Catan / Eurogamer
“First things first: some of us still have normal-person televisions. Catan is yet another game that completely ignores the fact that some people will need to play it on SDTV. Much of the text is tiny. Worse, it’s tiny for no particular reason at all. Double-worse, it’s actually pretty tiny on an HDTV, too.This is criminally idiotic, and means Catan gets 0/10 immediately. Or would do, except that would be to play into its hands, wouldn’t it? Trying to trick me, eh? Fortunately (for me and developer Big Huge Games), it’s nigh-on impossible to ruin a game as tightly designed as The Settlers of Catan, the German hex-based board game on which Catan is based. Even if you try.”
So there’s this Microsoft sanctioned concept, right? It’s called the “10 foot experience.” It claims that, hey, you know? People might be sitting more than inches away from their monitor or TV to use your software, so you’d better make sure it’s usable from that distance.
How on earth this hasn’t filtered down to Microsoft’s quality assurance team on Live Arcade releases I don’t know, but it’s one of the many flaws which turns Catan, based on the best board game ever (that’s not Scrabble) into a staggeringly near miss rather than an instant purchase. Quite a shame indeed.
Just wanted to chime in and say that the text is indeed pretty small even on my 62″ hdtv. I had to move from my comfortable 10′ distance of sitting to a 5′ distance to play the demo.
I might buy the game, but the demo died at the exact point where I might have started to understand what I was doing leaving me still quite confused on if I would enjoy the game.
Comment by Shapermc on May 7, 2007 at 10:11 am
This seems like EXACTLY the type of game I’ll probably never play again. Ever.
Comment by Mister Raroo on May 14, 2007 at 4:42 pm