User Interface and User Experience
This Game design lesson is all about the User Interface and Experience within video games. In this post I have left some notes on the positives and negatives of both User interfaces and experience. The games consoles I use in class was the PlayStation, the Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo, I played at least one game on each of them I wrote some notes below. The notes can be found below:
Sega Mega Drive
Sonic 2
User Interface
Positives:
Nice and simple easy to see how many lives and rings you have, you can clearly keep track of your score and time on each level.
Negatives:
The color of the interface often blends in with the game’s environment making it hard to see for some players.
User Experience
Positives:
Very easy to use controller, sonic can be moved easily.
Sonic can be controlled with different movements such as jump and roll.
If you select 2 player mode you can play split screen.
Negatives:
When playing with 2 players tails becomes less of a priority as who every control sonic is the main play leaving tales behind constantly making it hard to multiplayer.
Also, whoever plays tail has a less enjoyable experience as they can’t die so there is no element of challenge for the second player.
It is very confusing when trying to play with a friend as the options for multiplayer are unclear.
Super Nintendo
Super Mario Kart
User Interface
Positives:
The user interface is simple and easy to understand as you can see how many laps you have completed as well as a coin count and how long your lap time is.
You can very clearly see what position you are in during the race.
There is also a track view where you can see in real time your avatar moving round course you are racing on. This is a helpful way of keeping track of how long is left on your current lap.
Negatives:
The interface does it job well but it would have been nice If you could have the option to hide certain information on the screen as if your playing with a small television it can cram up a lot of space leaving less room for the actual gameplay.
User Experience
Positives:
Some elements of the control system are easy enough to pick up as you play.
These controls are mainly forward, left, right, but reversing is possible if necessary.
Negatives:
Although the basic are easy to pick up one thing that is hard is trying to use the drifting mechanic and this is not easy with tutorials or instructions.
PlayStation
Point Blank
User Interface
Positives:
Very easy on the eye and looks great when playing.
The colors are very complementary to each other.
Plenty of different options for game modes from the main menu.
Negatives:
The interface is in quite small text and can be hard to read especially when the screen is flashing all the time.
Lots of bright twitching lights when navigating the menus.
User Experience
Positives:
Plenty of instruction and lots of tips for playing are shown.
The gun is incredibly cool and fun to use.
Negatives:
Can be tiering when constantly trying to aim the gun to choose game modes and changing settings can be irritating.
The gun is very intricate and is hard to aim especially on a small television.
Arcade Machine
User interface
Positives:
Looks very cool and is surprisingly good at displaying pixels.
The UI makes it easy to navigate through menus and playing on the many fifteenth games Ia easy.
Negatives:
Leaving the games can be confusing at first as you need to tap a button on the Side on the arcade machine to bring up the UI menu that allows you to exit back to the game selection screens.
User Experience
Positives:
The controls are very satisfying and fun to use throughout all of the games, they all work in a similar way so once you get the hang of it your good to go.
The multiplayer‘s accessibility is very easy as there is simply two sets of joysticks and buttons to use. There are plenty of multiplayer games on the machine so there is planets to experience.
Negatives:
When playing multiplayer on the arcade machine it can be hard to play as there is not much room between you and your playing partner.
Because the controls are so close together this becomes a problem as you can easily get in the way of you opponents. Also the screen of the arcade is small so you often try to lean closer and start blocking your partners view.
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