Churning Addendum

New Manager In A Strange Land. I don't remember it being that short.

Something we've gone back and forth a couple times on the team is how strict we should be with checkins AKA commits. Much like a society swings back and forth between law and anarchy, the team swings back and forth between a strict checkin policy and a lax one. With the lax policy, everybody complains about the build being broken. With a strict policy, everybody complains about the time they have to spend validating their data, and how they can't check in because the build has been locked.

Our current policy is on the strict side. FWIW:
- when the build is broken we lock the depot - only people who are attempting to fix the build can commit
- the depot is locked an hour before the end of core hours, so people cannot "commit and leave"
- people who break the build and don't manage to fix it immediately are put on the blacklist; for the next week, they can only commit if they have permission
- a few special people are on the "awesome" list - they can commit at any time for any reason.

Despite the strict policy the build is frequently broken on at least one of the consoles for long periods of time, but it hasn't been in effect that long. We've also upgraded our build machines so they can churn faster - it could take an hour for the machine to detect a break, and another hour before the machine would validate the fix.

Notes on Prince of Persia

Okay, I finally got enough time off of work to finish it, and now that it's over, I am inconsolably depressed. I tried playing THUG and Call of Duty, but nothing fills the hole that Prince of Persia has left. To me, these other highly acclaimed and polished games seem like stick figure illustrations compared to the glorious masterpiece that is Prince of Persia. I wish I had been on that team, just to see how they work, because they've got it down.

Now, there are a number of things that are considered "good game design" that are missing here, such as: meaningful choices; emergence; nonlinear narrative. In fact, the whole game is an illusion: it tricks you into thinking that you're clever, by providing puzzles that are just hard enough to not be obvious but easy enough that almost anyone can solve them. It tricks you into thinking that you're a badass, by providing exhilirating combat moves and death defying acrobatics. While playing it, I felt like, "I am the greatest." Never mind that when my non-gamer wife played it, she was almost as great as me. I was suckered in by the illusion.

This is what Mark Barrett calls magicianship. (At least I think it was Mark Barrett.) And it shows that the Sid Meier definition of game doesn't suffice, whereas the Rollings / Adams definition -- a sequence of challenges -- still does. Like Zelda, it's another example of how simple puzzles really can be satisfying.

I'm almost tempted, after playing Prince of Persia, to say that the great, erudite game designers are just wrong, and that puzzles are better than problems, and a single highly polished, highly crafted linear game is better than a not-so-polished nonlinear one. I would almost argue that we should stop thinking of ourselves as game makers but instead think of ourselves as makers of virtual funhouse rides.

But that's silly. Different games appeal to different people. I seem to be more easily taken in by the funhouse ride than the actual meaningful game experience, but plenty of other people are not fooled and prefer the game that they can truly get involved in on a deep level. All I can argue for is that you pick an audience and try to make that one audience happy, which Prince of Persia does.

Another game design rule, one of Noah Falstein's, is "provide parallel challenges with mutual assistance." This one Prince of Persia also breaks. Playing it, I realized that the rule is just a means, not an end. The rule should be: "Don't let your player get stuck." Don't have shelf level events. One way to do that, is with the parallel challenges technique. Another way is to playtest the crap out of your game and make sure that most of your playtesters can make it all the way through without consulting gamefaqs. Prince of Persia does this well. The time-rewinding feature, obviously, is a great mitigator of frustration. Also, at each save checkpoint, you have a vision of the future, where they show you the solution to the next room. (Although I loved the idea that these two 'cheats' were both tied in to the time-travel motif, I started skipping the visions, because they were spoiling it for me. I sometimes went back to them if I got stuck. I never had to consult gamefaqs.)

Let's talk about the wall run. To me, it's the wall run and not the rewind that is the heart of Prince of Persia, because it's the wall run that turns the 3d game into a 2d one. One big problem with 3d platformers is simply aiming your character at the next platform. The arcing wall run allows Prince of Persia to take the old two-dimensional platformer gameplay and wrap it around the walls of a three-dimensional space, and thus, like Viewtiful Joe is able to bring tried-and-true two dimensional gameplay from the old world into the new.

People may say, when Spider-Man 2 comes out, that we stole our wall run from Prince of Persia. We didn't. We stole it from Shinobi.

Speaking of stealing, Prince of Persia steals back everything that Tomb Raider and Ico
and Soul Reaver stole from it, and then some. All the elements from Prince of Persia are here, but we also have Lara's three-dimensional block crawling, Ico's female companion, and Soul Reaver's vampire stake. And Zelda's reflecting mirrors. Was it Picasso who said he didn't borrow, he stole?

One thing that bothers me: the ledges and poles that you jump from and to are at different relative locations when you encounter different challenges, and the Prince always makes the jump. On the one hand, this is wonderful: if I think the Prince can probably make a jump, he probably can, and when I tell him to do it, he does it succesfully. It's like the game is figurative, where other games are literal. The A button means "jump over the chasm" in Prince of Persia, whereas in Mario it means "jump three feet." It's actually hard to make him screw up. On the other hand...this is yet another factor that makes Prince of Persia
feel less like a game and more like a funhouse ride, as the skills of precision and pattern recognition (is that a jump I can make?) are not really required here.

A lot of reviewers have been dissing on the combat. Maybe this is because the combat is an actual game, and they don't feel like it has any place in their funhouse ride. Contrast with Ico, where the combat was simple button-mashing. Maybe I'm experiencing halo effect, here, but I even liked the combat. I liked it a lot. I'll even say it is the best beat-em-up style combat I have seen in a 3d game with a free-floating camera. (Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe are better, but they're fixed-cam. And they're Capcom. Who can compete?) The combat has a number of orthogonal elements that create meaningful choices: attack, tortoiseshell block, dodge, vault-over-opponent, a vampire-stake move that makes sure opponents stay dead, a wall jump attack (that I almost never used), a one-hit-kill counter-attack, the ability to rewind time (of course), the ability to slow down time (which I almost never used in combat but did use on some of the rotating-blade timing puzzles), and some special attacks. There are three resources: life, number of time rewinds you get, and--let's call it 'magic'--which lets you use special attacks, etc. Like you manage your lives, inviso, and smart bombs in Stargate
you manage these three resources in combat. When you kill an opponent, it gives you one more rewind and a little more 'magic', so you're not overly encouraged to hoard.

Many complain that, when fighting, you are assailed by too many enemies. I'd argue that the resource management aspect of combat only comes into play because you're assailed by so many. It takes a while for them to grind you down, and for you to start wishing you'd used a rewind to save some life, or wishing you still had a rewind left.

(BTW, as much as I liked the combat, I think we can take 'em. Time will tell.)

Prince of Persia is, in many ways, GTA's opposite. GTA has freedom; Prince of Persia has none. GTA is outdoors; Prince of Persia is indoors. GTA has a branching storyline; Prince of Persia is linear. GTA you shoot; Prince of Persia you slash. GTA has a lot of real-estate at low detail, with low production values, and bad animation. You get the idea. I hope Prince of Persia didn't differentiate itself right out of the market. They've been on the Yahoo buzz index for seven days now...that's something. Especially since it's the kind of game you don't need to look up on gamefaqs.

Content Turnaround

A new episode of Manager In A Strange Land is up, and I don't remember it being that dense when I handed it in, but...there it is.

Gregg Tavares has already read it and had these points to add:

1) WAD files are only a half solution. Putting all your individual files into a wad file saves the time of opening a file which might involve a seek to the CDs table of contents but it doesn't save the all the seek time. What you really want and what most of the top console games do is make a system where you can almost load everything you need for a level in one big chuck straight out of the file, designed to be ready to use with a minimum of parsing. Instead of loading one model at a time or one texture at a time from indivudal files or wad files we load a level file (from a wad file) which has all the textures, models, sounds, need for that level or at least all the ones needed to get the level started assuming we are doing a spooling game.

2) 4 months sounds like a long time to get all your files from text to binary but I'm sure I don't know all the facts. My solution since about 1992 has been what I call a datalinker.

it's available here.

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/elibs/elibs/tools/mkloadob/mkloadob.htm?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/html

it takes a text readable file that has references to other files and builds something ready to be loaded. All my other tools either convert their formats to something this can parse or they convert to binary and those binaries get included in the level specification files that this linker uses to build a level file.

A big advantage is that basically there is only one format at least at a low level so there is only one low-level loading routine, one one pointer fixup routine and only one tool.

This linker was used on Gex 1 for 3DO and is also currently used at Sega of Japan. A similar linker was used for Gex 2 and Crash Team Racing for PSX.

3) Version numbers

I always put version numbers in my binary files. That way the code can check that the versions match and complain "version wrong". If I didn't do this then the game might crash trying to load an old file and it might take hours to figure out that someone just forgot to rebuild the level with the lastest version of some tools

4) Version folders

Since there are many developers working and not everybody is always using the same version of the source code a problem often appears where they are using an older version of the code and someone rebuilds the level they are working on and the version of the data for that level no longer matches the version of their code and they are not at a point that getting the lastest code is good for them

We solved that problem by having different folders for different version of the data. For example if a particular tool would normally store it's data in \\dataserver\gamex\levelbins we would instead have it use the version number of the data as a folder name so if the data was version 1.2 it would store the data in \\dataserver\gamex\levelbins\1.2\ That way, if some programmer changes the data format and changes the version number to 1.3, he can rebuild data knowing that his new data will not overwrite the data that other programmers, designers and artists are using.

I should mention that I suspect #4 may not make sense to some people. If you are making a game were building a level takes seconds or minutes then people generally build the levels on their own machine and version folders is probably not a big deal. If on the other hand you are making a game that takes hours to compute potential visible sets (ie, Jak & Daxter, Jak 2, Ratchet and Clank) then generally you have build machines that have enough memory to process levels that big and the results are stored on the net somewhere for everyone to use when they run the game. It's in that case that version folders are probably more important.

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass on those ideas. I'm sure they don't fit every project but they have worked for me up to now.

I agree with his points #1 & #3, and can only say with regards to #2 that he has no idea how many text file formats we have: patrol path, quad path, AI, entity, weapon, item, extra associated entity data, blah, blah, blah. Another team took the same engine and did a similar retrofit in a different way and it took them a similar amount of time. #4 sounds like a good idea although we aren't even at the stage where we're sharing data off the net. (But we're making steps to get there!)

I like 'skill plateaus'

Ok, I read the comments. 'Skill plateaus' is the winner. Forget 'local minima'.

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams said that Valve's Cabal system was not the way to manage game development, because Valve had a highly skilled, veteran team that could handle it, and you don't. This is an example of skill plateaus in the game development game. The question: can you make a game the quality of Half-Life if you don't master that higher plateau?

I had another example of skill plataeus in the game development game but it's slipped my mind now. Brain cloud. And I have to go the gym. To be continued.

If you look at the word 'plateau' too long it looks really funny.

Arg

Props to Rafael for pointing out that there actually were comments on the last entries. Arg. The lure of typepad gets stronger. Also, he doesn't like 'local minima', for pretty good reasons...the 'local minima' aren't the expert, finesse strategies; they're the lesser, seemingly good strategies you find on the way to the absolute minimum.

BTW, yesterday we were discussing whether to change Spider-Man 2 to eliminate one of our local minima (although we didn't call it that), and James Chao pointed out that the tactic in question was like training wheels on the way to the best tactic. We're leaving it the way it is. Which is good; it's nice when decisions you make early in a project stay made...it should take a landslide of approval from the team to reverse those decisions.

But maybe that's a way in which local minima can appeal to the mass market; as training wheels.

Must read those comments now.

I thought I invented that

Speaking of coining terms, I could of sworn I invented this years ago: heisenbug. Either:

a. It was so obvious somebody else came up with the same thing.

b. I heard it somewhere, forgot I heard it, and then mistakenly thought I coined it.

c. The people I used the term with thought it was so cool they spread it like a virus.

I'm going to choose to believe the last one, because that's the sort of arrogant, egocentric guy I am.

And back to "local minima": if people start using this as a game design term, remember who invented it. That's right: me, baby. Me. Yeah.

Am I the only one who blogs on Thanksgiving?

Don't tell the in-laws but I'm bored!

Does nobody have an answer to my questions of the day before? Could this be my opportunity to coin a new vocabulary term for gaming? How about "local minima"? That sounds nice and pretentious. I first heard the term when studying neural nets: when a neural net is learning and reaches equilibrium, it does so because it's found a local minima, but not necessarily the best configuration. When you have strategies only experts know, you create local minima in the game space: some people get stuck in these local minima and never leave. "I've got a strategy that works for me. I tried using this other strategy and got killed. That other strategy must suck." Local minima are great for hardcore games and competitive games; they're like the treasure you discover exploring the game space, trying to find the deepest minimum. But it's possible you want to keep them out of mass market games entirely; if you have them, then by definition you're locking off a part of your game from a part of your audience.

If what I just said was completely murky, here's an example: Prince of Persia's counter-attack and counter-retrieve. I am able to pull one of these off about one out of ten tries. One out of five times, I go too early and get hit. Statistically, I'm able to beat up badguys faster by using the other moves in the Prince's arsenal. Although I could probably practice the counter-retrieve and get to the point where I'm more effective with it than the Prince's other techniques, I don't: I'm content with the other moves. The counter-retrieve is a tool for players who are harder core than I am. That element of the game is lost to me. PoP could go in a few directions at this point:

- make the combat so tough that you have to master the counter-retrieve. If they do this, then they're creating a shelf level event for the non hardcore players. "I couldn't get past the such-and-such and quit." Bad move, unless you playtest to the point where you're sure most of your players will be able to master it.

- once you finish the game, allow the hardcore to play through on higher difficulty levels, or provide bonus combat levels, where the combat is so hard that you have to master the counter-retrieve. Decent move, but then you are spending time working on part of the game that not everybody sees.

- leave the counter-retrieve as a cool extra for players who care. Decent move, but then you're spending time working on a cool move that only the hardcore will appreciate. Also, this bothers me aesthetically. When I play a game where there's moves or units that are hard to use and you don't actually need, it bothers me. I'm not sure why. A sense of waste? A feeling that the whole thing doesn't fit together as a cohesive whole? An example would be the counter in Zelda: I used it, but Chris Busse played the whole game without it. Knowing it wasn't necessary makes it seem like an unsightly vestigial appendage.

I haven't finished PoP yet, so I don't know which way they actually went.

Spider-Man 2 has plenty of local minima, so I'm pretty sure it will appeal to the hardcore. Right now we're leaning towards a variation of option 2: once you've finished the game there will be incredibly difficult bonuses to complete. Things are still in flux, long time before we ship, so--who knows?--some of those harder-to-get-to local minima might become considered part of the standard player's arsenal, and we'll provide more tutorial missions to make sure the player knows them.

"Local minima" is a pretty damn crappy word. I invite you to come up with a better one.

And, finally, a new episode of Manager in A Strange Land is up, aimed primarily at coders. On distributed builds: our build time has gotten a lot slower since I wrote the article, and we actually are in the process of getting a distributed build system up and running here, but we're not using Incredibuild, because we need it to work cross-platform, and it will be nice if it can handle the gameplay scripts as well. As usual, the hardest thing about optimizing your turnaround time is finding the resources to do it, but this does seem like one of those times where the benefits will outweigh the costs, even in the short term.

Questions

Today I have questions:

The latest Penny-Arcade got me thinking. How do the various European front WWII games do in Germany?

On a completely different topic:

What is the name for a strategy or tactic that will win in the hands of the expert but causes a novice to shoot himself in the foot? I'm thinking of flying the Interceptor in Allegience, using the downward slash in Maximo, the counter from Prince of Persia, cavalry in Kohan. When I see these things I want to know what to call them, and I know one of you will help me out. Remember when I didn't know what to call emergence? Now I know it's emergence.

Notes on True Crime

I've already mentioned how I thought True Crime was a marketing failure: it looked to me like development and marketing where not on speaking terms for this project. Maybe now that Kathy Vrabeck has stepped into her new role as overseer of both marketing and development, everybody will stay on the same page. (She supposedly visited the studio today but I missed it because I'm in New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with my wife's family.) But that's not what I came here to talk to you about. I came here to talk to you about the macro game in True Crime.

It only takes two or three missions before you discover the mind-blowing thing about True Crime: when you fail a mission, it gives you an option to continue the story anyway. I was shocked. "Can they do that?" I asked. It gets better: depending on whether you win or lose the missions, you go down different branching storylines. Sometimes the storylines rejoin the main stream, sometimes they branch off permanently. I think it was Greg Costikyan who wrote about the value of abdicating authorship in videogames; True Crime actually does it.

Now, considered as a work of interactive fiction, True Crime is a failure. It can be thought of as a tiny choose-your-own-adventure. Where it gets its power is what this does for the macro game:

- the player never gets stuck; if he gets sick of a mission he can simply continue the story.

- it provides *parallel challenges with mutual assistance* : a player can skip a mission, power-up his character more by completing other missions and earning bonuses, and then go back in time and replay the same mission with the new power-ups. Does it make sense? No. Is it addictive? Yes.

True Crime is like bad drugs. The missions boil down to a half-dozen or so different kinds of mini games, all of which have high production values and crappy gameplay. (The shooting game is probably the best; they manage to bring a sort of House of the Dead feel to a game where you don't have a gun controller, by providing auto-targeting and encouraging trigger-mashing...shallow but pleasing.)

Still, despite the fact that I didn't enjoy most of the missions, I couldn't stop playing. I had to see what the next story point was. I had to complete the missions so I could get the bonus upgrades.

Another element of the macro-game: at one point, the story branches, and goes one direction if you're a bad cop, and the other, longer direction if you're a good cop. This game is NOT GTA. (Somebody should have told marketing.) You are strongly encouraged to be good, something I didn't find out until I got to that point, and I had to make a decision: do I do random missions until I can get my karma back in adjustment, or do I start over and try to keep my karma high the whole time? I went with starting over. I'm a busy guy, I'll usually shelve a videogame rather than starting over, especially when I got it for $15 through the Activision company store, but this time, for some reason, I didn't mind.

This all goes to reinforce something I've believed for a while: if your macro game is good, your micro game can be a shallow, meaningless experience. Diablo proves this (don't forget to click), Animal Crossing proves this (can you take this package to my friend and pull any weeds you see on the way?), Progress Quest proves this (I'm the worst Progress Quest player in the office. I keep resetting my computer and forgetting to turn PQ back on) and now True Crime proves it. I played True Crime all the way up to the final boss before quitting.

That isn't a slam on True Crime. I frequently quit games when I get to the final boss; that last prerendered cutscene does not interest me. Hey, I never beat the final boss in Chrono Trigger, and that's one of the best games ever.

Official Retraction

On the "Do Movie Games Suck" thing, Mike Hommel pointed out that my sample was not representative. He did a little more searching, and discovered that movie games do tend to suck. And Jay Woodward pointed out that admitting defeat in the comments section wasn't enough. So here I am, admitting defeat in full view. Something I say to my wife frequently: "I admit it. I was wrong. And I'm okay with that."

I'm 100% sure

My last e-mail to Amazon support said something like, "If you're an actual human, please let me know."

The response e-mail not only didn't let me know, it was exactly the same as the e-mail I received 3 transactions previously.

You'd think they'd get a human involved once the automated system failed four times in a row, but no human yet.

Does this bother me enough to make me stop using Amazon? Not...quite.

The hits just keep coming

Manager In A Strange Land, Part...Something. I've lost count.

Those reading the article may wonder: so, did it work? Is Michael Vance the lead I hoped for? Since I actually wrote the article months ago, I can answer. And the answer is: Yes! Yes, he is! He kicks ass.

Those reading the article may also wonder, what's the first law of bad management? I should make you read Tom DeMarco's book. But I won't. The first law of bad management is: if something doesn't work, do more of it.

Something I didn't mention in the article: promoting people to their level of mediocrity might be a symptom of a company that's growing too fast, and taking on contracts that it shouldn't. Right now the industry is contracting - projects are getting cancelled, studios are getting closed - so we're probably not going to see too much of it. In a couple, few years, however, the cycle will reverse, and we'll start seeing those disaster projects again.

I'm 99% sure that Amazon's support system is automated

They almost had me fooled. I'm not sure if they passed a Turing test or I failed one. At this point, I keep clicking the "No, that didn't help," button and writing e-mails swearing and accusing them of being robots and I continue to get bland e-mails apologizing for any frustration I might be having.

Do Movie Games Suck?

Generally people agree that movie games suck. This is a topic close to my heart, of course, so I stopped and wondered. Do they actually suck statistically more than other games? If we look at various movie titles and their gamerankings scores:
Goldeneye: 95
Return of the King: 81-85
The Two Towers: 77-81
Spider-Man: 74-79
The Hulk: 70-72
Enter The Matrix: 65-72
Minority Report: 52-59
Blade 2: 52-57

Did I miss anything? I'm purposely leaving out spinoffs such as Jedi Knight, KOTOR and Trespasser...these weren't tied directly to their movies.
Looking at these, and knowing that a score of 70 on gamerankings is about the mean, I'm thinking that movie titles are more or less distributed on the bell curve as you'd expect. In short, they do not suck statistically more than games in general.

A question you might ask is, with the larger budgets that these titles tend to have, why aren't they *better* than average? And then you can pull out all the reasons people have always pulled out for why movie titles suck: shorter timeframes, constraints of the license, and so on.

You might also say: average games suck. I can't really argue with that.

Scott Miller has started blogging

I expect greatness.

No pressure, Scott.

Yet another action-packed episode of Manager In A Strange Land is up

This time with special guest star Mick West.

Post-mortem Alternative

You can get some management anecdotes from these "final hours" Gamespot articles. This Prince of Persia one is particularly interesting...it all sounds so familiar. Some key points:
- extensive prototyping. They weren't content when they finished prototyping his motion, they wanted to lock down combat as well.
- by E3, they considered what they had "Just a demo". I wish I'd seen their E3 demo...it would be interesting to know how far along they were and how far they got in those few months since E3.
- they rewrote their renderer partway through. I'm beginning to think a renderer rewrite is an essential part of a good project: if you don't rewrite your renderer, your game will look so "two years ago." The key thing is to start development with an old renderer -- buy an engine if you don't have one -- so your production isn't held up while you're waiting for the new one to come online, and make sure you can convert your assets to the new system as painlessly as possible.
I haven't played Prince of Persia yet, but I'm already pretty sure I'm going to like it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Google better not fall into the hands of Evil.

I've been having a couple problems with my blog and I asked myself, "What's the leading provider of blog services?" And I searched on Google for the word "blog". Of course, Blogger came up first. Then I remembered - Google owns Blogger. They'd be stupid not to have their service come up first. Although I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; it's quite likely that Blogger really is the leading blog provider.

This extrapolates out. Any category of product, you want your brand name to come up first on Google. If you could pay Google to make that happen...then they would be even richer.

Any category of anything.

Google is perfectly placed to enslave humanity.

I did blog about that before

I mentioned it in passing in my Notes on Zelda. So I repeat myself. So what? Jack Trout and Al Reis have made a career out of repeating themselves.

Psycho Mantis: WTF?

Jurie Horneman's blog reminded me of something.

I think the Psycho Mantis boss fight from Metal Gear Solid, where you have to use controller 2 to beat him, is the stupidest thing ever. Nor do I like it in MGS2, when you have nightmare sequences where alien voices tell you you're just a computer game. Nor did I like it in Max Payne, when you were on Valkyr and a sinister phone call told you you were just a computer game. Hell, I don't even like it when in-game characters tell you, "Use the Circle button to activate sniper mode!" or whatever.

Designers might say: "We're consciously breaking the fourth wall for ironic value or for deconstructive metafictional whatever. We're the Italo Calvino of computer games. We rock." To which I say: cut it out, you pretentious bastards.

Or maybe they would say: "It's just a computer game. Nobody really suspends their disbelief. They don't really feel like Spider-Man, or a skateboarder, or a criminal. The game's a metaphor, not a simulation. So we're just having a little laugh along with the player." And although hearing this depresses me, I can't really argue with it. Some people like games-as-games, they're all about overcoming challenges and solving puzzles and mastering strategies, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I like it too, but it's not my main thing. I see computer games as an opportunity to explore a new frontier - create new worlds - give people experiences that they can't have in real life. That's my main thing.

So I'll say this: when you break the fourth wall you fuck it up for me. Let me have my little fantasy that I really am Solid Snake, okay?

It's easy to not break the fourth wall. It takes almost no extra work. Here's all you have to do:

- resist the urge to tell "It's just a computer game" jokes. You get a laugh, sure, but at the expense of immersion.

- separate what the character knows from what the player knows. The character doesn't know about the user interface widgets, the controller, the pause menu, the targeting reticle. The character doesn't see those huge glowing cylinders that say to the player "Stand Here And Your Mission Is Complete". Characters in the game should not talk about those things. On the other hand, you *can* have text on-screen or a disembodied tutorial voice that tells you what buttons to hit and what things do. An ideal solution: when the voice of command HQ comes over your headset, instead of telling you, "Press the B button to activate sniper mode", it should say, "You're going to have to use your sniper rifle here," and on-screen text can flash, "Press B button to activate sniper mode."

Deja vu...have I blogged about this before?