Caleb J. Ross's Blog, page 4

Video Game Preservation is Important…Duh.

Video games are great. Learning from our ancestors is great. So shouldn’t our descendants have access to the greatness of today’s video games? In this video I talk about video game preservation. Why is it important to preserve both physical video games and digital video games? How you can help preserve and archive video game […]

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Video Game Button Combos Should be More Complicated. Why Aren’t They?

I’ve been playing a lot of Marvel Spider-Man Miles Morales lately. Despite how many button combinations there are, I found that learning to control Spider-Man was actually pretty intuitive. How can it be that a game with so many button combinations isn’t incredibly hard to learn? How does Insomniac Games apply UX design principles to […]

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Platformer Video Games with a Keyboard? How Different are Gamepads and Keyboards, Really?

During a recent usability review playtest of an in-progress video game, I noticed something strange about the way the main menu registered gamepad inputs. This led me down an especially nerdy path to better understand what was going on. In this video I ask if players who use gamepads tend to hold button presses longer […]

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Is Usability the Reason You Quite That Video Game You Thought You Liked?

Games usability seeks to answer three questions about a game as the player plays it: 1) Does the player know what they have to do? 2) Is the player able to do what they need to? 3) Does the player know how to achieve their goals? Sometimes video games don’t reliably do these things, which […]

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Are Unskippable Cutscenes a Games Usability Issue?

There are probably not many facets of video games more contentious than the cut scene, the short, or sometimes very long, scripted cinematic scene that, from the player’s perspective, is either a necessary piece of emotional connective tissue keeping the player tethered to the narrative or just an unwanted speed bump along a highway otherwise […]

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Are Button Prompts in Video Games a Sign of Bad Design?

For a long time I’ve considered button prompts in video games to be an element of lazy game design. “Shouldn’t a well-designed game give players a play space so rich with affordance and feedback that players would frictionlessly and joyously discover the game mechanics and their associated inputs?” Not only did I think this, but […]

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Old Video Games Remind Me How Far We Haven’t Come

I’ve recently been playing through the original Ninja Gaiden on the NIntendo Entertainment System (NES). Why, you may ask? Maybe subscribe to the podcast Tales of the Lesser Medium, which I co-host, and pay attention to that subscription feed. Maybe you’ll have your question answered soon… As I was playing Ninja Gaiden, I was taken […]

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Can Disco Elysium: The Final Cut Teach Me to Love Keyboard Gaming?

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is a game I’ve been waiting for. Ever since Disco Elysium was released in October 2019 I’ve wanted to play it. However, my PC is terrible and, more importantly, I’m scared of keyboard controls. But then console ports were announced. Yay! But instead of diving right into a PS4 version […]

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Maquette Makes me Feel Smart (a review of Maquette from Graceful Decay and Annapurna Interactive)

I just finished playing Maquette, an incredibly unique first person puzzle game developed by Graceful Decay and freshly published by Annapurna Interactive. Is Maquette a good game? Is Maquette fun? Watch this video review for my thoughts on the game. Maquette is a first person puzzle game, which is a genre I love very much. […]

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10 Video Games like The Legend of Zelda that you Should Play

The Legend of Zelda is an amazing video game series. Zelda games are always full of puzzles, adventure, exploration, and gadgets. But what other games like The Legend of Zelda series exist? What games can you play if you like the Legend of Zelda? It turns out, there are a ton of Zelda-like games out […]

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