Of course, the guy can’t do much more than color commentary since he’s nothing more than a disembodied head strapped to Juliet’s waist. A few hours into the five-hour story I was sick of hearing anyone say anything - except for Nick, Juliet’s boyfriend. The exhausting vulgarity is amusing early on but grows annoying shortly afterward. When shocking and titillating the player take precedent over the core gameplay loop, we have problems. Obscenity eventually hits a point where it’s no longer contributing to anything. In and out of combat, the primary goal of Lollipop Chainsaw is the money shot, whether it’s up Starling’s skirt or down her shirt. For every zombie Juliet Starling decapitates with her chainsaw, someone calls her a whore, talks about masturbating to her, or comments on her gigantic breasts. ![]() At some point, however, the over-the-top exploitation of a hyper-sexualized high school student isn’t the parody it started as anymore. Lollipop embraces exploitation to poke fun at itself - everything is excessively violent, excessively sexual, and mashed together with glitter, sparkles, and rainbows. Profanity is as prevalent as innuendo, and the open-faced absurdity is endearing. It has fun with itself and is proud to be what it is. From top to bottom, Lollipop Chainsaw is self-aware and utterly silly. If you can’t hang with the nonsense from the start, you won’t keep up as the obscene insanity spirals further out of control. In the first five minutes, a voluptuous blonde goes from welcoming you to her bedroom to having a steamy shower scene to slaughtering zombies in her high school. Even fewer are willing to leave you behind if you aren’t into it. ![]() The examples are a little dated but the concepts are still highly relevant I highly recommend it.Few games establish a tone as firmly and quickly as this one. Joel Spolsky’s excellent book “ User Interface Design for Programmers” has a chapter on user’s expectations, and it’s actually available online as a blog post. So make sure that you’re aware of what mental models your users already have before using your interface. In this example, if Lollipop Chainsaw pushed that score over to the right side (where the other aggregate figures are), it wouldn’t have triggered those same thoughts. This is what we’ve been taught since the first grade – don’t mess with it. ![]() I’m deeming this one “Mark’s law of number stacks”: If you’re putting a stack of numbers on top of another, larger number, everyone expects that the big number is a total of the smaller numbers. That’s three different scores that all seem to represent how well I did in the level, and I don’t really know which of them to believe. Not to mention my “hunter level” of 18.0, whatever the heck that means. You can figure it out, but on first glance, one would think those values should be the same. When the interface doesn’t fit the user’s mental baggage, it means they have to stop and think for a second what’s going on.Īnd there’s a fair amount of consideration to have on this screen – consider that the letter grade next to my score is an A+, while my overall rank is a C+ (which is an average of all the letter grades on this screen). The user’s expectation is that a stack of numbers followed by a large number at the bottom indicates that the big number is a total of what’s listed above. The point is, the way this screen is laid out it looks like those numbers should add up. Of course, the answer is simple – it comes from killing zombies, among other in-game score bonuses that aren’t listed on this screen. Where on earth is the other 90% of my score coming from? Apparently I did pretty well somewhere, as I got an A+ in total score despite receiving zero A-pluses in the listed scores. But if you add up the numbers that are above it, those don’t total anywhere close to that – it’s only 28,720, less than 10% of my total score. The screenshot claims my score is 384,620. ![]() I snapped this screenshot at the end of stage 5. It looks like the game is producing some seriously fuzzy math, and it’s an example of how important it is to mind your users’ expectations. Okay, score is important in Lollipop Chainsaw, what’s the big deal, and how is this related to usability at all? It’s how the score is presented to the player. But it’s true, much like the game of Diablo III has barely started by the time you beat the story once, Lollipop Chainsaw begs to be played again and again so you can rack up a massive score. Destructoid’s review compares it to the SEGA classics House of the Dead and Crazy Taxi – odd comparisons for a hack and slash game. Lollipop Chainsaw is, undoubtedly, a high-score fest.
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