Skip to main content

Game Changer For An Industry!

    Hey, everyone. Recently I bought the new game by Polarbit Studios called Reckless Racing 2. I really don't intend to review the game but I do want to talk about a brilliant innovation in the controls.
   In the picture above, notice the silver bar and just above it the box you can check for Dynamic Difficulty. The studio people explain that dynamic difficulty is the practice in the gaming community of making a game get harder as you progress and have success in it. This is the instrument that ruins gaming for the casual gamers because they get stuck at levels and can't progress and enjoy the game they have paid for.
    As you know, I have constantly griped about this, even threatening to give one star reviews for games I get stuck on when I have selected the easy level. (see my post entitled The Shadowgun Manifesto). The gaming industry has catered to the hardcore gamers who want games to be super hard so that they can prove something or brag amongst themselves or whatever. Polarbit has not only given you the ability to remove the dynamic difficulty crap but have given you a sliding difficulty bar control so you can select a difficulty ranging from 0% to 100%. I can not begin to tell you how I love a developer with this kind of wisdom and responsiveness to the needs of their users. Hey, we who are 'lame gamers' have money too.
     The solution was simple but brilliant. Polarbit should immediately patent this idea, because it should be on every game on the app store. In fact, Apple should require it to be on every game that is over a certain price. Can you imagine being able to go back and play all those levels you were stuck on? You could destroy that last crate on Angry Birds and make those darn monkeys stop mocking you. You could see what is at the end of Star Battalion.It would be like you suddenly had dozens of new games! You could set up the controls to suit your own skills. The hard core gamers could still brag about 'I beat it on max difficulty and it was easy for me, dude'. The casual gamers could feel more fulfilled and not so 'lame'.
    I'm not saying that this is a diplomatic breakthrough of the proportions of something that a brilliant Secretary of State would come up with, but it is pretty darn cool. Here's hoping that the buzz will spread to other developers. It makes financial sense. If you don't want to lose the casual gamers from this vibrant industry, throw us a bone here. Make every game with similar controls. The problem is that most game developers are hard core gamers who decided to make a living with their skills. Please look at this from a financial perspective and mimic these controls. Maybe we can all meet at Cupertino and sign some sort of accord. Then there will be peace on the Ponderosa once more.
    From the author's green retreat, I'm CE Wills.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The White Chicken Mystery

    The other night I happened to come home very late. It was the middle of the night and I was driving up a steep mountain road. Near the top I saw something white in my headlights. It was standing in the other lane, standing very still. It was a large white chicken. It was probably a rooster because I thought I could see his comb as I whizzed by at my customary pace. He never moved a muscle. This is weird, don't you think?      After a couple of days to consider this phenomenon, I have come up with some plausible answers for his bizarre behavior. 1. He was conflicted whether or not he should cross the road. 2. He was feeling cocky and decided to play chicken with the traffic. 3.He was being hen-pecked at home and had decided to end it all. 4. Someone had egged him on to do it. 5. He had just watched the movie Fantastic Four and decided to try to stop a truck the way that Ben Grimm did on the bridge. 6. He had driven himself crazy wondering if ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Batman Lives In Washington, DC

    Hey, everyone. I just read an interesting article on Washington Post.Com by Mike Rosenwald. It was titled Who Is the Route 29 Batman? This is a true story about a guy that the cops pulled over. The guy was driving a black Lamborghini with Batman plates. There were yellow Batman symbols on the doors. They had a video from the police car that showed him being pulled over. He was wearing a Bat-suit which he said cost him $5000. His gig is that he visits sick children in area hospitals and hands out Bat-Toys and Bat-books to cheer the kids up.     His name is Lenny B. Robinson and he says that the 'B' stands for Batman. He is perfectly sane and is just a good dude trying to make a difference. He is a self-made millionaire and is currently having a duplicate of the Batmobile custom-made at a cost of $250,000.    It was a hoot, watching the cops having their pictures made with the Bat Guy. Someone asked him where Robin was and he said that the boy won...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cake Is Better Than Swords

Hey, everyone. On Thanksgiving, we had a get-together here at The Author's Green Retreat. One lady brought a cake which I wanted to show you. It had the look of a Roman Coliseum about it. Inside it was just as decadent...and fun, as ancient Rome. When I cut it open, homemade marshmallow cream began to ooze out in several spots, running over the chocolate cake and peanut butter icing. It is best served warm so the cream is fluid. Very tasty. The same lady, and her children, are people who have played a lot of Skyrim. They gave me some pointers on the game because I am having problems with it. They taught me how to fast travel, and a ton of other things, but the main thing was the armor and clothing problem. This is a little embarrassing, but let me explain. Okay. For several weeks when I played, I would enter towns and everyone I met would comment on my nakedness. I would select a tunic and shoes, whatever, go back around people and they would say something about it. I guess I w...
Post a Comment
Read more