Day: April 25, 2022

Most of the time, when I play a difficult or challenging video game, I like to think that my level of gaming skill is the only factor playing a role in whether or not I am successful. When I defeat a boss in Elden Ring, or survive a heavy firefight in a shooter with just one pixel of health left, the sense that I was lucky and skillful enough to win is a great feeling.

Back in October 2021, Metroid Dread released to critical praise, despite being a very mechanically unforgiving title. When I covered the game here on Access-Ability at the time, while I praised the game’s implementation of dynamic map labelling techniques in a non linear exploration game, I criticised the game’s inflexible difficulty, overall lack of even basic accessibility settings, and at times overly complex controls.

Ahead of launch, developer Playground Games made a big deal of touting the addition of Sign Language Support to Forza Horizon 5 in a post launch update, but without giving a clear indication when the update would come to the game. That update is now live, four months later, and I spent some time this week checking out how it works in practice.

I managed to get my hands on a Steam Deck in the first wave send out, and as such have been able to play around with the device for the past week, and get a sense for the release date state of the hardware and software on offer.

This past week I’ve been playing Gran Turismo 7 on PS5, and I wanted to take some time today to talk about the game from an accessibility perspective. The game is through and through a technical simulation focused racer, and I wanted to know if this would finally be the Gran Turismo game I found worked for me.

It’s fair to say that, over the past few weeks, I have fallen deeply in love with Shiny Hunting in Pokémon Legends Arceus. The feedback loop of filling in detailed Pokédex entries, then checking out mass outbreaks, while listening for the telltale sound of an overworld Shiny spawning nearby has been scratching a very particular itch for the ADHD Autistic regions of my brain.

While very mechanically similar to Zero Dawn, Forbidden West releases in a very different accessibility context to its predecessor. Horizon Zero Dawn released back in early 2017, when Sony had not yet begun its public facing push into accessibility with titles such as 2020’s The Last of Us 2. Sony’s first party accessibility output today is very different, as are the features their games have begun to include as standards.

So, with the recent release of Pokémon Legends Arceus, I wanted to revisit this topic, because I believe the game’s new approach to shiny hunting mechanics is perhaps the most player friendly, and least prone to encouraging compulsive behaviour, seen in the series.

If you’re a Pokémon series fan, there are very few things right now as exciting as the imminent release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the action oriented gotta catch ‘em all title releasing this week that has spent the weeks leading up to its release shrouded in mystery regarding what it would actually be like to play.

Games are longer than they ever have been before, often with more online elements and microtransactions, and for many game developers the goal is not just for you to buy a game, but to keep playing it long enough to be invested in DLC, or an online community, to ensure the game keeps making additional profit beyond release day.