Some game developers seem to be really stuck in the 70’s … early 80’s perhaps too. For example, Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed series does not allow you to have a player nickname longer than 8 characters. In the early days, your name was on the license plate, so I could see some reason into having it fit. But since a few years this is no longer the case, it just says NFS. Boo. (note: perhaps in the latest game this may have changed). There are many others who do the same thing.

Yesterday I played Marbles Balance Challenge on the Wii. Enter player name.. ok, there’s a bigass window to enter it in, should fit at least 50 letters in there. S .. i .. D .. 3 .. W .. i .. N .. D … what? WHAT? 8 character limit? Ok, my fault for picking a 9 char nick (which is actually 10 but reduced for IRC purposes), but what the heck? It’s not like the Wii memory can’t handle this… my analog watch probably has enough storage space. I could of course opt for “Tom” but meh. I don’t see the difficulty in allowing longer player names.