10 Things Developers Wrongly Think About Gamers

2. We Love Being Unable To See

We€™ve all been there. One minute you€™re happily playing a single player game, wandering along with your generic assault rifle, shooting the bad guys and generally saving the world when suddenly the screen goes black and you€™re in an episode of Dangermouse. Yes, it€™s the dark stage, which you have to complete without being able to see anything. For some reason game developers think gamers love them, otherwise why would they keep putting them in? It€™s just about acceptable in a horror survival game (though flickering light adds atmosphere far better), but in anything else what is the point? Is it a case of realism, because all you end up doing is navigating by the radar and how€™s that realistic? The enemy€™s AI never seems to be affected either,they€™re scoring hits on you like you were dressed in bloody fairy lights, while you have to stumble around blindly like a priest in a strip club. It€™s not just FPS either, classics such as Mario, Mega Man and even Donkey Kong have been sucked onto the dark side, and Twilight Princess had the nerve to tell you to increase the brightness on your TV before you start playing. Developers, stop doing it, it€™s lazy, it€™s cheating and no-one on the planet likes it.

 
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Richard has been playing video games since the days of the BBC Micro, (and incidentally when is Chuckie Egg going to get a reboot?) He is currently available for the post of Head of Marketing at Nintendo, seeing as no-one else seems to be doing the job. He's also a major fan of fantasy/sf books and is just waiting for his novel about an assassin who doesn't wear a hood to get picked up.