The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Stop that confounded bleeping

You know what the dumbest and yet most weirldly prevalent piece of misdesign I can think of is? "Low HP" warnings that never fucking stop beeping. Is there anything more irritating than that?

I’m talking to you, Nintendo. From The Legend of Zelda forward, you’ve made game after game where as soon as I start to get low on health, I have to listen to BEEP BEEP BEEP incessantly. It’s one thing to beep a couple of times as a heads-up, but, seriously, I get it. You don’t need to continue the beeping. At least when baby Mario goddamn cries there’s some sort of OMG REALISM reason for that. Why the hell is it that my heart meter has to have an unstoppable irritation generator attached to it?

January 29th, 2009 Posted by | Games | 5 comments

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5 Comments »

  1. I actually have a mod for WoW that adds a heartbeat sound effect that gets faster and louder the lower my health gets. Thing is, it’s of little use. I can’t seem to figure out how to tweak it, and it always seems to start in too soon or too late. Either I start hearing the beating when I’m still at three quarters health and panic and blow some cooldowns when I don’t need to, or I don’t hear it until the next tick of some DoT I have is going to do me in anyway. I actually haven’t figured out yet if it’s just being goddamn random or if my perception is just funky.

    Comment by Dave | 29 January 2009

  2. That’s a slightly different situation anyhow, since the longest it’s going to be running for is like, what, three seconds? Either you’re going to get a heal or you’re going to die. I’m talking more like in a Zelda game, where you’ll get hit once in a while and get healed infrequently, where it can be beeping at you for minutes on end.

    Comment by Darien | 29 January 2009

  3. Oh god. As soon as you mentioned that, dungeon music from Zelda II entered my head along with the beep beep! beep beep! It’s burned into my soul.

    Comment by Stephen | 31 January 2009

  4. I was just playing Zelda II again a little while ago. That game was way too hard for me when I was a kid, so I never got anywhere.

    Goddamn thing’s STILL too hard for me, though, and I’m stuck at the exact same place I was stuck at before — trying to get the goddamn hammer.

    Comment by Darien | 31 January 2009

  5. Ah, the Critical Annoyance. Maybe it’s just to give you that extra incentive to recover that HP.

    Comment by Nyperold | 3 February 2009

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