23 December 2011

Console game dialog

I got Sonic Generations for Christmas. It’s nice to have back the classic Sonic gameplay that was sorely lacking in the last couple of Sonic titles I played. Though it is going to take some getting used to it in stereoscopic 3D.

So many console games have really annoying dialog. It uses a dozen lines where three or four would have sufficed. The player has to click through it three or four words at a time. And then there’s the ones that throw in lots of pointless interjections for more pointless clicks.

Does anyone really enjoy clicking through this stuff? I enjoy the stories, but I’d enjoy them a lot more if they weren’t so poorly delivered. I used to come up with excuses for why this was handled so poorly, but these days the excuses are worn out.

So far, the biggest sin in the Sonic Generations dialog—ignoring the sin of having dialog in a Sonic game—is the pointless interjections.

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