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« on: May 23, 2008, 03:50:34 pm »
One way to look at it, IMO: imagine playing this game. Where are you going to be looking during action sequences? At your character, of course. Now, looking at your image, and focusing my eyes on the character, your whole HUD -- now something like 5 inches from my area of focus -- dissolves into a homogeneous purple blob, which is a Bad Thing. On the other hand, if I perform the same exercise with ben2's edit I can clearly tell the number of hearts without so much as a glance in their direction.
Consider the Zelda games, which have, over time, gotten larger and larger health meters, and at some point began massively enlarging the "current" heart; HUD information needs to be readable even using only ones peripheral vision, and thus it should be almost too clear and obvious when looking directly at it, if you see what I mean.