Screen Tearing

The reason I even considered writing this entry was because of this. I was watching the Heavenly Sword review in Gametrailers, and I'm not sure if it was their capture equipment or the game itself, but there was an awful lot of screen tearing going on in that video! The game looked beautiful for the most part...great animation, great art, nice camera angles, but...UGH, the tearing made it look so ugly.

If you're not sure what screen tearing is, it's like whenever the image kinda...splits for a second. I think it has something to do with the refresh-rate of the image or something. I don't know what really causes it. In some games (especially PC games), there's usually an option to toggle Vsync off or on. Leaving it off usually causes a more stable framerate, but it also causes more screen tearing. I used to leave it off to preserve frames, but I just can't stand screen tearing anymore and I usually turn Vsync on now.

Inconsistent/slow Framerate

Shadow of the Colossus, I'm talking to you. Some people, oddly, do not notice drops in frames like I do. Some of my friends swear that there was no slow-down during the fight with The Fury in MGS3. I noticed, and it made the game less enjoyable.

Shadow of the Colossus's framerate problems were a little less noticeable during boss fights (and that's pretty much the whole game), because the slow-down seemed intentional, 'cause you're fighting this huge monster, and time just seems to slow down to make the battle more epic...but then when you're suddenly running around some empty space at 60 or 30 frames, and then it drops down to 10 frames the next minute...you notice the slowdown, and it just seems to drag. Lame.

And Elebits? Yeah, you were fun at first, but in the later levels when the game began to drag at 10 frames or less....yeah, not fun anymore. I was thinking about keeping that game until that happened. Once the frames dropped to unbelievably low levels, I instantly said, "I'm trading this in."

Stiff Animation

I'm talking to Oblivion now! The Elder Scrolls IV looks gorgeous in screenshots. People have held this game in high regard when it comes to graphics...I guess they only look at the screenshots. In motion, this game is ugly because the animation is so stiff and last-gen. I mean, look at how your guy walks in third person. He doesn't even have an animation for walking diagonally. It's ridiculously silly-looking. First person animation isn't that great either. Combat felt very stiff in the game because sword swings felt weak like there was no energy behind them.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic got first person melee combat right, both gameplay and animation wise...too bad the rest of the game wasn't as great.

Overuse of Ragdoll Physics

Ugh, I've seen this in way too many 360 games. Saints Row, Crackdown, Tony Hawk, and even Skate. Ragdolls are cool when your character dies an amazing death, but if your character goes ragdoll when he falls out of a car or falls off a skateboard, it is WAY overdone. When that happens to someone in real life, they don't just lose all movement in their bodies. They try to resist the fall. When you're dead, it's okay, 'cause you no long have control of your body. Seriously, that just kills any realism the game might've tried to present.

Come on...in Crackdown, you're a freakin' super hero with super strength, yet when you're hit by an explosion, you go flying with no control over your body and have to wait 30 seconds for your body to hit the ground and regain control.

Though it is entertaining to botch a trick in Tony Hawk and go FLYING across the whole map.