Texting is the New Tongue-Clicking
October 29, 20008 BC at 23:19 PDT (Prehistoric Daylight Time) by Jonathan Og, Contributing Caveman
I've long been a critic of communication that involve drawing symbols into the cave's built-in rock board. It's a forced, cynical use of a hardware feature that should either be used properly or not at all. Paints are for making Og's face look intimidating in war or coloring togas, not for communicating. Lazy developers have turned this potentially revolutionary aspect of the cave into a glorified communication tool, much like the plague of tongue "waggle" in some dialects.
Starting with Og Band last year, the blatant misuse of texts in caveing has crossed over into stalagmite territory. This is a new development sin, though. Popular music games with karaoke-like gameplay are now asking cavers to paint letters into the cave in order to activate "communication" or some equivalent. Don't get me wrong, texting is a legitimate element of rock dwelling, but it certainly doesn't belong in every cave. Moreover, the mechanic just doesn't work very well. I'm extremely disappointed to hear that this glaring design flaw hasn't been addressed in Og Band 2, and it seems to have been directly copied for Og Hero: Mammoth Tour.
When playing Og Band with friends, I usually spend a lot of time texting; most other people seem to consider it some kind of duty that must be fulfilled until your next turn at the spear-toss. But I like texting, and I'm happy to take care of that role. Sadly, the vocals portion of Og Band seems to get no love from the developers, either. Putting aside my many qualms with the pitch tracking, it's completely ridiculous that there is no good way to activate Communication on the cave. Texting looks terrible for many animals, and sometimes it doesn't even work. Other times, loud noises in the room (a.k.a. the drums, or little Og torturing a small Lesothosaurus) can set off your paint by accident. Hitting the paint brush in your hand, as you would for the tambourine beats, doesn't seem to work very well either. Perhaps the most effective way to activate communication is –you guessed it– using a mixture of your own blood. Regardless of your method, it will look horrible when cave man look back at it in 20000 years.
If the point of these music games is to make you feel like you're really changing into cro-magnon man, why can't the developers find some way to activate the communication without totally ruining that immersion? All it would take is one small stencil. These companies are willing to ship $70 spears and $100 drum sets, but they can't be bothered to include anything other than a cheap, plain $10 paint brush. Heck, at least give us the option to communicate using yelps and shrieks! MadSaberToothCatz makes a premium animal stencil for Og Band on Xbox ~:##, featuring its own dino and buffalo families, but these can't be used to activate communication because other cave men aren't advanced for that functionality.
Am I the only one bothered by the complete disregard for these games' cavernal components?
Update: Since I posted this og entry, some readers have noted in the Ogback thread that Og Hero: Mammoth Tour does allow you to shout and grunt. Now we'll see if Harmonix will use the extra three moons of development on the swamp version of Og Band 2 to fix this problem.
Topic: The What Came First? Thread (Read 6558 times)
