Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

Camera angles and/or control seems to be something that modern games get praised or bitched about. Especially games where it moves about freely without user being allowed to control it. And in some games where this is fixed at certain places which may be inconvenient to some... So this is something that might be worth adding as a rating subject.

I added notes about the camera in control rating in Sands of Time and Warrior Within because it causes problems in controlling the character, but I'd rather have it separately, even though it tends to be tied to how controlling the character works, but not so directly. Some games have control based on where the camera is, so the control direction changes with camera angle (I think Ico did this, Soul Reaver certainly did it - the effect is that with no target lock, running left will often cause the character to run in circle around the camera itself as the camera turns left with the character going left, so the direction of left changes with the camera turning, producing the circular movement around the camera). And in some others it works the same way regardless of the camera (think most of the earlier Resident Evil games for example).

Side-scrolling and top-down perspective games probably don't usually rate this unless there are some other issues with it, like peaking (showing more stuff in the direction you're going) and this being slow to respond to changes of that direction, or maybe the camera is zoomed too close or too far for comfort. For non-action games this is rarely an issue of any kind and text-adventures would of course go with "not available" and games that show the whole level in one go probably just don't rate it at all.

And there are some games that love to move the camera somewhere else to show action going on in other part while the game goes on, so you might be fighting some mobs but can't see a thing because the game (the game/level designers actually) thought to show you something it thought more important. This is actually poor game/level design, but falls into how the camera works. Some games do away with this by making everyone invulnerable or pausing the action for the duration of this so it no longer is of (much) any inconvenience.