Best PSP Game So Far--Lumines

Lumines, so far, seems to be the best game of PSP system.

Its unlockable music and backgrounds are additive for most hardcore and non-hardcore game players.

However, there IS something disappointing.

From the perspective of IT professionals. Its interface has a fatal weakness.

It was very confusing when the players want to save the game data. It violates the rules of heuristic evaluation. When players break records, the system will ask if they want to save the new record, which is a good design. However, the way the system asks is problematic.

The easies (smartest) way of asking it probably is "Save New Record?" But what the system asks instead is "Load Save Data?" This question is ambiguous enough for users to make mistakes.

Most games (includes all the games from Playstation I've played) would ask "Save Game?" instead of something like "Giveup Saving Game". So most game players are used to (trained to) press the "OK" button ("X" button in the case of American-version-Playstation). Thus, players would just instintively press "X" button, and then they find out they are SCREWED.

Okay, even the players are very careful, and read the instruction before doing any action. "Load Save Game?" doesn't make any sense to anyone (except the whole bunch stupid game developers themselves).

Therefore, it violates one of the "Golden Rules" of interface design by Ben Shneiderman --Strive for Consistency. In other words, the message asking for Throwing Away New Record is inconsistent to other playstation games.

Yes, it is good when sometimes we deserve some changes, and changes are sometimes good.
But IT professionals are more valuable doing more important and productive changes, instead of making non-important, non-productive, confusing, misguilding, and unefficient changes.




If you play Lumines long enough, you should find some other drawbacks of the game.
I will explain them if I have time.