Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner
Evening Reading
by Garnett Lee, Feb 15, 2011 5:00pm PSTI received word today that the publisher of a fairly high profile video game due out shortly plans to handle pre-release reviews with an event. These "review events" give me great cause for concern, but not for the reason you might immediately think. Anyone at the level in the business to make the invite list for one of these things is well above the threshold of remotely being able to be bought off.
No, ironically, the real loser out of these deals is the game. On a AAA game--particularly of the sort prone to get the review event treatment--hundreds of people have worked months and months, often stretching into years, to create the game. In fact, on many of these games the last few months all those people will have been playing the game over and over, tweaking this and adjusting that to carefully craft the final experience.
And then it gets handed to a reviewer and the clock started on the brief few hours they are afforded at the event to play the game. Who does this sound like a good idea to? Wouldn't you want the person critiquing the game to have ample time to enjoy that content at their pace? On top of that, I can't count how many times I've gone back to a game while working on a review to replay a section or try something different or just double-check my impression from the first time through. And don't invoke the piracy defense because any outlet for which that would be a concern opens a much bigger issue to be addressed.
Tl;dr -- game review events are bad for all involved.
Now here are the top stories from today's video game news on the Shack:
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I think the pale yellow runs into another of the tips I learned at the same time: "if you want something to be different, make it really different; don't make it kind of different but not very." The pale yellow is just different enough to bug me but not different enough to really be different. That's of course why it's effective in being "the lowest priority visual content". But in that sense I'd almost rather they just be white, exactly like the content below. Even though I didn't like that mock when I saw it. Fah.
It's weird to me that I work on UI for a living, and even have lots of strong opinions on it and a lot of respect from Chrome's graphic designers, but I have no formal training in it and by my own admission can't do graphic/visual design to save my life. :P
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