 I need more icons
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Sep. 19th, 2010 @ 11:12 am 
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So, I got a new game yesterday: Gran Turismo 5: Prologue.
My very first impression of the game is currently being borne out further as I let it idle to write this post. To wit: This game is really really pretty.
As it's idling, I'm now getting a slideshow of shots of cars in different cities where there are tracks - slow pans around Bonn, right now, just being very pretty.
It is also, however, a lot of fun.
I like racing games. In the real world I think car racing is ecologically unsupportable and generally dangerous and pointless; I don't think car races are, as a rule, particularly enjoyable to watch.
But they're a lot of fun to do - and if I do it on a video game, I don't have to deal with the repercussions of my inevitable crashes.
Because I do crash, and also, my racing style is slightly influenced by childhood games of MarioKart. If you're trying to overtake an opponent near a tricky corner, it's a totally viable strategy in MarioKart and many racing games to take the corner at a slightly unsafe speed, and keep yourself from going too wide by essentially making a bank shot off your opponent, hitting them broadside, using that to give yourself some lateral force, and thereby screw up their corner while improving your own.
In the real world that leaves a mark.
Anyway, Gran Turismo specifically is awesome because it's all about modelling real-world driving physics. It adds a whole new level of fascinating challenge to the game. For a change, in a racing game the brake button doesn't exist in a world of "Brakes? SIF!" Take a corner too fast and you're going to lose, and lose badly - once your car spins out into the sand wash outside the corner, that's it, you're done.
Brake in the corner when you start to lose it? Oh hell no, son, that's death on locked wheels. Drive like it's reality - you brake before you hit the corner, and accelerate out of the corner.
For the first time, I'm playing a racing game where coming fourth sometimes feels like an awesome achievement. Because negotiating the track is a challenge in itself, and finding the moments to overtake the opposition can be a strategic challenge.
Meanwhile, I noticed, with approving delight, something very cool.
Certain in-game information is presented while youre racing that you need to process quickly and without taking time away from paying attention to your driving. For example, there's an optional driving line that shows you the optimal line to be taking along the track - which turns red at the corners if you're going too fast to hold the line at all. And at checkpoints, you get your time split vs the leader, if you're not in first, or second place if you are. If you're behind, that comes up red. The colour-marking is important because it's very easy to miss the +/- if you're just catching that with your peripheral vision.
If you're driving right, or coming first, you might expect - as is traditional - that it will all come up in green.
Not in GT5.
The information is presented to you in blue.
I have come to notice these things due to having a close friend who's red/green colourblind. Periodically, there are things where he has trouble parsing information presented with a red/green spectrum split. To the extent that once, he had to ask me to come and read a graphical breakdown of some data for him, because he couldn't see the differences, at all.
(Sadly, I think most people don't really think about disabilities until they've had some kind of reasonably close experience with them. I know I never thought about red/green colour-marking until I spent so much time around my colourblind friend.)
Accordingly, I think that it's just very cool to have a game that presents this stuff, signals information you want to be processing without thinking about it, by marking it with a vivid red and a clear, cool blue.
Sure it won't work for someone who's completely colourblind, but a) that's very very rare and b) at that point, no colour distinctions will, so... not a lot you can do, really.
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