Bad camera? 'Tis a dealbreaker for me, good sir.

So an instant killer of my opinion of any game ever made is poor camera angles and having little to no ability to do anything about it. Being someone whose eyes don't handle working in three dimensions very well as it is, a poor camera severely hurts my ability to enjoy a game, and as such I've gained some notoriety among a lot of people for hating games many people otherwise loved.

Most egregiously I was playing Super Mario Galaxy on my friend's Wii some time ago. Thirty seconds after landing on my first planet, I asked how to adjust the camera after pressing several buttons and finding that nothing worked (and a crossed out camera icon kept appearing on the screen; I couldn't see where I was going because the angle had gone perfectly overhead so I couldn't see how deep anything was.) His answer: "you can't." My response: turning off the Wii and swearing never to play the game again.

I gave the original Devil May Cry very similar treatment as well, and when a friend of mine was playing one of the later games I noticed it hadn't improved. Said friend was a games design student and remarked that camera control is very difficult to do.

Another incident occurred when I was watching someone play one of the Space Channel 5 games. In that you have to follow directions... but in one round he had to follow the directions with the camera constantly cutting to different angles so you couldn't actually see what direction the character was moving to copy them. After he failed the sequence several times, I told him to turn off the game and refuse to put up with it, and I ranted for fifteen minutes how disgusted I was that the camera had hindered a freakin' rhythm game, one of the simplest genres on the planet.

How do you people feel about bad cameras in games? Personally I don't think there is any excuse for them whatsoever; these people are paid professionals and I expect a professional job for something costing upwards of forty quid. If your game's camera is bad, there had better be something goddamn special about it to make me not turn it off in disgust.

Bad cameras are a major problem in games. Especially if you're playing a game where the camera is an important component. For example, look at every Resident Evil game before RE4. Those have fixed camera angles, and it's really inconvenient. I recently played Dino Crisis too, and that has the same problem.

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Originally Posted by Alpha2099

Bad cameras are a major problem in games. Especially if you're playing a game where the camera is an important component. For example, look at every Resident Evil game before RE4. Those have fixed camera angles, and it's really inconvenient. I recently played Dino Crisis too, and that has the same problem.

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I find that in games where everything's 2D and pre-rendered, it can be quite manageable, because you can still always be certain of where absolutely everything is. At the end of the day, you're moving around on a 2D plane, so having no depth to perceive is a relief. It's a real bitch when stuff attacks you from offscreen though >_<

I never had much of a problem with it in Super Mario Galaxy.

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

I never had much of a problem with it in Super Mario Galaxy.

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I'm told it's better on the more sprawling levels, but when I was on the smaller planets at the start and, like I said, got that perfectly overhead view that the game wouldn't let me adjust (especially since it didn't START that way and slowly adjusted itself to that) it got right on my nerves.

I deal with it until I get used to it.

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

I never had much of a problem with it in Super Mario Galaxy.

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That's because it has the best camera in a 3D platformer ever. Seriously. (Well, except sometimes when hunting those tacked on green stars in Galaxy 2.)

I was going to link to a thing I read about why it's so great but apparently Google is broken. That's a first.

Cameras are my arch nemesis in video games. I can't think of a single video game antagonist who has caused me so much grief. There are tons of critically acclaimed triple-A titles that I find unplayable due to camera issues.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

Cameras are my arch nemesis in video games. I can't think of a single video game antagonist who has caused me so much grief. There are tons of critically acclaimed triple-A titles that I find unplayable due to camera issues.

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I stopped playing Kingdom Hearts 1 during the Cerberus fight because fighting a ten-foot three-headed hell hound and not being able to see it because of the troutty camera is unacceptable. There's no excuse.

I hate(d) FFXIII's camera. Close to ruined the game for me.

I hate going back to older (ps2 and older) games that used the shoulder buttons to move the camera. I've gotten spoiled to analog stick camera manipulation.

The KH camera was one of the worst...ever. Not just among cameras, it was the worst thing ever made. Take the worst experience you've ever had, and KH's camera was worst than that. You licked Shlupquack's toes while Loony Bob dingled his dangle (or dangled his dingle) in the corner and Del Murder did play-by-play in his best Italian mobster voice? Yes worse than that. You had a dream that you couldn't stop yourself from masturbating in front of your class instead of giving the big presentation that's 60% of your grade because you didn't do it so you slap yourself but then you realize that you really are awake and you probably should have worked on the presentation instead of going to that party with Barry "the lush" Anderson and drinking the alcohol equivalent of Bath Salts? Yeah, worse than that. Really, I'm never all that pleased with any of the cameras in SE games in general. With the exception of FFXI, which hardly counts. Maybe I'm forgetting something though. Oh I did grow fond of the crunchy screech sound of Final Fantasy Tactic's camera (though other than that, it too sucked).

Am I just imagining things or do Japanese games' cameras tend to be more annoying than western based games' cameras? I don't want to generalize, but that's my experience. It could just be the companies I tend to follow.

I agree that KH1's camera blows, it made some of the platforming sections a pain in the ass, especially when you adjust the camera to a certain angle to make a tricky jump and in mid jump the camera switches back to default and the controls reverse back as well making you screw up. The entire reason why Sephiroth is actually a challenge in that game is because the camera is conspiring with him to give you the shaft. I love how he teleports and you hit lock on and all you get is a little pointer telling you what direction he is off camera, instead of the the more logical approach to have the camera change to focus on the smurfing lock on target. I'm grateful the later games fix the camera.

I never had too many problems with DMC's camera, though it does rear it's ugly head when fight Shadows in the first game, who love to jump off screen and prepare their insanely high damage air strike move. Still, I have more issues with the games really awkward control set-up.

XIII's camera was pretty annoying as well because it couldn't decide if it wanted to be like FFX's fixed camera or FFXII's fully controllable camera and even in the sections where you can control it, the camera had a bad habit of shifting back into it's default position. On the brightside, it's not as detrimental as KH's camera.

I only have a few issues with Mario Galaxy's camera but nothing that I felt was too bad.

Catherine's camera is pretty bad, it's semi-fixed, meaning you can move it, but only to a certain degree before it stops, so heaven help you, if you have to go to the other side of the block tower to fiddle around because the camera never gave you a good angle and the game likes to reverse controls on your without telling you, which is a pain in the ass in a game with a time limit.

I'm ashamed to admit that the last time I got super excited to play FFXII, the inverted camera controls made me stop. I used to play the game every few months, until I got serious into the PS3.