• Dark
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  • From: the Ivory tower
  • Registered: 2007-02-16
  • Posts: 103

Re: Mainstream Games for Low-Vision: Examples, Tips and Hacks (long)

Hi Barry, thanks for the link, for one thing it's nice to know somebody else is vaguely reading this thread (I'm hoping some of my ramblings are of some use to other people). the Vib ribbon soundtrack is certainly random and good fun in a crazy, J-pop way. I rather like Galbadia Hotel in general, despite their lags in page loading times, however, checking what they've got in the huge volume of stuff is quite a task, I certainly don't believe I've checked under the V index for example, so it'ss good when people point out sound track locations.

I also believe they have quite a few Mk soundtracks, I'll have to check.

Well Velu, I didn't really want to confuse this thread by using multiple names for the same person, (you seem to have slightly more online aliases than I do), however, now things are clear for any possible lirkers, I'll use Velu if that's okay. hmmm talking about "lirkers" gives me very odd Babylon 5 related thoughts, especially talking about lirkers being a good thing ;D.

Anyway, as to games, I think Streetfighter is probably better played than explained. Obviously, having very much grown up with the game, I'm slightly biased, but I think the system is fairly intuitive. It's also worth noting, that the game speed (especially in some of the early versions) is generally quite a bit slower than Mk, making time for strategical thought, hence the need for a speed upgrade (and depending upon how you vary the speed, things in turbo can get very! fast).

Also,the characters have relatively more air time in Sf than in mk, so variable attack hites play quite a factor, especially sinse only a few attacks in the game may be ducked.

I think my Sf playing might have actually influenced my Mk char preference, sinse it's possible with Scorpian, Rayden and Lu-kang to catch your opponent mid-air after a jump kick with certain attacks. Obviously with Scorpion's spear, this can be extremely damaging (it's one of the ways I found to beat Kintaro in Mk2).

though of course, nobody can defeat the queen  of Combos Kitana (the fan lift is just wrong!).

As to the Mk audio, Shang-tsung's voice is certainly fun. We always had theories on which character's Shang-tsung liked based on how he pronounced each name (we always assumed that Tsung was the announcer).

we always thought for example he had a bit of a thing for Sonia, but really disliked Johny cage.

For Mk voices though, i really like shao karn in both Mk2 and 3, particularly when you fight him and he booms taunts at you!

the snes version of Mk2 had a quite entertaining sequence you could watch by holding the right buttons at start up, featuring Shao-karn taunting you, and Kintaro stomping on the Midway logo and posing.

I'd certainly go for trying One mussed fall (I do like a good beat em up), though I'd probably better sort out some alternative controls first, as I believe learning to do those sorts of motions on a keyboard could be difficult for me.

Even in the Turrican remakes, I find myself getting quite severe wrist ache from trying to carry out all those jumps on the arrow keys. Stil, if I can track down the write attachment for my X arcade stick that shouldn't be too much trouble.

As regards vision, your probably right about my Fuv and resolution issues. I also believe you have much better spacial coordination than I do (particularly in 3D environments), whereas I am possibly more comfortable with colour variations, ----- though as I've said, luminance and good contrast also plays a large part in what i do as well. I'm certainly not into light brown backgrounds (I think desert stages are second only to ice and sky in my most hated environments list),  but I don't mind a good deep dark brown, such as the Wily castle in several MM games.

I think though, trying to make any observations related to gaming ability and vision might be difficult, sinse there are many other factors such as previous experience to be taken into account.

Mega man 7 does have the advantage of larger chars, just like the X series, and sinse it's a classic game and thus has a lighter atmosphere, the graphics are in consequence usually brighter as well, though part of thise might have simply been that it was released after X 1, so the hardware had improved to give better quality graphics (as I said, the graphics in X2 do have a greater degree of contrast I believe). Many enemies also make sounds, which helps.

A lot of lighting changes were used in the game though, in particularly a most annoying red tint to everything in water sections, while this wasn't too bad for ledges, distinguishing spikes, and my char was something I found rather hard. the only way I could get through those sections involved keeping the Mega buster charged as much as poss so Mega man would be flashing (there was far more made of this effect than in previous games, I found), and quite a bit of persistance with learning spike positions (think Rick Dangerous here).

In general, I find the gameplay in the later Mm games tends to be fairly puzle orientated, things like negotiating ledges with rising and falling water-currents and the Infamous Mega man vanishing block puzles. While it's a style I enjoy, I do find it slightly harder than in the X games, particularly in Mm8 and Mega man & bass (probably the two Mm games I've done worst in).

Also, Mega man 7 is fairly heavy on the hidden items, and even features a shop, but faqs can take care of both issues, especially sinse all the shop items can be found hidden throughout the game.

I also do like some of Mm7's music, in particular a remix of the ghools -n- ghosts theme used for Shade man's stage, given the preferences on your mm music page Velu, you might also enjoy the Guts man remix at one point.

X2 shouldn't provide too many difficulties, though there is one boss who's rather annoying for his brown desert background, however he's also very noisey with his attacks and quite predictable, so while he took me a litle practice I can now usually do him in without much trouble.

It's rather odd you mention the Jim Dale version of Harry Potter. Here in England it's read by Steven Fry, a fairly wellknown English actor, and imho he does one of the best audio book readings I've ever! heard! ever! you can just about tell every single character by the variation in his voice.

I also admit, sinse a lot of Hp is written with very normal English informal language such as "loo" , I think it'd sound very odd to me in Us english. I remember being quite impressed with Hp partly because it was the first book I knew that ever used the insult "Git" which my friends and I had been using for years. Also, on a personal note, I'm highly amused by the hole "Sorcerer's stone" business. By the same logic, does that mean I'm taking a Phd in Sorcery? if so, cool!

But to get on to the Sarah game, you do indeed have to activate the block graphics. This can be done in the options menue, just press F1 in game and scroll down to options. It'd also be worth checking the sound settings. Headphones are Imho essential in such a game (I've tried using my speakers but it just doesn't work!). Depending upon how good your headphones are, you'll want either the sterrio or virtual 3D setting. I also find many of the game keys useful, and actually reread the manual several times to get to grips with them. In particular, I recommend making frequent use of the Shift D command, which gives you a list of all the objects around you from front left to back left in a circle, along with their audio position.

I will admit, in terms of layout, Sarah is certainly one of the harder games produced with the Gma engine, imho Shades of doom is much easier to navigate. Also, shades has far fewer enemy sounds to learn.

as to the in game audio, as I said, I'm very used to Steven Fry's fantastic reading, so anything after that will be a miner let down, ----- the acting in the films was a let down in that respect!

However, as I said in E-mail, I think a lot of the acting trouble comes from the fact that modified synths are used for most of the char's voices (in the beta released a year ago, even Sarah herself was a synth), I don't know if this is because Phil Vlasak couldn't find enough english voice actors (or english sounding voice actors anyway), but I do think some of the synths are extremely dodgy, in particular prof bins, Dobby, and nearly headless knick.

Phil has said he'll be revising the game in July after Deathly hallows, and I've already offered my voice acting services, so hopefully this situation will improve.

In general, I really like the Sarah game, sinse some of the puzles are extremely nice, and the amount of Hp detail in there is most extensive. Also, as a huge fan of exploration in games, that sort of style appeals to me, even if I would prefer a more deffinite way of dealing with the various enemies than just scaring them off or stunning them.

talking of my voice, I've done a podcast about the Fighting fantasy project site. As this is something already talked about in this thread, perhaps the link might be helpful. you can find it on the Blind Cooltech website at: http://www.blindcooltech.com/

To go back to Sarah for a second, the music is actually from the 1980's film Labyrinth, starring David Bowey, which is probably the best film I know about goblins, and features some really good music! It also interestingly enough had a main char called Sarah.

Now there's a soundtrack I'd like to get my hands on!

I've seen tetris worlds for the Gba Velu, but reading reviews of the game on Gamefaqs, it did seem the backgrounds sounded rather too complex to warrant me buying it. However, the various game modes did sound fun.

Being as it was very much that era, I've played quite a few tetris Variations, including the battle type games you describe. One of my favourites in that style is Super puzle fighter on the Ps, which features crazy chars from streetfighter and Capcom's other beat em up series, Darkstalkers, and lots of very odd Japanese voice sampling, ---- not to mention some extremely strange things done to the usual Sf and dark stalkers music.

There's apparently a Gba version, but I've yet to track it down.

Interestingly enough, Mk6 Aka Mk deception apparently featured a Mortal Kombat version of the game, if I ever decide to brave the 3D Adventure mode and risk getting a game that is only half-playable for me, I might well give it a try.

On the snes, my favourite of that style of game is Tetris Attack, also known as paneled upon. rows of Coloured tyles come from the bottom, and instead of controling their movement, you move a highlighter box and switch them around to get rid of them. This does several interesting things to the gameplay, but also makes it easier from the Fuv perspective, sinse you have access to all the blocks on screen (not just the falling ones), can correct just about any mistake, and only really have to look at what's around the box. The box is also large and thick, and so quite visible I found. the game also features loads of different game play options, a battle mode as you describe, an endless rack up score mode, a level up mode where you progress through different stages with music and characters to eventually take on bouser (yes! it's Mario themed). there's even a puzle mode, which requires you to get rid of a certain number of blocks in a certain number of moves (this wouldn't be possible with original tetris, but the Tetris attack formular is extremely different).

For more info please see: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/data/588787.html

Finally, at risk of doing something nasty to the fabric of spacetime with this huge mass of postage, on Saturday I went to have another look at my friend's Wii. this is a slightly strange thing to say, sinse in the mild English slang I was talking about earlier "Wee" can mean one of the things you use toilets for (the thing blokes tend to do standing up).

anyway, nope, the control pad idea for the mouse was actually worse, sinse it didn't mean the pad, but the analogue stick, which was even harder to use for me than the remote (owing partly to the lack of force feedback).

However, I found it is actually possible, once you've got onto a particular channel, to switch using the L and R buttons on the joypad. However, firstly getting any of the channels working is a pest, sinse it requires the main menue and mouse, and secondly, opening each channel only brings up the channel's title screen (such as the info screen for the emulated game), and it's stil necessary to click the "Start" button on screen with the mouse.

Why nintendo can't make it possible to just presss "Start" on the joypad for both of these things is beyond me! Hopefully though, with the wii's os being constantly updated, this is something that will change. My friend (actually the girlfriend of my friend who owns the wii), suggested I write to nintendo, sinse the change in question would be both comparatively small, and something they might themselves wish to do in the future. given some rather unpleasant previous experiences with contacting game companies over accessibility matters, and also given some of the basic tennits of capitalism I'm slightly sceptical of how worth while this would be, good business and good ethical behaviour on the part of a company are most often not the same thing it seems.
As I said, I'm fairly certain none of the Wii original titles will be accessible, but I'm highly interested in it for emulation purposes.

sorry about the absense, my uni network has been going up and down like a yo yo for the past few days, I've also had a fair bit of work to do as well. As I'm heading home from Uni until next Wednesday, I won't be able to reply to this thread ffor a while. But stil, I deffinately think I've already said more than enough here!

Last edited by Dark (2007-03-30 11:02:06)

  • From: Finland
  • Registered: 2007-02-01
  • Posts: 42

Re: Mainstream Games for Low-Vision: Examples, Tips and Hacks (long)

Hi Dark,
Yes, I'm glad to get input by other people, too, it would be great if someone could do an academic study of the VI gaming community at some point. Our integrated information systems and computer science department has actually sum game research as well, mostly by a guy named Tony Manninen, but so far nothing about accessibility. Accessibility was not even mentioned in the games and virtual environments course I took. ALthough that was the course in which I could, as a play tester, influence accessibility directly, as I mentioned near the beginning of this gigantic thread.

This time my excuses for not replying earlier are going to be especially unconvincing, <smile>. I spend a large part of the Easter holiday learning to program the Japanese scripting language Ruby as a user of both Perl and Java. THe only way in which that's on topic is that we've talked about philosophy and object-oriented programming off-list and it spilss in here.

And the other main reason is that I simply did not notice the new page in this thread and having missed the initial notification mail, thought you had not replied at all. that might be surprising to sighted folks. but with a screen reader you read with speech line by line and so if you don't put the screen readder's virtual focus on the list of page numbers, it is quite easy not to notice that a thread spans multiple pages. SO in the name of accessibility, if the admin could configure the forum to show such stuff more explicitly, that would rock.

About aliases well I don't use that many names. It's just that my full name is Veli-Pekka Tätilä, which is shortened to vtatila in Unix and thus I use that handle in a number of places. yet most people call me Vellu. All three are derived from the same name.

I'll try Street Fighter once I get round to that, but am going to say right away that there will probably never be a fighting game like MK1 or MK2 is to me. So many memories, childhood nostalgia and other things are attached to the game that it is bettter than it would be when rated purely rationally. The same thing with the original Star Wars.

Well this gets to game audio more than accessibility, but let me continue with the MK soundscape a bit. I don't think Shang-tsung is the announcer, though. The only thing that char speaks when fighting in the PC version is some old and feeble expression of pain which does not sound at all like the same guy whose doing the announcements. Agreed Shao Kahn is cool in MK2 and suits that games more gloomy atmosphere very well. But I think that in MK1 the rather relaxed tone of the announcer and the fact that at the end of the round you get a sound of only a handful of people clapping make the atmosphere quite different. Mind you I cannot see most of the violence at least to the degree of finding it any more gory than any other game out there. The only thing Shang-tsung actually says with attitude is FInnish him/her in MK1.

I didn't know about that MK2 sequence. But my cousin knew the Megadrive blod code and I also heard that you get to play pong if you have 250 wins in a row in MK2. Call me geeky, I decided to test that one Christmas as a kid but never got round to the final wins, I think I did about 100 in the multiplayer game and then gave up bored.

HMm X-arcade stick which port does it plug into? i.e. is it the old game port that has been around since the original IBM PC and used to Come bundled with most sound cards? Or USB? At any rate, it might be hard to get the stick working one must fall if it is USB or anything else fancy. DOS was not known for extensive hardware support. But you might be able to reconfigure the stikc in software to send out keypresses, my Gravis X-Terminator let's me do that and thus include joystick support for any arbitrary game. WHIch reminds me, I wonder if the USB or bluetooth based console game controllres have Windows drivers?

About OMF still, I think the controls are abou the simplest I've seen, though. Only one kick and one punch button with walking away meaning blocking. Most moves require only two or three direction key presses and the use of either the punch or kick buttons. Here are the special moves for Jaguar, for example:
d f punch
d b punch
in air hold down arrow, and press kick while above opponent.
Could not get much easier than that, I think. Still of course fatalities, er I mean scrap and destruction moves are more involved but optional.

I'm not sure about 3D environments and sight., it might very well be we move equally well in the real world. It might be that my FOV is better suited to 3D games, though, or that I'm better in them Simply because I've played them so much. Still, I've found that especially recently I've done very poorly. Alien VS PRedator is one of the hardest FPS games I can sort of play, only with the Marine and flares or With the special predator sight modes. Still the last time I played it I got fragged most of the time before I had even seen the enemy, which just feels plain unfair. I've always hated accurate, long-distance sniping, especially with the chain gun or its equivalent, for more or less obvious reasons. In some other games, some BOnuses help like night vision Goggles.

One thing I've been speculating is how well we could approximate our sight on the computer. That is deriving based on real world test data how sensitive the sight is to luminance, hue and saturation as well as what kind of resolution and field of vision it is. And then driving some sort of filter which zooms in, blurs and degrades the hue, sat and luminance values to approximate the effect. One could easily write an image processing plug, though
getting any acurate test data and whether that reflects the real world is a totally different story.

I wonder if it would be possible to mod a 3D game such that the enemy emits some noise when he or she is visible on screen. I do have a little Experience hacking Duke 3D con FIles but never found the language reference and it seems to me reacting to other players is something the CON system makes especially hard.

Another possibility might be DOom and port specific scripting languages such as Fraggle Script for Doom LEgacy. That's something whose reference manual I've read, too, originally trying to implement a shared lives system for co-op play. This eliminates the common problem that all levels are beatable unless monsters respawn, as you can just take more and more lives and win the game with brute force tactics. Sadly many modern FPS games have dropped Co-op play.

You said:
Mega man 7 does have the advantage of larger chars.
Err the disadvantage in my case. But I'm glad it helps you to play the game. Another console gamer abroad has been recommending MM7 music, so I guess I should finally down the SPC.

You mentioned enemies making sounds. I have not played this for ages but I wonder if you would like the PC platformer and shooting game Abuse. The movement is pretty unique you walk and jump with the keyboard but use the mouse to aim and shoot. I just recalled that game had one of the most impressive ambient sounds of its time for the PC, but mind you this was mid 90s, I think. ANother cool feature is that the Ai is written in LIsp that is an interpreted language so the game can be modified without having to use special development tools for the job. The ability to modify the games is one aspect of PC gaming I like. On the down side, LISp is one of the most annoying languages with a speech synth which reads parens as left paren and right paren. Typical expressions look like:

(T (CONS (CAR x) (a (CDR x) y)))

Another genre of games I should ask about is if you have played the Scortched Earth type, simluating throwing objects given an angle and velocity plus gravity and wind, of course. Tank Wars is a very fun and pretty accessible early 90s take of the concept on the PC. I just played it the other they with that sighted gaming friend of mine, and it was far better than I recalled. I'm also a fan of the WOrms series as I've said owning the original and Armageddon on the PC. Do you have it for the SNES? I've hit the ROM with Google a number of timesthough for that game I far prefer the real rodent to the SNES 8-way pad.

I've never been that fond of the puzzles myself, in MM games or other platformers. While it is great fun once you do master a demanding sequence of jumps and  moves, Prince of Persia 2 went over the top in that regard. Think level 8.

About HP and the Sarah game., Steven Fry is quite good, too. and I've heard JKR is a fan, though I enjoy Jim Dale even more myself. Actually not being a native English Speaker I've found later on that some of the expressions I took to be general English were actually UK specific. Git is one such word which I learned in the context of HP, I mean I had to use my electronic dictionary to look it up. I also read even Englis books with this highly intelligible US English voice, so I guess I'm already spoiled, <grin>. The choice of dialect is arbitrary for me to begin with and I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.

Which reminds me, I find self-voicing games that let you pick a SAPi speech synth far preferrable to most sampled prompts. The speech synth generated prompts can be more dynamic, as they are just Strings to be spoken, and I can understand such voices many times as fast as I can English spoken by real people. The major down side is that the experience depends on your hardware or software, kind of like with MIDi files, and is never as natural as human voices would be. Apart from the synty humans you mentioned in the HP game, that's pretty bad I think. I'm glad if you're able to contribute voice acting into the Sarrah game. I wonder if a PC style force feedback stick would be a useful way to indicate collisions in audio 3D games? I'm sure direct input provides a uniform interface to such devices. At least it provides a standard for axes, x y, z u and v as well as up to 32 buttons, which are controller specific.

About HP, I've also seen an interactive fiction game taking place in Hogwarts, though it is somewhat uncanonical in that it takes place between GoF and OotP. Still it was a pretty nice game largely due to the HP references, i.e. the same halo effect as with decent fanfic. Have you played that game? I think you can find it here:

Umm seems the inet connection is down at the moment, I'm writing this off-line in a ttext editor. Well, if you find the game interesting, I'll post a link the next time.

Speaking of blind only 3D games, I think I should give Shades of Doom a try as I'm a Doom fan, err at least a fan of the first two games. THe 3rd is pretty much unplayable to me and the movie is total bull to begin with. It does not even take place in hell, nough said. As a active use of my remaining sight when navigating physical environments, though I also use a white stick, I find the game play of Audio QUake extremely complex and demanding, even with stereo headphones and after having digested the manual. Is shades of Doom equally hard? Ironically There's a big difference between Doom and Quake as far as accessibility is concerned.

Hmm Mortal Kombat version of Tetris, that sounds bizarre. How does it work, is that kind of like Battle Chess? i.e. doing rows has the effect of your char randomly beating the other player and you can win by doing enough damage. Hmm not that much modelled after battle chess at all, if this is how such a concept works.

ANd now to the Wii. I've managed to give it a try here, too, so I can Comment on it much more:
Ah a sharp observation about the inability to press start. I had sighted people use the menu GUI so I cannot comment on that but it sounds bad by your description. LIke you said this change would only have positive usability effects I'd say and should be easy to add as part of some larger software update. BUt then again, it also sems like a small touch to the average sighted user, so chances are it might be too low priority to ever make it.

I wonder if you can code plug-ins for the Wii, GUI plug-ins in particular. I recall reading that Nintendo offered a softeware development kit for the amateur gamers comparatively cheap. Writing a screen reader with public domain speech synthesis would be infinitely cool. THough chances are they don't let you hook events in the main Wii frontend. I was thinking of the same thing for our Topfield digital TV box, as it also has a software development kit. IT had plenty of programming interfaces but no chance of writing a screen reader. Someone had ported DOom for that TV set, though, and my mobile phone runs MAME so here we are,

About the controlers I'm glad to report that I like both far more in terms of ergonomy than I've liked any previous console controller, as a diehard  PC gamer and keyboard user:
The analog stick is more sturdy and slightly larger than say on the N64 making it easier to operate. WHile not quite like a true joystick yet, I think that's an improvement especially as the controller fits in one hand very well.

And then there's the Wii remote, which looks like a remote controller with a D-pad on the top and a few buttons. Again that is a positive surprise, too. The main buttons are easy to reach, and the various directions on the 8-way pad are more clearly indicated than on most such controllers. This means you can find your way around by touch almost like you can with the arrow keys, though using the thumb is still the method of control and something I still have not properly gotten used to.

But the most revolutionary thing about the Wii is of course its motion sensing. although I'm not into real sports in general and thought the premise a bit dull, actually physically moving to control a game is very intuitive and fun. It has an unreal sense of not being a game at all, but I don't really mind. In Wii sports the only title I can play is bowling, though, and even so it requires that a sighted person tells me if I should move left or right using the 8-way pad to hit the remaining pins(?). I've tried the real thing a few times, and there's something very convincing in the experience. Now I'm waiting for Nintendo to come up with an anti-grav device for the controller, to emulate mass and force better, <smile>. I'm kidding, of course. i've tried boxing, too, though based on audio feedbak it did not go too well.

In other sports, one very nice thing abou the Wii is that it inspires people to play who normally would not. My parents got into the Tennis game big time, as they like the real thing, even though neither is exactly an active player of console or computer games. We've already named such tournaments Wiimbledon. I quickly tried out the new Zelda game, too, and the good thing is that the main char LInk that is, is highly visible and the environment is bright. Still it is about as bad as Mario 64, which is too bad.

IT appears driving games utilize the Wii remote control, too, and in a very intuitive fashion. I found out on my own that flipping the controller on the x and z axis, if it points initially towards the telly, that is turning it like you would a steering wheel with the buttons facing you, worked just as I expected. AS I've learned to drive using the keyboard, because most wheels mean an inaccessibly big distance to the screen, one thing I had to got used to wass to manually center the wheel after turning.

ONe fairly innovative feature of the Wii I happen to like is the pretty LoFi loudspeaker built into the remote controller. The concept sounds simple and it is but it is used to great effect. When it is your turn in Wii sports, for example, your controller will emit a nice bleep to let you know. That bleep is easy to distinguish from the rest of the audio and will always follow you. Similarly, say hitting the ball in Tennis produces a sound as well. It actually produces two sounds. One in the main audio system and another variant from your controller. This heightens the immersion for me especially when the controller can rumble as well. Too bad the rumble effect is pretty weak even compared to the N64. Well, you cannot have everything.
Sadly, the use of the Wii remote means that I have to be very far away from the screen and am almost logically equivalent to a totally blind gamer at such distances. I'd need an absolutely huge screen and would have a very limited field of vision, then. Another point is that the Wii motion sensor does not work very well at closeup and you would risk hitting the telly, too.

One type of game I' would very much like to see for the Wii would be sword fighting. Any such games out there? As we've discussed off-list, it should be Star Wars related, simply because most light sabers are very much more visible than real swords in  movies.

The Wii is not a very good name here in Finland, either. The problem is that as virtually no native Finnish words have the w sound, most people don't make much of a difference between v and w. It is something one has to consciously pay attention to and even so is not very easy. This is a problem in pronouncing English, too. So it is pronounced like Vii almost like how I say the Unix text editor in Finnish with a long i, though that's Vi for visual editor.

I would still like to support Nintendo and it is one of the things for which I have an irrationally big appeal: kind of like the good old Star Wars. That is 85 percent of my console gaming experience and 95 percent of the significant once have been on Nintendo consoles. The 8-bit NES was the first console I saw and WIi is the most recent one. Most of the games I can play are Nintendo or Megadrive games with very few such titles for the Play Station. Nintendo also has Megaman games. And on the list goes . I've never owned a Nintendo console myself, though, but my parents are considering getting one for the whole family, doubling as a WWW browser in the living room. The Opera browser is available for the Wii for free.

Wii are the winners.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä

vtatila's Website

  • Dark
  • Advanced member
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  • From: the Ivory tower
  • Registered: 2007-02-16
  • Posts: 103

Re: Mainstream Games for Low-Vision: Examples, Tips and Hacks (long)

Oncemore appologies for the long absense, i've been busy. I'm afraid however sinse it finally! looks like I have a flat and can move out of colidge, I'll be staying here for the next week so replies and such should be fine, then on next Wednesday I'll be perminantly moving in over there and sorting out a broardband connection. Hopefully this shouldwork with minimum amounts of trouble, but if i vanish around next Wednesday you'll know why, stil, we might be able to extend this thread a litle more before then.

As a fairly frequent poster on Web forums, and as I abuse my tab key mercilessly on pages I know the layout of, i've never personally found the multiple pages thing in threads an issue, but as with everything else, I suppose brousing the web can be done in a variety of ways.

I've never tried audio quake, mostly owing to the fact that you need a fully working copy of quake first, which is something I don't have. I'm reliably informed though, that Shades is much easier, mostly because even though the sound scape and viewpoint are most deffinately fps style, there are no ramps, or 3D alterations in terrain other than elevators and holes. In fact, one person I know described shades as a top down 2D game with 3D sterrio targiting. I'm not sure if original doom is like this though.

As regards the wii, a screen reader for it would be good. I also tried the bowling game, and even though my friend does! have an extremely large Tv, I stil found the necessary distance to have the sensor function was more than my vision could handle as well. the bowling game was entertaining, though personally I like a litle more weight and mass behind my ball in the real thing, so Nintendo had better get working on their quantom physics so that controls can vary their weight and mass ---- smile!

Even if I could get around the menues business though, I stil probably wouldn't buy Wii sports myself, sinse in my view something that is only possible with on going sited assistance isn't completely accessible. If nintendo update their Os though, I'll certainly get a Wii, ----- assuming you don't come up with a Wii screen reader first Velu, that would be extremely cool! I also liked the analogue stick slightly more than other examples I've seen, but for me, nothing beets a good old fashioned arcade joystick, ----- you already know my thoughts on the hole thumb based control system issue.

there has actually been a motion sensing sword fighting arcade game, called surugi. As you can guess from the name, it involved Samurai, and a motion sensative sword as control. while I enjoyed watching my brother play the game, it was entirely inaccessible, partly because of the contrast on the enemies, ---- but mostly because of the five foot distance you had to stand away from the screen. Hopefully, a game with light sabers would be easier in terms of contrast though, and if it was on the wii, probably not at such a great distance.

As to abuse, I've certainly heard of the game and it sounds fun, especially with the various extra levels and such that seem to have been created for it ala turrican 2002. It's a very silly reason I know, but I haven't actually played the game because I haven't bothered to put batteries into my mouse (it's an infra-red one like my keyboard). Sinse several mouse driven audio games are coming out though, I've now got some batteries for it so will be sure to give Abuse a try as it very much sounds like my sort of thing.

Talking of mice, one problem I encountered in worms, ----- much as I did in lemmings, is that even though the game's char's are visible to me, the icons, text and mouse pointer are not, recently this came up with a retro-remakes block puzle game called clockwiser. It was slightly sad because the author had put considderable work into contrast and colour options for visually impared gamers, but sinse the game was mouse driven, this made it unplayable for me.

Obviously back on the Amigar with lemmings and worms it wasn't an option, but perhaps upgrading to supernova and playing with the look of the mouse pointer might help here.

As far as Tank wars and the like go, sinse I find text far to low res for me to read, I'm not sure how playable these games would be for me, even if all you have to read is numbers.

Usually I use an inference system with game menue text, for example finding the number 1 (one of the few numbers I can recognize), and counting from there, or, if i know where the difficulty setting is, inferring that the currently selected longish word ending in a small horizontal stick (the foot of the letter "L"), is normal, and one press left, to  a smaller, highlighted word with something vaguely triangular at the end is easy.

I wonder though, if it might be possible to have this sort of info output to Sapi, ----- the way Archaist does.

Lack of text is actually one of the biggest troubles I find in various games. I remember mentioning the Castlevania games with their 70, randomly dropped items, but also character dialogue. I've been recently investigating the very famous Japanese freeware platformer Cave story, which would be fully playable for me accept for the absolutely huge amounts of in game branching dialogue. Of course I can use a Faq, but sinse the Faq also tells me where to go, this rather spoils the exploration aspects of the game for me.

I deffinately appreciate the nostalgia thing, being part of the gaming movement that very much embraced street fighter 2 back in 1991 was rather special, and seeing the later versions of the game come out and how the characters and system expanded. Mk was always fun, and I certainly played that game a fair amount, too, but Streetfighter was a fairly major thing, ------ particularly in arcades.

One must fall actually sounds quite similar to an old amigar beat em up called Body blows, in which all the char's specials were activated via db fire,up forward fire, or holding fire for a certain amount of time. It was actually one of the first amigar games I remember that featured very extensive speech (it had very accessible graphics too), but it did have a few short comings in gameplay,such as only letting you choose four chars in single player mode, and having no difficulty setting (I got totally slaughtered whenever I played the computer, because I couldn't play my favourite char).

to go back to Mk, I never played the Pc port, but in the Snes and I believe the arcade ports, tsung always spoke the names of the various characters when you beat him and he morphs into everyone before crumbling to dust, I also believe that on the arcade he spoke the names of the various fighters as he changed into them during the match as well, this is why we always believe it was tsung.

I never got to the pong 250 wins, but on the snes port of Mk2, and in the arcade I believe, getting 50 wins would let you face Noob-saibot, a secret char who appeared as a scorpion style ninja in all black armour, he was incredibly fast, used Scorpion's and Johny cage's moves, and was a nightmare to fight, ----- particularly against the goro's lair background where you fought all the secret chars sinse his costume blended in so well. We used to think that beating him would let you fight Goro in Mk2, ----- but i believe this was deffinately a myth.

Mk 6 does actually feature a chess combat mode, which apparently resembles an old Pc game called Archen,----- though being a Pc game I of course haven't played it. You choose Mk chars to represent the various chess pieces, and whenever they meet on a square you get an Mk beat em up fight. while it sounded fun, sinse moving the camera around is part of the controls I'm not precisely sure how accessible it would be. the puzle combat thing I mentioned is actually another mode in Mk deception, in which you choose Mk characters but compete in a Tetris style game, ---- dropping blocks on your opponent whenever you get rid of some of your own. Very similar to super Puzle fighter 2 as I was saying. Of course, I can't judge precisely, but looking at it I certainly don't see why that game mode would be inaccessible for me.

Btw, the only game I knew called battle chess was an old amigar chess program. All the usual rules, accept that taking pieces resulted in some rather commical death sequences, ---- Knight takes knight being similar to the scene in monti Python and the Holy grale, for example.

Oooh dear, another european country has fallen to the throws of americanized english, ----- how sad! oh what will become of our great english culture! ---- smile!

well it really doesn't matter, though it does slightly confuse me that even though lots of Us programs and such are shown here in england, when English stuff goes over to america it has to be redubbed. just as reading an author like Steven King wouldn't sound right to me in an english accent because of the Us expressions, I do find it a bit odd that English authors get dubbed into American.

I have a friend who's downloaded the Jim Dale version of Hp, next time I go and see her I'll have to borrow it and see what I think.

Before I bring things to a close, I want to mention another technique I find extremely helpful in 2D platform games with highly complex environments. I recently downloaded the Morgul returns level pack for T2002, and the background is one of the more difficult things I've seen in a platform game, particularly sinse several background textures (especially in the first world), resemble the ledges. But as I'm a major turrican fan, and extremely stubborn I decided I was dam well playing this game!

Firstly, using the level skip cheat to go to more graphically pleasant stages helped, but one technique I found useful (particularly on the first world), is something I've used before in very graphically complex 2d platform games, ------ a technique I think of as checking the scrolling. This is based on the fact that background objects will change their position and scrolling, (and sometimes their luminance), at a different rate to forground objects, assuming I understand the correct rate of change for forground objects relative to my char's movement (and in something like turrican or Mega man I understand it quite well I think). so to illustrate, when climing ledges, if I'm not sure something is a ledge or not, I'll frequently watch it as my char jumps, if it moves down at a slow rate, changing luminance, then it's background, if it moves down at the same rate my char moves up, then it's a ledge!

this is probably a highly complex explanation, and something I only realized I was doing the other day (this thread has very much made me considder precisely how I do what I do), but knowing about it might be helpful in playing games like Donkey Kong country or Mega man X which have a lot of background detail. I'll certainly try out the toy game you mention play testing for Velu (both in hacked and non-hacked states), and report on my thoughts.

well that's certainly enough from me for the time being. If you (or anyone else), can reply before next Wednesday things will be fine, post next Wednesday things might be slightly erratic.

Last edited by Dark (2007-04-18 19:53:45)

  • From: Finland
  • Registered: 2007-02-01
  • Posts: 42

Re: Mainstream Games for Low-Vision: Examples, Tips and Hacks (long)

Hi dark,
First of all, great that you  got a flat of your own. IT might mean quite a gap in inet stuff of all kinds. When they installed the VDSL connection here a couple of years back, it ment weeks of waiting. ANd the guy managed to mess up the analog of routing tables in the phone system, even, so that calling our number made the go call somewhere else, neat, <grin>.

On a more serious note, I think this upcoming gap might be a natura point for reconsidering the posting strategy. While this forum is easier to use than most, I've realized a growing trend of talking a lot about semi OT:ish stuff such as the cool MK nosstalgia, Wii natters that are unrelated to accessibility and other such things. First of all, don't get me wrong, I like these discussions very much. POndering things over, though, I think they aren't accessibility strictly speaking.

I've learned a great deal of accessible console and some PC games from you, though, as well as new modes and tacs of using my sight I have not thought of. I've also gone through most of my favorite games here accessibility wise and otherwise. most of the rest of the stuff is advice and info on specific games such as lists to memorize and technicl info on DOS gaming, for example, which is quite specific. I'm no not sure how many other people benefit from this discussion apart from you and me. SO I'll tentatively suggest moving the game specific stuff off-list and wrapping up this gigantic thread. Let me know what you think about that.  We can continue here, too, the above is just a suggestion. IF we do move onto the off-list model, I think there's lots of fluff in my reply, I would consider that in the current installment, these topics might generate further discussion: Shades of Doom cpmplexity, shooting games, Wormss, One Must Fall

About benefits, I read mail daily and ,ulti-threading, breaking separate stuff into multiple discussions, means far shorter round trip times to borrow network terminology. IT also makes it easier to attach files and tacle specific technical problems separately from the rest of the discussion. NOw those problems end up in the gigantic main thread which needs to be processed as a a single big chunk of data. Nough said about that I guess.

On an OT:ish note again, you mentioned liking Web forums:
I'm a heavy keybord power user and have always and probably always will hate Web forums, from a technical stand point. They pale in comparison to the hierarchy, random access and discoverability a menu bar gives you, not to mention the ease of navigating by type ahead and the ability to customize the view, and make non-contiguous selections in multi-column list views. But this is heading into WIn32 GUi jargon and the inefficiency of Web browser keyboard access, which while related to accessibility, is not related to games. Given a choice my discussion medium preferences are newsgroups, mailing lists and Web fora as the last resort.

About Shades of Doom, I gave that game a very quick try, too, and while better than the Sarah game I cannot say I'm a fan. THe guy doing the music obviously uses a lot of general MIDI in mp3 which you can hear, just spotted the Fantasia patch, why not pure GM music then to save space? aNother gripe, while I do think the sound FX are bettter than in your average shareware game, the audio guy or gal would benefit from the use of professional sample CDs and better voice acting. I especially dislike the Whacky, pitch-shifted effect in the voice read-outs, it makes the game feel less serious and not quite as scary either.

Playing with very good studio headphones, the soundscape is actually pretty perceivable and I was able to navigate around much better than I expected. There are still plenty of keys., though, and I think they could be both more mnemonic and more like in conventional 3D shooters i.e. control to fire and space to shoot, shift to run, alt to strafe. I've also tried the graphics and they do help a bit. But the visuals don't show you as much of the playing field as o one might have expected, I suppose this is to keep the game challenging enough. MAybe I'm too pessimist here and another point is that I'm not going to give the game quite as much effort as I've given most other 3D games, to be able to play them, so this initial impressions comparison is a bit unfair frankly speaking.

Your analysis about the game that it is actually a 2d game with no real 3rd dimension is correct as far as I can tell. I wonder if it only uses 90-degree angles as welll? IF so the code is bound to be prety simple, especially as they don't have to render the graphics which is the hardest part. IF this is about as basic as the game is, then it is roughly equivalent to Wolfenstein 3D.

Doom has got other angles than pure 90-degrees and whie it does not allow sectorrs over sectors, looking up or down or ramps, for that matter, it has still got elevators and stairs as well as per-sector lighting based on shade values you giv to textures. I'm not exactly sure how Doom works but from my Duke Nukem 3D days I'm moderately familiar with the Build engine which is a bit more advanced than that of DOom. NEither are true 3D engines, however.

About the Wii, yes screen readres for it would be cool but I'm suspecting they are technically impossible and the software development  tools might be costly, as well. WIndows readers have been lucky. They intercept the Windows graphics device calls, meaning that they get info like this is a line of color RGB widht w from x0,y0 to x1,y1 or this is a text reading foo using the font f with the properties p. So this is very rich semantic info the OS exposes to screne readers, as they intercept all output coming to the real display driver. I would be amazed if Wii offered that level of control or a true accessibility interface, even comparable to MSAA in WIndows. Accessible mainstream games just are not commercially viable, I guess, and so even if the coders would be aware of the issues, they are not delt with because It does not make good business. I hate that atitude very much but that's reaility I guess. I could say the same about fancy software synthesizer GUis with no keyboard access, but will have to leave that discussion off-list.

Back to Wii and Bowling, yes I do think the feeling is very very light compared to the real ball. SO light as to feel quite different.  I think force feedback could be much more effective as well if it was stronger and more directional, rather than the whole thing rumbling at once.

haha this story about shooting games reminds me of the NES and duckhunt. I would play that game bak then but have to be very close to the TV to see what I'm shooting at. The ducks are easier than the disks. I wass so close that The gun barrel almost touched the screen, <grin>. Which reminds me, the NEs lightgun is actually ingeniously simple. WHen you shoot the NES gets a notice of that, and very rapidly blanks the screen leaving your target the only white area. If your aim is right, the gun senses some light when you aim at the target, emits a pulse back to the Nes, and the game interpretes the whole thing as a hit.

Although I don'normally use that in game menus or even in most 3D games, I actually do use my mouse. I'm using SUpernova which also has magnification, so the fastest way for me to jump on a page is to scroll the page magnified and middle click in areea area virtual focus to route the focus there. Other than that, though, I'm a very clumsy mouse user and have had great difficulties in photoshop, the whole thing be damned accessibility wise, as well as drag and drop in general.

About Worms by chars do you mean characters in text or characters in game i.e. the worms themselves? Apart from the menus the game text is too small for me, as well. So I ask sighted folks to read me which wormis which or use text prefixes to make it vaguely obvious which worm is mine.  The hue difference in the worm names is all too small for me.

Also, you don't really have to see the cursor in all that many places. YOu do have to see where you are aiming at but weapon selection and scrolling around the play field can be performed on the keyboard and by moving the mouse around without the cursor. The only thing where you do need the mouse cursor are weapons or tools requiring pointing namely teleport, girder, air strike and homing missile. But if you set no time limit, you have plenty of time to track the cursor. Also in the PC game, I recommend choosing the lowest resolution 640x480 and killing all background detail with numpad minus.

As for how wel Supernova magnification actually works it could work in games that rely on diret draw as opposed to direct 3D and for most games that run in a window. Still it does not work in most 3D or fullscreen games, though, including Worms. Just recently I tried coaxing SSupernova to read Master of Orion 2 for me, but it does not magnify that, damn.

I'm not sure how playable tank wars would be either, as the tanks are quite small and some colors are hard to distinguish. Just the other day I mixed up the yelow and green tank. Well there are things you can do, though. KIlling the background detail, leaving trajectories on, making bolts fly very slwoly so you have time to see where they land the last time, these are the things that come to mind very first. Still hwen you take a lot of damage the tank color darknes to indigate damage. Even that sighted friend of mine, whose been reading the thread casually, by the way, said even he cannot see where the tank is aiming at. But fortunately there ar angle readouts and direction arrows, too, though both are small.

About how accessible in game text is to screene readers varies. If it is rendered using standard Windows true type fonts, i.e. the same graphics calls, then it should be provided that Direct3D is not used and the game is not full-screen. Still to be able to track your selection the games needs to expose the focused or selected item by moving the system caret around, which is the concept of Focus Windows has. This is important because without the focus the screen reader does not know what to read and cannot auto read changes on screeen when you navigate the user interface. Very very few games fit these two requirements.

I would not really compare One Must Fall and Body Blows in general. The good thing here is that I've finally managed to create a simple game installer for you both for OMF and DOsBox itself, as well as writing a MIni accessibility guide for the game. I'll send you both off-list. But as I think this guide, i.e. how I mentally partition the GUI and in which order I describe things, might be useful to a larger audience, here's a link to the guide:

http://tols17.oulu.fi/~vtatila/downloads/omfnotes.txt

back to OT:ish MK nostalgia, cabn't resist, <smile>. Ah Noob-saibot I didn't remember he was around back in MK2. But You probably know they are the two authors Tobias and Boon backwords. the PC version of MK3 also has one audio track in which there is reverse dialog embedded in it. The same thing about Doom 2 and the Boss which says heavily processed and reversde "to win the game you must beat me, John Romero". I read that in Master's of Doom, which is a good book about the hacker mindset. And I mean this in the original positive and to me true sense of the word. Back to MK for a sec, though, I did manage to fight Reptile once in the Pit and lost. You had to beat your opponent doubly flawlessly without blocking while performing the fatality and standing towards the moon. The pit and Goro's Lair have got excellent contrast as there are no very dark characters in mK1. But ouch that Noob Saibot thingy you mentioned is black as night.

About accents, very few games make the difference between UK and US English. I also, though it really was not a a rationale choice for me, would justify my use of US english because it is shorter and is slightly simpler to spell to the uninitiated. Still, both langs are very easy to read magnified compared to Finnish. in English one is able to guess words pretty quickly based on their endings. that does not work in FInnish though. We use inflectional endings to replace prepositions, denote word order and derive new words and forms, so there are often twenty interprettrations left when you've read along the word so far that you know that at least the basic noun form of the word is there. But that's highly OT again. Of course context does help immensly, as with all language reading.

Hey thanks for yet another accessibility trick, dude. I mean, I have never thought of polling object luminance on games that employ parallax backgrounds to put this in abstract terms. I'll try that. THough I've in general foundd games with parallax backgrounds that move at different rate from the rest of the playing field, pretty complex. they tend to be the more graphically intense and hardder games. still, this will probably come in handy.

Still I think it would be quite fascinating to try to make explicit and collect the various strategies llow vision folks use to manage in games. Polling luminance, looking a jump ahead, vague pattern recognition in text, learning to recognize objects without knowing what they are, tapping and hoping it will block and pausing the game to examine in detail are some tactics that we've talked about, I think.

Well, talk to you soon, on or offlist.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä

vtatila's Website

  • Dark
  • Advanced member
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  • From: the Ivory tower
  • Registered: 2007-02-16
  • Posts: 103

Re: Mainstream Games for Low-Vision: Examples, Tips and Hacks (long)

Greetings again velu and anyone else reading this thread. Well as normally with these things my move is taking slightly more time and trouble than I thought, especially as far as dealing with university burocracy goes, not to mention sorting out deliveries. Strangely enough I was at home with my parents until Wednesday (last minute changes of plan), but hopefully this means that things will be sorted out sooner (including my new dsl connection), sinse I was able to make a lot of phone calls that I can't make here at university.

anyway, that's the end of the Ot section of this post.

As regards this thread, it actually seems slightly ironic that you propose closing it just when you've put all that time and trouble into creating the exceptional one must fall stuff, ----- which I've downloaded and will be trying out very soon, I can tell from reading it that it's a good deal more complex than Body blows and I'll look forward to giving it a try). It's probably something to do with being a philosopher, but I rather enjoy long and varied discussions, and would much rather have a large amount of freeform discussion to read than a lot of sectionalized topics, ----- I've known forums where the admins are absolutely draconian on the subject.

As with everything else though, moderation is always a good thing, and perhaps several things being discussed in this topic (such as gaming nostalgia and linguistics), aren't quite as relevant, or useful to other low vision gamers.

so, I suggest we move the majority of discussion off list and exercise some extremely stern discipline about what we post here.

so, here we will only discuss game accessibility matters, such as useful low vision techniques, reports on specific types or genres of game, and tech discussions about games and accessible software, such as supernova.

I suggest that Other related matters such as game genre or controler preferences, discussion of plot, nostalgia or non-accessibility related gameplay or tech issues should be moved off list.

I'd rather not finish this thread entirely, sinse useful stuff is stil coming up, and I entertain the hope that someone else might read this thread and reply. I certainly don't believe that you and I are the only extremely low vision gamers out there Velu, and perhaps comments from people with different amounts of vision, ----- such as my brother who is able to read normal print and play games like World of Warcraft and the later Zelda games, though with some focusing difficulties might be helpful.  my brother's not one for posting on Web forums himself, but I know there are people in a similar position.

right then, onto the new slimmer, more focused post.

to explain about Lemmings, I find the in game objects, such as the ledges, hazards and lemmings themselves visible, but the mouse pointer and icons not to be. Perhaps if the pointer had been a more contrasting colour (I believe it was dark green on the Amigar version of Lemmings),  things might have been easier. While I did have quite a lot of fun with my friend playing the game in a discussion manner, this obviously wasn't accessible. I'm not quite as familiar with Worms as with lemmings, sinse I only saw it briefly, but it did appear to be the same in terms of accessibility for me.

I think tank wars is something I'm just going to have to try. One site on retroremakes.com has a quickly playable Pc remake, so I'll have to see when I get some time. there was also some news of an online multiplayer tank wars under developement as well, I believe, but I'm not certain. You might want to check the news at http://www.retroremakes.com/ for more details. That's also a good place to check out other sorts of games and various remakes (I played a rather nice Yar's revenge remake just a while ago).

The scrolling technique i find only tends to work some of the time, but it can be especially useful when doing extensive platform jumping (either vertically or horizontally).
Generally what I do is make certain my character is relatively safe from enemies, visually scan in the direction I need to go and if I'm uncertain whether something is background or forground, do a vertical jump with my character and see how it moves.

the two games where I really needed to use this type of tehcnique were Pandemonium and Pandemonium 2, some of the very few 2D platformers on the Playstation 1. though the games played as 2D semi-mario style, a lot of fairly major 3D effects were used in the backgrounds, ----- such as having ledges go in spirals or switch backs, or a sort of diagonal scrolling. Certainly if the controls had been 3D the games would've been unplayable, but I found in the majority of cases it was possible to tell the ledges from the background, and for the few cases where it wasn't, persistance was oncemore my friend (the game's many cheat codes also helped smile!).

another nice thing about Pandemonium, is that in many cases, only one colour or design for ledges was used in each level. In many games, this is something I find useful, and even in something as graphically symple as Mario brothers 2 I've sometimes had to do a bit of experimenting before working out that this coloured object is actually a ledge and not part of the background (I had this miner trouble with the cloud ledges in world 3 of Mario 2).

the pandemonium games also had a very rich soundscape (and some rather nice music), which was very helpful. for example even the single goomber style enemies would make a sound as they walked, and being the Playstation 1, this sound would also pan a litle.

Talking about sound brings me to another thought I had. Playing shades of doom using the Graphics to navigate and the panning to fight, I've found myself taking more notice of sterrio panning in games. for shades itself, the layout is indeed based upon 90 degree angles, though obviously the fights require turning. the lack of graphics is actually deliberate, to make certain that low vision gamers don't have too much advantage in the game. this is of course one of the good things about the Gma engine, and something most audio games don't seem to do.

but to get back to soundscape, one thing I did while at home was play through Mega man X 2 oncemore,bearing in mind all the accessibility discussions we've had on this thread, and trying to put aside my own preferences.

Well, because the graphics are slightly sharper than those in X1. As I've said, I think the opening stage to X1 was a bit of a show off stage for the snes graphics, and there's certainly nothing with quite that amount of ramle in X2.

In fact, the majority of backgrounds are nice and dark. there is one stage with a blue sky style background, however the majority of that stage (including the boss), takes place in caves. One other stage has a slightly irritating habbit of brightening at random intervals (it's the whether control stage, and just as in reality, I find sunlight to be bad for accessibility), however most of that stage can be dashed through (and some of it, again including the boss takes place in dark buildings).

the final annoying stage is the desert stage. The stage itself is rather easy however, sinse you get to ride a jet bike and can effectively finish the stage simply by holding the dash button and pressing shoot rapidly (you don't even have to jump). this stage does however have a most annoying boss for contrast. I can now defeat him successfully, however I do remember having difficulties when I first got the game. There are several alternative stratogies to get around him. firstly, all his attacks are fairly noisey and sterrio pan (so you can tell which way he's going to dash at you from). Secondly, as this is a Mega man game, you can always save that boss for last when you've got a large store of energy items and his weakness weapon and just outlast him (this is what I did when I first played Mmx2).

while many of the enemies don't make sounds, a lot do, and all of the bosses have noises for their attacks (and quite often for when their preparing their attacks as well).

One surprising thing I found is that a particular boss, who Teleports around the screen a lot, was much easier once I started paying attention to the sterrio panning. Sinse there is a noise whenever he appearsI could tell instantly what side he was on. Looking next to my Char, I could then tell whether he was at the top or bottom of the screen (he only has four possible appearence positions), and thus hit him more easily.

One miner trouble with the game is that several enemies do not make noises when they fire. Most of the bullits are however, a fairly bright green colour, which can contrast against quite a few dark backgrounds. also, understanding where the bullits are going is fairly easy sinse the enemies in the game are predictable. In fact, one complaint that's often made against X2 is that the same enemy was used multiple times, --- but perhaps this is also a case where the game design vaguely favors accessibility.

As to game difficulty, there's no denying that some of the bosses are slightly nasty. However, some of the harder bosses are plot related optional extras who you only have to defeat if you want one of the game endings. Also, you can always find the Heart and sub tanks to give yourself more energy for those battles.

I'm probably biased here, sinse as I've said MMx2 was my first Mega man game, but having played it through the other day with my thoughts on accessibility I'd stil say it's probably the most accessible of the snes Mega man games, it's not perfect of course, but unless games are specifically developed for low vision gamers we can't expect it to be.

A final game series I want to mention (another game series I played recently), are bomber man games. To anyone who's not familiar with the concept, these are generally top down view games (like Packman), played in a grid in which you can only move horizontally and vertically. You can plant bombs which blow up in a cross, there are also blocks you can destroy with your bombs, enemies that move in different patterns (and sometimes shoot), power ups of various kinds, and occasionally other human players either trying to blow you up with their bombs or help you get rid of the enemies.

the famous bit of Bomberman is the battle game, in which four or five players run around a single screen trying to blow each other up. This can be slightly hard from a field of vision perspective though, sinse other players can be very fast, or can get you from a distance with their bombs.

More accessible is the main game. It's actually one of the few top down view games that I've found reasonable to play double players, sinse you can agree with the other person to each stick to certain areas of the screen and thus avoid field of vision issues.

generally the main games involve blowing up all the monsters, or switches on a level and going through the exit. sinse most of the screen is covered by destroyable blocks, you can progress in a fairly slow manner and deal with enemies and things as you come to them. Of course, as with many other game series, the move ionto graphically more complex consoles well and truly did for Bomberman games accessibility, sinse different perspectives and other viewpoints made the action much harder to see.

but as far as the Nes, Snes and Mega drive offerings go, I find the main games mostly accessible, ------ especially bomberman 2 and Mega bomberman, which featured manually scrollable levels in the main game rather than single screens, and also slightly larger graphics for in game objects (though stil fairly small).

the two main problems with Bomberman games in terms of accessibility are contrast, and bosses!

sinse each world generally has it's own background colour, it's sometimes rather chansy as far as visibility goes. Mega bomberman for example has two very nice first worlds (a jungle in dark Brown ana rocky background in dark red), however the third world is a pest. A hack of the game which darkened all the backgrounds, ----- or maybe converted them all to black would certainly be welcome, ------ hmmmm, perhaps it'd be possible to recreate bomberman with the Rocks -n- diamonds game engine, I'll have to suggest it on the R&D forum.



The second problem I find with Bomberman games are the bosses. Sinse when fighting a boss there are no distroyable blocks and the entire arena is open, field of vision issues can be a pain, especially with later bosses who have warms of enemy minions or do a lot of shooting at you.

this is why I've managed to complete Bomberman 1 on the snes, but have rather more trouble with Bomberman 2 (the 2nd world boss is a pest), and bomberman 3 (the fourth world boss in that game). Again, maybe someone might considder an easier hack version, or adding appropriate panning sounds.

Well, that's all my accessibility related thoughts at the moment, while this isn't exactly a smaller post, it's hopefully more to the point.

Last edited by Dark (2007-04-27 12:28:24)


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