Mercenaries should all wear Ponytails

I hope Tom forgives me for pushing this Just Gamers post down, but I couldn’t resist commenting about something I’ve noticed in Metroid: Other M. Initially, I wanted to save the comment for some future review, but frankly, who knows when I’m ever going to put my hands on that game .

If there is one thing that bothers me about games in particular is when functionality is dropped for the sake of a possibly interesting design. I’ve always been an advocate of the opposite: that form should follow function. Even if the form in question is Mario’s cap and its function is merely to give Miyamoto an excuse not to draw hair with pixels.

So, I was trying to find something interesting at Kotaku today (and it wasn’t easy) when I came across the picture of Samus used in the Japanese box art.

That’s so stupid, I thought. Samus shouldn’t use her hair inside her helmet like that: it might go into her eyes in a critical battle or something. It’s dangerous! A skilled mercenary should know better.

In fact, at her past games, she does.

See? In some way or another she manages to keep her hair away from her eyes

Hair and helmets are a bad combination. It’s like deciding to wear a ring when you are already wearing a glove. Too much hair makes the air inside most helmets hot and stuffy, although I’m pretty such the Varia Suit must have some kind of AC. But then again, considering the other notorious dumb shit Samus does in Other M (I’m referring, of course, to the whole “I can use missiles/turn heat protection on/etc until Adam says so” what-the-fuck-a-thing), a good explanation would be that Samus only got the patch to fix her brain at a possible future event of the series.

Is it too much to ask for designers to take function into account during their work? One of the reasons I’ve always had trouble buying into the whole Splinter Cell franchise was the fact no enemy could ever spot Sam Fisher even though his night vision goggles glowed green in the dark as if Fisher originally took it from a Mortal Kombat character (probably Kabal) and sprayed some luminol all over that shit!

Still inside Ubisoft’s backyard, I also can’t wrap my head around that sword from the new Prince of Persia game (the one with the Magical Chick that doesn’t let you die). How the hell Prince Douche manages to insert and remove his sword from its holster considering its curved shape? Play the game again to see what I mean. I tried making a montage with my MS Paint skills below, but I don’t think I’ve succeeded. The sword in the actual game is bigger too.

Unless you are willing to tear that nice holster apart, there is no way that sword is going all the way through

And God, let us not get into JRPGs or we are going to be stuck in here forever. Giant sword-slash-guns? Heroes running around wearing panties at their faces? Gimme a break.

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