"Just remember, it's not like they made him a pink haired female dwarf for crying out loud..."
ALttP disagrees with you, (except for the female part but it doesn't matter because as a japanese character he tends to be on the androginous side
)
ok now seriously, I know Link's laterality is of course irrelevant, but its a really neat detail, and these are the kind of details that make the games so great, so its just not nice to see one of the most important features of Link go away, even though it makes perfect sense and we understand the reason behind it.
Now changing a game from right handed friendly to left handed friendly is not easy. The problem lies in little details that usuallly go unnoticed by everyone who just casually looks. As we left handed people have to learn the hard way, the world is made for righthanded people, so personally Ive discovered many little things that seem that have nothing to do with which hand you use but they actually do. First example, look at any pen with something written on it, if you hold it in the right hand you can read it, but if you have it on your left it ends up being flipped and thus unreadable.
That is a visual example, so its no big deal, but now lets take this, bags who have holes for earphones. If they are on the side (like the bag I use every day), the hole is in the right if you look at the front of the bag. Nothing that seems to be very important, right? no, as a left handed I grab the bag by its left strap first when Im going to put it on my back, since the hole is in the other side, if Im using my earphones and I try to put my bag in my back the cable tangles around my neck and chokes me (it happened to me twice ¬_¬ very embarrasing) and the same ackward moment happens when I take off the bag and Im using the earphones. Needless to say, the hole for the earphones is useless for me. Theres also the cable on the earphones, notice how if its the kind of earphones that share one single cable, this one always hang on the left side, it seems again irrelevant, until you find yourself in a situation when you are writting in a desk and using the headphones at the same time, since the cable is on the left, it constantly gets in the way of your writting, its just unconfortable there and you have to put it around the back of your neck to write without problems.
In games I had no problems, apparently laterality wasn't that important, but with the DS it changed. While playing Nintendogs I noticed a few things that weren't confortable. You have to walk your dog and he always does it from left to right, if I use my left hand, the hand covers the screen all the time, so I hadmissed presents dropped in the streets in some ocassions. The menus are also uncomfortable, the slide bar is on the right, so again my whole hand covers the items while Im looking at them.
This are very minor complains and theres a solution to overcome the potential problems, I certainly wont through away my Nintendogs copy in disgust, or my earphones, bag and pens for that matter, but it just shows that those details are really hard to see unless you actually test it. So Rick was right when he said that in order to make a game fully friendly for both hands its necessary to completly test it with both players in mind, otherwise something might scape the test, and what if its not a tiny irrelevant detail but a major thing? I didn't realize all the Brain Age footage Ive seen was left handed unfriendly until I grabbed my DS and notice that the game was going to end up being upside down for me, making it basically unplayable, in that case it was completly necessary for the game to have a left handed option or it wouldl just not work.
With the new controller who separates both hands, this inconvenients will be a lot more frequent, maybe it will be only minor stuff and nothing that seriously prevents left handed from controlling the game correctly, but Im still a bit concerned.
Topic: Suprised no one is flipping out about this yet ... (Read 31311 times)
