The RE4 knife fight sounds much better, and even more importantly, much more purposeful, than the quick time events in SWTFU. I can picture the perfect quick time event, but to me it would need to have some logical decision making behind the button you push as well as just the flashing button on the screen. Ideally, I’d like them to be so that if you took the flashing button away, you could potentially work out what you’re supposed to do. It sounds like the new Prince of Persia is treading that line a bit.

An aside — I didn’t realise how unintentionally amusing The Force Unleashed‘s acronym is.

I feel the developers are lazy — or just too short on time — if they skimp on ideas and just make lame quick time events which amount to an unrelated game of guitar hero going on whilst my character does something awesome. In my snarky example I could have been more charitable and had them go off to work on the physics engine or something.

Ultimately, there are two choices here I guess. If they’ve made a scene that looks cool, I’d rather get to watch it properly rather than having buttons flash up on it. Perhaps it’s a limitation of my brain/eyes but I find that I suck at quick time events unless I’m focussed on the place where the button will appear to the exclusion of the rest of the screen.

The second choice is whether looking cool is of a similar importance to feeling cool. Ultimately if a game’s immersive enough, I don’t give a crap what camera angle or perspective I had — if I’ve done something awesome, I know it. Of course, it would be nice if every game had a Halo 3 style replay too, just to prove it.

You may not like them. You may view cut-scenes as a reward and want to relax during them – I understand that. You may disagree with the whole idea of characters being involved in awesomely choreographed fight scenes that aren’t possible using the in game engine (or even if they were, the player almost certainly couldn’t pull off) – I would understand that, but less. Your comments seem unfair. If the developer wants the player to see something cool would you prefer they did not include it? Saying they should always implement it in the engine somehow or not bother seems completely unreasonable. I would also find a new mini-game being introduced before a dramatic sequence would take away from it somewhat.

For me, having watched countless cut-scenes where I’m just watching myself being cool, occasionally I find the illusion (however weak) that I’m somehow taking part welcome.

Few would argue that the Quick Time Events in the RE4 ‘knife fight’ in Resident Evil 4 do not add dramatic tension to the scene. It’s a confrontation between the Leon and one of the antagonists. They circle each other having a conversation where they occasionally take swipes at each other. It’s quite tense watching the conversation knowing you might have to dodge a knife every now and then. That kind of reflex action I find a reasonable approximation of how you would feel in real life. It isn’t just action – it also advances the plot. I think that the kind of things we can animate are always going to surpass what we can actually do in a game. There is a fight later on with the same character and it does not nearly look as awesome because I’m actually controlling myself.

Of course, what you are describing in this game does not sound at all like what I am describing. In this case, it does sound like it is perfectly reasonable to expect this stuff to implemented in the game. You did, however, take a thinly veiled swipe at RE4 a game which you have never played. If I didn’t know better I’d say you were deliberately trolling to provoke a response.

Anyway I am interested to hear your thoughts on why it is you exactly hate them. From your review I get the impression you get affronted by the idea that the developers are lazy.

I agree with your first point, though.

There’s something frustrating about being given the power to pick people up and throw them about, but having it not work on the people you’d most like to do it to. I’m not going to whinge about that though as it feels very realistically ironic.

Most of the game encouraged experimenting with force powers and being creative, except for the boss fights, when most of you powers wouldn’t work, and you just had to follow the prompts.

Being told when and which button to press gets boring quickly, but it can help make more cinematic moments, because the developers fix the camera and can control the scene.