The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Get it right, for fuck’s sake

Goddamn French can’t do anything right. First they make their big wall too damn narrow, and then they make their little game too damn wide. But I guess I should start at the beginning.

There’s this weird game called Winter Voices that I’ve been cocking an eye at for a while. It’s like some kind of funky episodic adventure game, which is ordinarily the sort of thing I’d completely ignore. But it looks astoundingly pretentious, and I’m kind of a sucker for things like that. So when they pooped put a demo, I figured I’d check it out.

It opens with a long pretentious cutscene with acceptable-quality voice acting that doesn’t quite agree with the subtitles, which is always good for a laugh. There are some watercolour pictures in the background while the dude’s intoning, and they don’t always agree with the dialogue either; "there are no roads within miles of the village" the voice booms, while the picture clearly shows a damn great road running right into the centre of town. Good times.

But I’m not here to complain about the cutscenes. You think I’m an amateur? It’s an adventure game, for Pete’s sake. No, I’m here to complain about how it don’t work right. See, I finish watching the cutscene, and it fails utterly to make the game seem non-boring, but that’s fine. I press the "New Game" button. What do I see?

This is what I see:

There's something wrong with thi

Great. The box spills off the edge of the screen. Good job, QA team. Well, it’s not such a big deal, right? It doesn’t say anything I need to know.

Be nice if I could read all of th

Wait, fuck. Initiated into the what? Will encounter in the where? This isn’t going well. I should go to the options menu and set the resolution correctly.

Oh, for fuck's sa

… Oh. It’s set correctly, and the game just doesn’t care. Seriously, QA team, wonderful job. I sure would like to know what that last option is. "Extended" what? Maybe it’s "Extended UI," and it pushes the left edge off the screen too. Maybe I’d check it to find out, except that the "no" button is unreachable so I wouldn’t be able to turn it back off.

So I’d like to thank the Winter Voices team for releasing a demo of their broken game, so I could discover that it’s impossible to interact with before parting with the princely sum of two United States dollars for the privilege.

Oh, I guess it was made in France or whatever. So those guys really need to get to grips with the concept of width.


March 20th, 2011 Posted by | Games | no comments

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