Yes, I Read A Lot of Cracked Articles

Yes, I Read A Lot of Cracked Articles

5 Completely Useless HUD Elements

Videogames, especially recently, have been divided into two groups:  the HUDded, and the HUDless.  Just as some HUDless games could benefit from sacrificing a "cinematic" experience for an arrow pointing where the hell we are supposed to be headed, so too might some HUDded games bear to lose some dead, stupid weight.  Here are five HUD elements that we could have done without.

1.  Doom's Guy Head

Doom is about shooting guys and stopping only long enough to get to the next area so you can shoot more guys.  Its HUD, therefore, is pretty straight-forward.  You've got your health, your ammo, your weapon selection, a picture of your guy...

Wait, what?

Yeah...right there in the middle of the HUD is a picture of your intrepid Space Marine.  As you take damage, the Guy Head gets increasingly bloodied.  Eventually, he looks like Bruce Willis at the end of a Die Hard movie, which, as we know, is when Bruce Willis is at his most powerful.  However, the Space Marine is not Bruce Willis, and is therefore incapable of both Working Through the Pain and converting rustic, old-timey cowboy wit into ego-crushing ironic insults.  In other words, Bloody = Bad.

This would actually be a pretty cool way of showing your character's health, if it wasn't for that thing you might have noticed over by the Ammo readout.  See that number?  The one with "Health" written below it?  That's your health.  And guess what?  At a glance, numbers will always be more useful in these situations than Bloody Guy Heads.

Of course, that's not to say that numbers are always the answer...

2.  Burnout's Speedometer

The Burnout series features cars going fast.  Not just fast, but insanely fast.  In fact, these cars go so damn fast that actually ascribing numbers to these speeds is mainly a matter of academic curiosity.  The car in that screenshot is going 202 miles per hour, and it's in Second Place.  This can only mean that the car in First Place is traveling somewhere in the neighborhood of eleventy-billion miles per hour.

When you're dealing with cars that go from zero to a hundred in under five seconds, I don't know that we really need to get too specific about velocities, especially in a race scenario, when your brain is not terribly concerned with numbers:

A.  Are you going fast?

No - Go faster.

Yes - Proceed to Question B.

B.  Are there cars in front of you?

No - Continue going fast.

Yes - Go faster.  Proceed to Question C.

C.  Are there cars behind you?

No - Go faster.

Yes - Go faster.

3.  Pikmin 2's Day Counter

In the first Pikmin game, your astronaut had a limited amount of time to wrangle his tiny sprout monsters in order to obtain the parts he needed to fix his spaceship and escape from Shigeru Miyamoto's hellish garden.  In Pikmin 2, however, the astronaut and the monsters can come and go as they please, taking their sweet time and leaving when they're damn well ready.  So why, one might ask, does it matter how many days they've been wandering around the planet?

It does not.

While the Day Counter is not in the way (and is, in fact, transparent), its inclusion is of interest to pretty much no one.  Providing the sort of information that is usually relegated to a Stat Screen in the Pause Menu, the Day Counter sits up in the corner, good for absolutely nothing but telling you how many imaginary days you have spent pretending to play outside.

4.  Disaster Report's Compass Flair

A compass is usually a pretty important and useful part of a game's HUD, but Disaster Report had to go and make it stupid.  There are thirty-five compasses in the game, and they are shaped like everything from a pistol to a duck to just a regular old compass (go figure).  All of the compasses function exactly the same, but if you are the kind of person who insists--nay, demands!--that the way North be indicated by an apple, then Disaster Report has you covered.

5.  Metal Gear Solid 3's Radar

I wasn't able to find a screenshot showing Metal Gear Solid 3's radar, and that's because the entire system is freaking useless.  Sure, there was no Soliton Radar in 1964 (nor will there be in 2014, apparently), so what is made available to you is, admittedly, incredibly crappy.  You have a choice between a radar with an excruciatingly slow sweep arm and a motion detector that doesn't work unless you send out an incredibly loud ping like a freaking submarine.  Either way, you're better off climbing a tree and hoping that the guards get bored and go home or, better yet, that they just go and blow up the Shagohod for you before shooting themselves in the face.

This may be Hideo Kojima's way of saying, "Hey, gamer.  Don't depend too much on technology.  It cannot play the game for you.  You have to use your eyes, and your ears, and your brain, and you know what?  Use your soul, too.  Because technology can give you many things, but it cannot give you a soul.  That is why I have put this useless and stupid radar in this game:  to teach you about your soul.  And your heart.  And, somehow, love.  Also, while I have your attention, I should probably also tell you that nuclear weapons are bad."

Or he thought it would be funny.  Either way...just leave the radar off.  You'll know where the enemy guards are when they trip over you.

This list is not definitive; feel free to comment with your own additions.

-Evan