Silent Hill 3

[annuin]

Wow. Silent Hill 3 has the shittiest game interface I've ever come across. That alone makes me reluctant to want to start the game up again, or reinstall it since I just removed it after installing it yesterday, so I could make way for a different install.

Game makers need to do more than just port the damn game from console to pc, they need to come up with better fucking interfaces for the pc users. PC game interfaces, such as those on the first person shooters like UT and its sequels, leave something like Silent Hill writhing in the dust, which is something I believe the nasties are supposed to be doing, if I can actually navigate my robot-like character out of that main area the game opens in to find some of said fucking nasties.

I think SH3 ranks as the first game I've ever just quit out of after less than 10 minutes from sheer annoyance at the interface. And the majority of those 10 minutes was taken up by the mostly pointless opening movie.

Comments

[captainflux.livejournal.com]

Never played it, only ever played the first one, but it was much the same - a good idea with a shiteating dog of an interface. And that was on the CONSOLE. I got abuot 25 minutes into it and never played it again.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

I never played the first two, so this was my first foray, and I had heard good things about how creepy this series is.

Someone on IRC pointed out that a survival horror game is different than a first person shooter. Maybe so, but you'd expect your character to be able to fucking move properly in both.

Or maybe this just adds to the tension of trying to survive... it sure as hell gets a lot fucking harder to do so if it's a pain in the ass to move adequately and you have to press all kinds of extra buttons to go into "defense" mode etc. Plus I hate the lack of being able to change the direction of where you're viewing from, with the mouse in a first person shooter you can have the character pivot on the spot and view around themselves, in SH3 you're limited to what the game allows you to see, which is sometimes the view in front of the character from behind her, and sometimes it means you're staring into her face as she comes towards you. Not exactly handy for seeing if there's something approaching you, or for trying to walk to a specific point.

[trejkaz.livejournal.com]

When I think "shittiest game interface", I think Resident Evil.

RE has the annoying feature where they don't give you a crosshair but you're still expected to shoot zombies in the head to kill them properly, exactly the sort of convenient interface which made the PS2 so popular because apparently stupid people (who are known to be the number one purchaser of PS2 games and gaming hardware) like that sort of thing.

PC interfaces almost always need reworking, yes. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a fairly good reworking from console to PC, though admittedly because they originally planned it for PC until the Xbox showed up, and then defected, and so on. Same went for Halo and any number of titles around the same era which Microsoft pulled the carpet from under.

What I find sucks is when people port a certain type of game to PC and pay no attention to the completely different style of game that people will expect. The crown example of this is Tetris Worlds, which on console allows four player side by side play, and on PC, allows four player side by side play... assuming you have four controllers you can hook up to the computer, which applies to approximately zero PC owners. When asked why they didn't include online or LAN multiplayer in the game, its designers, Elorg said, "What's a LAN?" (Well they didn't really, but I suspect they would if they were asked.)

There are probably a few game types which don't require much reworking but it largely boils down to GTA-style games where they have to port from controller to mouse/keyboard control, but everything else remains the same.

The funny thing is making portable game engines caused this problem. Yet portable game engines are a good idea in themselves. Oh well...