Dead Rising wasn't unreadable, all you had to do was stick your eye on your TV. Luckily for me, I've upgraded to 1080p. | |
I've noticed this on many titles being released, most recently in the CoD5 beta for the 360. While not completely unreadable, it strains your eyes to try and read what things say on the menu. | |
Thank god I wasn't the only person to be perplexed with the text in Dead Rising. It was damn near undecipherable at times. At least the game rocked. | |
I guess I have good eyes, I never had trouble with Dead Rising on my old TV :| | |
I downloaded this demo. My housemate and I have been waiting for Banjo-Kazooie for almost a year now, it's his most loved game series ever - trust me when I say that we turned the air blue. If they DON'T patch it, there's gonna be problems. | |
I ran into similar problems in Condemned Two. I didn't know it was so wide spread. | |
I know it's going to make me rather unpopular, but as far as I'm concerned this is like my dad whining because he couldn't play cassette tapes in his 8-track back in the 80s. Signal goes digital in 2009 in the US, and hi-def TVs keep falling in price. Technology has evolved yet again, and that's what it's supposed to do. Time to get yourself one of them newfangled flat Zeniths, grandpas. | |
Or you play everything on a nice computer monitor like me. | |
See, this is why I quit Dead Rising after one hour, I had no fucking idea what to do, where to go, or what anybody was saying. Thankfully it was my friends game and I didn't waste money on it, but I could still tell that I would have liked it if the text (which was a big part of the game) was two or three sizes bigger. I mean come on, what's so friggin hard about making making the text bigger? Hell, even a patch later on if it slips by would be alright, but I remember playing my old SNES games on a 8-inch TV and being able to read it just fine. You would think that the text would get bigger with the TV, not shrink. | |
Those newfangled flat Zeniths are still pretty damn expensive when you have a perfectly good SD television. It's different to not being able to use cassette tapes in an 8-track as this is a problem which should be fixed in development, not a question of a different media. | |
The problem is, they're citing a lack of time, so we have to go spend $500 at least on a new TV? I'm gonna claim ignorance of everything in order to make an invalid point, but isn't it pretty much a case of go into the code and where it says 'font size=8' change 8 to 12 or 16? Then for testing, find the longest line of text in the game, make sure it fits, and ship it. Honestly, when there's option screens filled with tiny details you can flip on and off, why not text size? No, its never been an option in older games, because older games had to make the text readable due to big clunky pixels. I think its a case of better technology not always advancing things. I mean, with the HD mulitchannel sound, they could have probably had all the radio stations in GTA4 play at once! That would have been cool right? look what my magic game box can do! /pointless and undefendable arguments over NOTE: Moaning because I don't have great vision, even with glasses, and had to sit like 4 feet from my mates large HD tv to read the text in GTA4 and Dead Rising. | |
I can't believe that developers are still making mistakes like this in this generation. I really did think that everyone would have learnt from Dead Rising. Apparently not. Surely this is a big problem for a game like Banjo, where a good portion of their audience are gonna be kids playing on little TVs? | |
I'm playing the Banjo demo over VGA and even *I* can't read some of this text. I shouldn't have to squint at a computer monitor just to make out whether a button icon says "LS" (Left Stick) or "RS" (Right Stick). | |
Truth be told, I sometimes have trouble with Fallout 3 and some Arcade titles and I do have a 1080i HDTV set... just one that's 26" instead of a wall-consuming jumbotron. Studios really need to check these UI elements on a variety of displays to make sure they work comfortably on what consumers actually own, or they'll keep ending up with these embarassing blunders. -- Steve | |
Hey look at that, Rare not giving a shit anymore. What a surprise. Wait not a surprise at all, what's the other word...oh yes, eventuality. | |
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Rare: No Fix For Banjo-Kazooie SD Text Issues
Readable text is apparently an HD-only feature in Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
When you release an adventure game that relies entirely on text to convey each and every drop of story and character interaction, you would think that priority number one would be to make sure that text is legible for all players. Unfortunately for the developers at Rare, this seems to have been a slight oversight. Those without HD televisions who downloaded the recently released demo for their upcoming title, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, were surprised to see that the on-screen text had been rendered microscopic.
This isn't the first time an Xbox 360 title has been deemed illegible as early in the console's cycle, Capcom released the zombie action game Dead Rising, in which the game was largely unplayable on standard definition televisions due to indecipherable text. Capcom never did issue a fix of any sort for this problem and according to Rare community manager, George Kelion, neither will they.
"Please don't kill me," pleaded Kelion, posting on the NeoGAF forums. According to Kellion, the text issue is one that will not be fixed in time for the retail release, set for November 11, citing a lack of time, resources and money to cure.
One of the biggest questions concerning this issue, particularly one in such a high profile, first-party title, is how does something so painfully obvious to so many players make it through the certification process? Reporting on the issue, Joystiq points out that in a recent Official Xbox Magazine UK feature, all Xbox Live Arcade titles must be fully playable (readable text included) on a standard definition television as small as 14". It appears, as strange as it may be, that the same standards of quality do not apply to other 360 titles.
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