Half-Masked

Mass Effect 2 is a game everyone was looking forward to for its branching dialogue trees, rich narrative, character building, and pretty much just reading a whole bunch of interesting stuff about this space-opera in-game. So EA and Bioware decided that the text should be so small that nobody can fucking enjoy the game for the reasons they bought it in the first place.

That’s like a Halo game that doesn’t give you any weapons, or a Mario game where they forgot to put in a jump button.

Not that I’m surprised. This is Bioware. These people aren’t completely satisfied unless there is some arbitrary, game-killing bullshit in their products. Instead of being unplayable, they’ve just made it unreadable. When even people with the high-end HDTV’s this tactic is trying to convince more people to buy can’t fucking read the text, and you don’t include anything in the options to circumvent or rectify this, in a game where reading is the defining aspect of the game’s critical and popular significance, you have failed as game designers and as storytellers.

And if the only way you can think of to make a convincing case to buy an expensive television with a shorter lifespan than SDTV is to make your game WORSE to look at, you don’t deserve gainful employment.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.