with my WLAN security protocol. Every other gadget recognizes my WLAN protocol automatically, but the DSi does not. It took me three tries to understand how the whole dialogue works and given the fact that this should be a console for non-techies too, I am a bit disappointed by Nintendo (or of my skills).

Another dialogue problem is the shop interface. It is not easy to distinguish buttons, information boxes or signs from another and the logical structure of the whole shop is not that easy to understand as the one for the Wii. And this is not only a problem of the small screen size of the DSi, it is in some parts, poor interface design and usability. But, here is the chance for Nintendo to do better: Everything can be updated now :)

A problem I did not encounter yet is the new position of the power button. I heard some people hitting it by chance and kicking themselves out of the game. The new sound adjustment works fine for me – with two buttons instead of one bar you have a more precise control of the sound volume.

The main reason I bought the DSi (given the fact that I bought both previous designs, too) is the SD slot and the opportunity to download small games and apps. The first games and apps (like the browser) do not show the full potential of the service and I really hope Nintendo starts releasing classic games for the DSi like they do with the ‘virtual console’ service on the Wii.

My final statement: If you have no DS till now and consider buying one: Pick the DSi. If you already have a DS: Just wait a few months until interesting download content shows up.