What's In A Color

{sidebar id=1}This is going to be a busy year for me since I’m taking on just about every racing game available to consoles this year: Dirt 3, Shift 2: Unleashed, NASCAR The Game 2011, Motorstorm Apocalypse, WRC FIA World Rally Championship and Forza Motorsport 4, and possibly more depending on what’s announced.

All of the above games have something in common with a lot of racing games of days past and present which will undoubtedly not make me happy, and ultimately end up hurting their visual accessibility score.

What’s the commonality between Forza Motorsport 3, Trials HD, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Gran Turismo 5 and disc after cartridge after hard drive additive?

They all seem to want to give me medals and trophies made of gold, silver, or bronze.

Those without color discrepancy issues probably fail to see the problem, but for those, like me, who can’t tell gold from bronze, all this does is perpetuate a vicious cycle - racing, winning, forgetting, racing, winning, forgetting, and it just keeps going and going and going...

“This is the song the song that never ends,

Yes it goes on and on my friends,

Someone started singing it not knowing what it was,

And they’ll continue singing it forever just because…”

Lather, rinse, repeat…

It might not be that dramatic, some games, like Trials HD, do represent themselves in both color and in not such a disorienting manor - text. These games get my thanks for breaking up the monotony that comes with finishing a race in the top three.

As for those games that can’t be bothered to let me know which trophy is which, they don’t get my thanks, they get me to do their job for them. Before I introduce an extremely simple idea which I can take absolutely no credit for, let me give you a two-word hint - “State Fair”.

I want award ribbons!

Blue for first, red for second and yellow for finishing third. Simple and highly unlikely that anyone’s going to have trouble telling first from second or second from third. If it’s good for Bessie, the winning-est heifer in all State Fairdom, it’s good enough for gamers.

“No, it’s not. I wiggled my thumbs around and pushed a couple buttons. I deserve at least the same graphic as everyone else got but maybe in a different color - oh, and a million gazillion points, too!”

After establishing the need for a bad network game show titled “So you think you’re better than a cow” it can be established that video game developers work in an entirely different realm than the International Olympic Committee, and thus can set their own standard.

That’s right developers, there’s no need to stick to a tradition that has lasted the entirety of the “Modern” Olympic Games. Freedom of choice in this regard is only taken from you if you are making the next Olympic Games game.

If not, you’re free to give first place the biggest, most tacky sculpture your mind’s eye can create for finishing first, or maybe the nicest “runner up” mug anybody could ever sip their champagne out of for being the runner up, or better still, the award for finishing third in a field of eight could be a bag of oranges.

Don’t confine gamers like me to running laps on the same boring track because you didn’t have the imagination enough to think outside of the recycle bin.