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that’s enough knitting for you!
NOVEMBER 21st, 2002
holly is by far the sweetest girl i’ve come across in quite some time. i rather like this. but damn… she’s got to learn when to stop knitting and do her homework.
i bought kingdom hearts the other day. square never ceases to amaze me. the character designs are beautiful as ever. it’s superfun, though some things have been a bit frustrating.
it is also making me want to make video games real bad again. this may or may not be a good thing. i may fool around with my most recent hopeless project again. perhaps create some bad guy character designs. i should really put together a sort of design document for it. various character sheets, interface designs, sketches and maps of a level or two, a written description of how things will work. the same sort of stuff i’ve done before with josh and frank, just all pulled together nicely and a bit more polished.
one thing i really like about kingdom hearts is the interface. in terms of functionality it’s fairly standard, but graphically it’s far more polished than i’m used to seeing. RPG interfaces seem to always be unnecessarily plain, not to mention they’re often translated far too directly from japanese, resulting in a lot of ugly abbreviations because there isn’t room for enough characters. kingdom hearts certainly does not suffer from these problems.
my biggest complaint? too often you have to be in just the right spot for the next “event” to occur that moves the game along. at least twice now, the place i needed to be was totally unrelated to anything. there was no indication whatsoever that i ought to go there. i’ve seen this a lot in games, and it seems to me it’s a result of trying to make games appear less linear, when really they aren’t. you take a meandering path through the game world, but it’s still a relatively set path. you’ve got to do things in the right order, or you can’t continue. when you don’t realize this is going on, it works great, and it can be done quite well. but when it’s done poorly, and you get stuck, it can be awful. at least back in the day when your path was linear it was clear.
you just kept on going forward.
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