Too Much 3D… Going Into Coma…
Okay, so this might sound like fiction to you, but bear with me here: I was watching football this Sunday (I was at my parents’ house, what can I say?) and despite the fact that my father has a satellite dish, he had it turned off so he could get CBS.
Now here’s where the rant starts: I could not believe all the 3D bullshit that was going on during the game and halftime report. There were 3D boxes of stats flying all over the screen… the scorebox would fly in, with the “1st and 10” box popping up, then arbitrarily zooming away. I mean, I thought I was watching the fucking Terminator, with all the robotics going on. Isn’t there enough to see during a football game; enough to keep your eye on? Now we have to watch little boxes zooming in and out as well, just to see what the score is?
Obviously (and here comes the second part of the rant), I can’t blame CBS for this… after all, wasn’t it FOX who did this first, with that horrible SuperBowl coverage a couple years ago? As I recall, SGI themselves did the work for it, and there were giant scoreboards materializing out of the endzones and shit. Then eventually, of course, a toned down version of all that got introduced to their coverage every Sunday… but the fact that CBS had the audacity to absolutely copy everything FOX does (after all, I sort of expect that kind of thing from FOX, don’t you?), and badly as well, that annoys me. Case in point: the halftime report consisted of this giant interface (after all, that’s what they’ve become), which only had to do one thing: show us the names of the two teams who were playing elsewhere, with each team’s respective score next to their name… maybe an injury report or something, but that’s basically it. What did CBS have to do? Animate every fucking metal pane containing each team’s logo, their city and their score, along with 12 other things on the screen, with very little of it actually legible.
And that’s not even the worst part of all this. What really got on my nerves after a while were the SOUNDS. These little ‘skrreeee’ sounds of what I’m assuming the interface, had it been real, would have sounded like. Give me a fucking break. Now, the little thing that pops up letting me know that a flag was thrown, that can be useful. But does it have to rotate in from the screen like a robot? If all of this were being used on, I don’t know, Battlebots or something, that would be totally understandable. Robots fighting eachother, hence the metal scoreboard. But football? Come on. Even baseball could use some more energy… the only worse sport I can see this being used on is hockey… which they’re already started on with the little highlight that follows the puck around the screen during playoffs. If you need this thing, I’ve got a tip for you: don’t fucking watch fucking hockey.
But I digress.
All of this stuff stems from ESPNs use of graphical ‘interfaces’ during SportCenter. But ESPN does it right: all the graphics are there to get you excited about what they’re talking about, and display the information coherently. FOX, CBS and who knows who else (I’m assuming the other NFL-covering networks do the same things) are just moving little metal pieces around, which has nothing to do with anything. Okay. That’s it.