I haven’t watched the vid yet, but one of my least favorite modern UI trends in console games is using a virtual cursor to replicate mouse movement with those long hold button presses to do actions. It’s all the more annoying when the long presses are still in the PC version. There are more efficient ways to make UI.
As modern games have grown more complex, they increasingly have a need for a fully fledged GUI toolkit encompassing all the widgets and layout mechanisms one would expect from conventional GUI toolkits like Qt. This is convenient because it allows UI designers to have all the familiar components like radio buttons, text entries, drop-down menus, sliders, etc. at their fingertips while outsourcing the maintenance. It also provides a common API for companies designing middleware, tools, extensions, and assets for the game engine. The drawback is that every. single. game. is using the same UI engine, just with different skin slapped on top of it.
Back in the day, GUI was something most games had to roll their own. They were a lot more unique because they were literally re-inventing the wheel each time. Modern games using off-the-shelf UI engines should at least benefit from additional considerations when it comes to internationalization, accessibility, and porting to platforms with different input methods (the provisions are there), but apparently nobody gives a fuck and we end up with GUIs that could have been produced by Copilot.
Kitten Space Agency is developing an entirely in house custom engine
the title screens of the 90s were cool mind you most of the UI in the actual game was trash because no-one knew what they were doing, but it had character. For example; I’m reminded of how WarCraft used to have different pointers for the mouse depending on the side you played the orcs had a chopped off green hand with blood leaking out and the humans had a gauntlet
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My favorite and most played game of all time is still Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2- The Rise of the Witch King which came out in 2006. I’d kill for a modern remake. There are modern RTS games but they just aren’t the same.
And that game isn’t available anywhere, stuck in IP hell
It was super duper easy to download a pirated version online last time I checked but I still have my original install disks so I haven’t done it myself
Games used to have relatively cheaper budgets, so there was less interference by finance folks and corporate suits. That allowed the creative types to stretch more and try weirder shit. Now everything needs to be carefully min-maxed in an attempt to extract the absolute most amount of money, rather than some creative folks just wanting to make enough money to pay their bills and be able to make another game after their current one releases.
They also used to be made with far smaller teams, so there were less people to intervene when one member wanted to try something different.
Now, for non-indie games at least, each part of the game down to a fucking bush involves multiple peoples’ work, so whether intentional or not, it’s design by comitee before it even gets to the stuffed suits meddling.
Fucking greed at all costs ruins everything, and it will for as long as games aren’t seen as an art form like cinema or music, where there are thriving subcultures of people making shit they want to make for the hell of it, whether an audience likes it or not.
Indie devs are making amazing inroads in that space, but I feel like every success story of indie games that makes it mainstream ends up making people expect AAA polish from small teams. It’s possible, but the exception.
Hollow Knight is an outlier, and so many people seem to be unwilling to deal with the jank and rough edges that comes with the territory of small teams. There are so fucking many other indie metroidvanias that get disparagement for not having that level of polish, even though it’s not reasonable to expect it all the time.
Slice of life farm sims that aren’t Stardew (Eric Barone is gift to the world), colony/base building and management games that aren’t Rimworld, survival crafting games that aren’t Mincraft, etc. You get the point.
It’s frustrating because very, very occasionally the high funding results in a BG3, and I would hate to lose that, but there is just so much absolute overpriced dreck.
that colin mcrae rally 2.0 menu is cool, console menus used to be cooler too, PS3 was my favorite but I also like Gamecube
Anything after PS3 has been pure simulacra
Lmao I was not expecting the UK to be cited as the reason for early gaming being cool, it’s a good explanation though, particularly the UK music scene has always been good
Was also pretty funny that the UK gov outlawed events with music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Wouldn’t that just be… Music? Completely ridiculous but I guess totally expected.
They were have a moral panic at the time about club drugs, notably speed and ecstasy. That’s why the ad for Wipeout is a couple of clubbers with nosebleeds, they’re supposed to be overdosing on speed. It’s very clever edgy and pretty cool (to the music scene people that go clubbing and do drugs) advertising. A kind of creativity and level of marketers being extremely in-touch with current culture of the time that you don’t see at the moment. The message being “Wipeout is an overdose of speed”.
Autechre then released the completely legal song Flutter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdhtm6qjmhU
Flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played at 45 or 33 revolutions under the proposed law.
However we advise DJs to have a lawyer and musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harrassment.
Oi, ave you got a loisence for them bars?
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At least Their Law by The Prodigy and Pop Will Eat Itself came out of that, absolute banger.
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