[justathought]

Hi,

The PS3 Birds of Prey demo is awesome, but there is a major problem with the game. Using R3 for Free Look is uncomfortable and prolonged use wears out the right joystick. A wonky joystick makes a flight simulation unplayable. Too little pressure and the joystick erratically reverts to rudder control making you crash when flying low. An urgent patch is needed to map Free Look to another button.

The problem is a game breaker because it frustrates the gamer and renders the Simulation mode unplayable. You need to look around manually quite a lot.

Solution:
R1 is the most obvious choice because it is little used. It is easy to quickly press and difficult to accidentally press. Making the button a toggle would be even better. It has been suggested to make R3 a toggle but this would not work in practice because in the heat of the battle when you are wrestling with the joysticks, the last thing you want is to lock into Free look accidentally.

It's a shame it was not spotted during the testing stage, but it's easy to correct with a quick patch via PSN for the retail version. What a great game this would be if sorted. It would be almost perfect. The gameplay and graphics are excellent. A bit of screen tearing here and there, but you can forgive that when you see the vast photo realistic environment and aircraft.

The only other problem is the over dominating aircraft text that hides the aircraft and its targeting guide. What is more important, the aircraft and gameplay, or the aircraft name? At present the text frustrates targeting gameplay and ruins immersion. You cannot make the text smaller, so I would just ditch it and go with a small enemy coloured triangle. or just use the short word 'Target".

Suggestion for the future:
An optional kill cam would really bring the planes to life and let you see the action in detail at close range. If you do not want to break the action during combat, you could create a cache on the PS3 hard drive and save a 'show reel' of highlights to be shown at the end of the mission. A highlight would be the 3 seconds leading to a kill and 5 seconds of the crash. If you constantly track 10 seconds worth of game physics, then you will have access to the highlight data every time you detect a kill. When this happens, you just spool the relevant data to the 'show reel' cache on the hard drive.

Thanks