Monday 12 January 2009

Why Won't You Pause? Dammit

You know what really annoys me, when your playing a game and have to go answer the door. You think "I will just pause this cut scene while I see who it is", only to find out that the game won't pause or the cut scene skips. This is something that happens pretty often to me, it seems as though everyone waits just until the cut scene starts before deciding to call and ask if I want new windows or with some retarded questionnaire that I don't want to answer. Heck even the pizza guy gets in on the act and chooses the exact moment to deliver my food, not 10 minutes before when I was wandering aimlessly across some field fighting some generic monsters, or shooting some terrorist scum in the head just so I could reach the next part in the story.



With the 360 on the odd occasion there is a way around this with a couple of games, such as pressing your guide button to freeze the cut scene up until you are ready to watch it. This doesn't always work though as sometimes the action will just carry on regardless. I like RPG's and one of the main element's of a good RPG is the story, in fact it is probably what helps make or break an RPG and forms many people's opinion of the game.

Games like Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 4 and quite a few others let you pause cut scenes and it sound's like nothing, but it really is great that you can do something so simple in these games. If anything it has helped people enjoy the games a lot more as they know what is happening in the plot lines. (Except for MGS 4, nobody knows what Kojima is on about)


It is just a shame that so many games are ruined like this for me and quite a few other people at a guess. This could be simply solved with a few easy steps such as........
  • Placing a large man-eating lion outside your front door, which really would be a good idea except for the cost of keeping a lion, and the inability to leave your house for fear of being eaten.
  • An intercom system set up so people can buzz you from the front door and say what they want, enabling you to tell them to sod off without having to answer the door.
  • Employing a butler, this would be a great idea but would leave you even less money to buy games. Plus if there was a murder committed everyone would accuse them of doing it, resulting in the press camping outside your house and banging on your door that the butler will no longer answer.
  • A replay option that is available in the menu to replay the last cut scene, enabling you to answer the door and watch it when you get back.
  • Finally how about just giving us gamers the option to actually pause a cut scene, other games let us do this. It wouldn't be to hard to implement into a game and would make for a better experience for gamers.

Will some game developers actually ever listen to their audience and add features like this to their games, or will myself and many others never be able to find out an important part of the plot, while that asshole came to the door asking if we have thought about changing our gas suppliers.


1 comment:

Dragonblogger said...

I recognized Rikku from the cutscene which made me read your post immediately. Final Fantasy, X, X-2 and XII are among the best games ever made for the Playstation.