Item — HN Reader

This is really interesting. I read that warning every time I save and I never noticed the delay. For some reason, it doesn't bother me like the archive utility animations. I guess it's because saving the game is a such ritualized action.

I wonder what other requirements Sony imposed on developers. Maybe they have their own video game-oriented human interface guidelines. Do you have a source for this information? I found plenty of technical documents and SDKs but nothing about interfaces.

2 comments

Kind of related, the reason there's a "Press A to play game" on xbox (and a lot of PC ports) is because Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds, and if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement.

N64 had press Start to start, years before XBox was even a thing.

And yes, many/most PC ports are of very low quality. Gone are the days of PC-first Triple-A games with forgotten features like Quick-save/load, LAN-multiplayer, Map-editor, official Mod-support. These days, these ports feel like they started porting two months before release, done by two coders. All these console-ish things like messages "don't turn off your system" (yah-right), press a key to start (yup), save-points (wtf), always-on single player (...)

The N64 in turn took the start screen thing from the Super Famicom and Famicom before it.

I assume title screens are just that: title screens, and the developers want to show off. Maybe it's a legacy of arcade machines, though.

PC games never had a title screens, until the first bad console ports around 2003 came along.

Instead of a title screen, PC games used to go to the main menu directly.

Even today, some console games like GTA V don't have a title screen, but many smaller games feature a useless title screen.

My copy of Alley Cat from 1983 disagrees with you.

Tons of PC games have had title screens going way back. Ultima IV (1985) and Commander Keen (1990) spring to mind.

What about DOOM (1992)? That had a title screen of sorts.

The other reason behind "Press A to play" is that a console can have several controllers associated with it. Pressing a button at the title lets the game know which controller the user is holding.

Wouldn't it be P1/2/3/4?

Only in the case of wired controllers.

>Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds

What is the rationale behind such a requirement?

>if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement.

Does this mean those screens/videos that get displayed after the game starts and before the menu appears are required by Microsoft to be skippable?

If that's the case then it's good UX design in my opinion. I think those things are an unacceptable waste of player's time; I hate them so much I rename the files in the game's directory so it will fail to show them.

Presumably so they can see how long it takes to handle input events, because that's a good proxy for whether the application is responsive or not. What they don't want is the game freezing. But that's harder to measure directly.

It doesn't mean they have to be skippable, just that they can't drag on too long.

Can only speak for PlayStation 2 games (I also worked on PS3 and XBox 360 but didn't handle that part). Sony's Technical Requirements were a pain. We had to build a freaking complicated State machine to handle all save scenarios (PS2 still used those external things to save games, you had to handle the user taking it out midsave, put back, etc). We had a game rejected for having a SINGLE space between PlayStation and that registered trademark symbol.