Thank you very much for you offer. I might come back to it. Until then, I would like to do a pass myself first. Back when I wrote it, I was pressed on time and out-sourced much of the translation to my girlfriend. Since then, I haven’t had the time to double-check it. It’s a lot of text and I feel uneasy with burdening yet another person with it when I know I can fix at least some of it on my own. As I said, I might pick up on that offer in the future… at the most unfortunate time.

So how about Gears? I saw you on XBL the couple of last days but I was way too hooked on Mass Effect. But I think I’m over the hump now. If you see me online, send me and invite. I will try to catch you as well. “Let’s do this thing”.

Your English is typically better than most native speakers from what I’ve seen, but if you want me to do a check for obscure annoying English grammar things I’d be happy to.

I only said “fellow design student” because I’m still a student and it would sound pretentious for me to say “fellow designer.”

Hmm, if that’s Flash I could probably look into doing something like it. I can wrap my head around ActionScript, and animation comes pretty easy to me.

I just can’t handle jscript for some reason. Maybe because ActionScript is intuitive and well-documented while javascript makes no effing sense.

My colleague Yu-Chung already overtook me there:
http://www.ycchen.de/

And it’s not javascript but Flash. And I’m not a student anymore.

It makes me mad because I want one like it and don’t have the javascripting skillz.

And it’s exactly what you said: It’s not the company’s first game, they invested a lot of time and money in it. They had QA. It amazes me every time I see such obvious problems make it into the final product.

Good point with the stats – it may be simply an effort to make things less stat-heavy. Still, if I tune up an armor with a shield battery, it says my armor gets a so-and-so percent shield boost but I can’t see anything change on the screen. Which is bad because I have so many frigging upgrades and I can’t make an informed decision as I don’t know what I need to improve. It might have been smart to simplify the underlying equipment system to match the interface. What if the upgrades would simply unlock new functions (secondary fire, zoom, etc…)?

I defiantly agree, however, that the ringed in the dialogue is pretty neat! It’s not perfect (because not consistent) but I really enjoy how they generally mapped different types of responses on different directions. So Up/down is paragon/rouge. Left/right is investigate/conclude. It fits to my recent BoRT entry.

Like, they don’t fucking show it to anybody until the game goes to press? Do the QA kids not get to see the interface?

Maybe it’s because they have a bunch of programmers working on them instead of graphic/web designers?

I think if they included a bunch of numbers they were using for their dice rolls I would be pissed off that they were showing me a bunch of information that I clearly didn’t need for “hide, use special power, shoot, repeat.”

And I think the whole not being able to equip members not in the party was more a misguided attempt at realism than a design flaw. But yeah, it’s ridiculous.

Good point on the “extreme B” used in the star map. I forgot that menu, definitely annoying.

But all I can say is… keep your poor brain away from Oblivion, Fable 2, and Two Worlds. It will literally explode.

I thought maybe we had different useability standards, but clearly its just that my expectations are so low from other games and yours are so high from the admittedly more polished JRPGs.

On the other hand, the stats, travel, and inventory management menus of JRPGs have pretty much remained the same since the SNES… so I guess I prefer admirable failure over reliable stagnation.