I recently booted up Prince of Persia only to find that the beautiful title screen art was sullied by the gigantic sentence "PRESS START BUTTON". Do we need an instruction telling us to press the button labelled "START" if we want to start?
Game developers have done everything humanly possible to make their games more like movies, and less like games. They've busted out trashy scripts, bad acting, terrible direction, inept camerawork, elaborately cheesy plot "twists", all in a vane attempt to be more 'cinematic'. I wish I could say they busted their asses, but they barely lift a finger in most cases so the results are garbage. But despite all this, they still muck up their beautiful title screens with nonsense like "PRESS START BUTTON".
The subtext of the sentence might be this: go ahead, it's ok to press the start button now. We're presently not in the middle of an ornate "cut-scene" or any long-winded exposition. Yes, we will eventually grab hold of your face and shove it down into this masterpiece of a game here, but we'll get to that, we'll get to that. Right now? It's ok to press START. You won't be missing anything. Our little title screen animation is finished. Nice while it lasted eh?
Maybe the subtext is that don't want their game to be confused with a movie, because their narrative elements and composition is so dramatic and mind-blowing! they're game is so incredible that it might be mistaken for a movie. If it weren't for the PRESS START MESSAGE plastered over the title screen, a crowd of curious movie-lovers might slowly accumulate on your couch waiting for you to pressing PLAY on the DVD player.
Isn't it ironic that the button for games is "START", while the button for movies is always "PLAY"? Think about those words for a moment. It's just further nightmarish proof, positive, that the gaming industry has its priorities horribly, horribly wrong.
Just as a sidenote: the "SELECT" button function has been redundant for decades, possibly centuries. Obviously instead of pressing a "SELECT" button, you can simply use your directional pad to move your cursor between the various choices available at the outset of a game (one or two-player, etc). Instead of pressing "START", you could simply hit one of your action buttons, A or B, to start the game. But there's something cute about naming a button after what it does. The "ESCAPE" key on a computer keyboard comes to mind, and I have this vague inkling that decades ago, in more primitive times when computer machines and code were big new untamed beasts, the key was much more meaningful than it is today.
1 comment:
Two things that remind me of the early days of video/computer games attempting to be more like movies are:
Wing Commander Three with Malcolm McDowell and that guy who played Maniac. It was this weird thing where you could fly missions and then there were movie sequences that were kind of like choose your own adventures where, by answering questions a certain way you would change the outcome. Basically the movie elements of it were lame though.
Kings Quest VII - In fact, the only cinematic thing here was a "Kings Quest" song that played if you put the cd into a cd player. IT was the lamest most god awful song in the world!
I loved playing prince of persia when i was a kid, but i'm guessing you're talking about some new version
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