First post, by Kerr Avon
A trivial complaint, I know, but why is it that now, in 2019, not only do we still not have jet-packs, robot butlers, or holidays on the Moon, but in third person video games your character still keeps on moving their legs when up against a solid wall, even though they're not moving anywhere? In the majority of third person games, if you move your character up to a wall, and continue to hold down the control to move forward, then for some reason the character's legs run on the spot. Since games nowadays mostly aim to appear realistic, you'd have thought that this behaviour would be extinct by now.
I'm currently playing Control (PS4, released on Tuesday), and it's supposedly a high-production value AAA title. The environments have lots of varied and detailed contents, most of them movable and destructible, so detail obviously was a concern of the designers. So why didn't someone think "You know, since we're not writing this game for the 48k Spectrum or Commodore 64, we can probably spare enough RAM for a few lines of code to check if her (the protagonist, Jessie) way is blocked, and then if it is blocked, to stop the motion of her legs".
I mean, even back in 2001, Conker's Bad Fur Day on the 4MB Nintendo 64 stopped moving Conker's legs when he wasn't getting anywhere.
Mind you, why would a marketing division allow a game to be called 'Control' anyway? It's so generic that googling for anything to do with the name will be a tedious exercise in sorting through the countless non-related pages google will find. And you'd expect the marketing people to insist on a more memorable name.
That's my weekly complaining-because-I'm-supposed-to-be-typing-up-my-weekly-work-report-and-it's-so-boring-that-anything-else-is-a-welcome-distraction topic done. When robot butlers do become a reality, then I'll get one that can type reports.
