Tag Archives: ux

Bayonetta 2: Saving Me a Trip to Wikipedia

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Bayonetta pointing a large gun very close to the camera with the caption "Let's Dance, Boys"For most games, as soon as I see the credits roll, I immediately grab my phone and go to Wikipedia to read the summary of the game’s plot. I’ve got to be honest here, I’m always somewhere on the confusion spectrum. Occasionally I have no idea what happened – I’m looking at you Final Fantasy XV – but usually it’s a point or two that I may have missed.

I just wrapped up Bayonetta 2, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they at least tried to save me the trip. In Bayonetta 2 you gather up lore books as you progress through the levels, written from the POV of a journalist. Upon completing the story, you get one more entry automatically added for you that contains a recap of the game’s plot.

Partial journal entry in Bayonetta 2 displaying a summary of the game's plotOf course, I didn’t notice this until after I returned from Wikipedia, but in any case I appreciate the developers being realistic about gamers like myself who may have lost track of what’s going on in the story along the way!

Elite: Dangerous: Can I Change My Name?

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I picked up Elite: Dangerous recently in a Steam sale, as it’s a game I’ve threatened to get excited about for a while now. Upon booting it up the first time, I found one of the most difficult decisions facing me: what to name my character. And Elite: Dangerous leaves out some pertinent information that would help inform that decision.

Commander Tad Cooper, I believe in you.

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Hearthstone: That New Card Smell

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Hearthstone_LogoBlizzard’s Hearthstone (full name, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft) is a digital collectible card game that’s currently out on Mac, PC, and iPad. The obvious comparison is to the biggest CCG around, Magic: The Gathering. While MTG is a physical game that also has a digital component, Hearthstone is a purely digital game, designed to be purely digital. That poses both interesting challenges and opportunities.

Being a collectible card game, a huge hook of both of these game is of course, getting new cards. A recovering former MTG player myself, there is nothing quite like the experience of opening a new booster pack of cards. And while Hearthstone doesn’t reproduce that new card smell, it does go out of its way to try and evoke the same feelings as the real thing. Continue reading →

Hotline Miami: Meaningful Backtracking

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Cover of Hotline MiamiGiant Bomb defines “backtracking”, in part, as the following:

“Backtracking is often a derogatory term used to describe a situation in a game where the player must return to previously encountered locations in order to continue advancing the game”

Most of the time, backtracking is annoying, even when realism-wise it’s a little dubious how the game’s hero is able to make it all the way out of perilous situation X while off camera. But as is usually the case, the real answer on backtracking is “it depends”. Sometimes, in small doses, it can be very effective.

Hotline Miami (Steam link) is a super-violent action game that has earned a lot of attention as an indie PC title released in October 2012. It uses backtracking in a brilliant fashion – to really hammer home the game’s own meta-commentary on violence in games.

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Stay Closed: A Tale of Two Tiny Board Game Boxes

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I’m a fan of board games. I’m also a fan of good design. Naturally then, I’m a fan of well designed board game boxes. I’ve backed a few board game related Kickstarter projects in recent memory, and there are two that have particularly standout packaging – in both good and bad ways.

On one hand, we have Dungeon Roll with a shelf-unfriendly box but a perfect touch on a closing mechanism. And on the other hand, The Great Heartland Hauling Co. features a great travel-sized box that will probably dump its contents all over your bag if you attempt to travel with it. Read on for more!

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