sc94597 said:
kitler53 said:
i always get a good laugh at the threads that claim nintendo games to be the most polished games on earth immediately after starting to play other systems i realized how deficit and half-finished most nintendo games are compared to their competitors. |
In which ways? I've always been a multi-platform owner, either on Playstation/Nintendo, Pc/Nintendo, or last generation with all consoles. My thought of polish, when I hear it, is that a game is bug-free and what is there is done very well. That describes Nintendo games much better than most games I play. Sony games have a similar amount of polish. I never think of polish as "feature-packed" or having many different things in it. In fact, if we try to thinkg about the etymology of polish when referring to media content, we can look at the literal definition of polish, "make surface of something smooth and shiny." That usually means removing a lot of extra features rather than adding them. Many games have plenty of features that don't work on top of features that do work well. It can be a chore to play such games because you have motivation to see the good qualities but have to lug through a lot of crap. I consider those unpolished games. And Nintendo is really good about cutting out things that don't work, are boring, or are buggy.
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polish is more than bug free to me. it's about having an experience that is always positive and never feels bad or incomplete or makes the gamer feel frustrated about playing the game. that can be bugs. it can be balance. it can be missing features that make the gamer feel frustrated or gets in the way of them enjoying the game like a lack of online in a multiplayer focused game.
a generic instance of a lack of polish in games is the concept of invisible walls. it is a cheapy way to do your level design and cheapens my experience every time i run into an invisible wall. it breaks my immersion and causes my experience to be frustrating. destiny is really guilty of this btw.
so i'll give you two examples of where nintendo engraged me:
wii fit had some great ideas but a really obvious omission to an exercise game is being able to set up a routine. it's pretty fucking obvious to me that someone would want to do more than 1 (often times 30 second or less) movement at a time. wii fit plus included that feature and so i bought it. but once i got the software i found out that you could only have 1 routine, you had to add the exercises in the exact order you wanted to perform them, and a movement couldn't be repeated within the routine. i'm a chemical engineer and i can program better UIs than that... i rage quit wii fit plus within a week because it was too frustrating to use.
mario galaxy 2. upon completion of each level there was a loading screen that took you back to that mario head planet hub world thing. to start the next level you had to traverse to the other side of the head to get to the launch pad thing and sit though a loading screen to take you to the world map. you had to navigate though the world map to your next level and sit though a loading screen to take you to the galaxy. then you had to pick your galaxy start to sit though another loading screen to load the level. some of the levels were so short that i spend more time in loading screens than i did in gameplay. i only made it to world 2 and i couldn't take it anymore and stopped playing which is a real shame because galaxy 1 was soo awesome.
it's just poor design, it was a barrier to my experience, and in both cases i quit the game because it was too poor of an experience to enjoy. polish is soo much more than bug free.
