4 those who see(k) the art in games
Archive for October, 2007
Zero Punctuation: MOH Airborne
04 years ago
by Void
in Entertaining
Aaaa, war games…
And again I must side with Yahtzee, not only because of his determination to only care about the singleplayer game, but also because seeing the same war(s) reenacted again and again and again is quite the oposite of being creative and original and thus is something I don’t find of interest. Not to say that I can’t imagine amazing games that make use of this magical thing called internet, just that I have yet to experience those in which this leads to a more immersive artistic experience and not just gameplay fun.
And again I must side with Yahtzee, not only because of his determination to only care about the singleplayer game, but also because seeing the same war(s) reenacted again and again and again is quite the oposite of being creative and original and thus is something I don’t find of interest. Not to say that I can’t imagine amazing games that make use of this magical thing called internet, just that I have yet to experience those in which this leads to a more immersive artistic experience and not just gameplay fun.
New Uncharted Trailer
04 years ago
by Void
in Cinematics
I must admit I never really saw what all the fuss was about uncharted looking beautiful, maybe looking at it through my work graphics attitude i was overly critical, however with this new trailer I found it quite moving. It managed to get the emotion in and the different environments popped more and felt like pleasant variety. Suddenly the whole reinventing of the adventure genre makes sense to me. The music and the cuts add a lot… My favorite scenes are the birds flying away, the catch above the cliff and the one in the red sunset. Of course waterfalls are always pretty…
What do you think about it? As a video… as a game? Favorite scenes?
Bruno Gentile – Hydropix
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One of my favorite modern painters… make that all time painters… is Bruno Gentile, aka Hydropix. I love his sense of perspective and chosen themes. Born in Paris in 1975, he’s been working in the games industry for more than 11 years (i do suspect his website is a bit outdated), “mainly doing 3D works, (environments in “Alone in the Dark IV” and much more )”. I wish I had a comprehensive wikipedia article on him, but since I don’t I’ll have to rely on the the little info he put on his website:
“I’m currently a concept artist and illustrator at Ubisoft Montreal, in Canada, where we’ve been developing “Prince of Persia – Warrior within”, “Prince of Persia – The Two Thrones”, “King-Kong” and more projects.”
Getting back to the things I can say: his painting skills are amazing, and his paintings have great moods. He uses darks for framing quite a bit but they fit in well with the very dramatic subjects he depicts. I strongly believe that it’s in no small part due to his vision that I loved the art direction in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones so much. I can only admire them for adopting in the game a perspective very similar to his paintings, which though oftentimes has lead me to missjudge distances makes the whole game feel like… like (cheesy alert) a moving painting in parts (omg… the words i’ve used!!! Who would have thought i had it in me? Not me…). I got to see two videos of him at work and was also very impressed by his use of images: from what i’ve seen he’s developed this magical technique where he slaps on seemingly unrelated images to what he’s painting which give it a lot more texture and variety.
See the master at work:
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A busy player is a happy player… or not?
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Back in 2000 Ernest Adams, one of my favorite game design writers, wrote a little article called Letter From a Dungeon, all written in-character: one young hero who set out to be a great adventurer, fighting for glory… and instead of epic tales full with glory because of mighty deeds he finds himself fighting hordes after hordes of faceless monsters. To me it remains the best to date ilustration of the tragedy that IMO plagues gaming: in the trailers and cinematics you’re promissed reason, drama, epic things, but the games end up being filled with fighting monster after monster, all looking and feeling the same… a huge mass of duplicates. My latest example: from the first clip I saw of Bioshock i was fascinated… why? because it looked like amazing art direction, amazing potential to tell a story through visuals… the promisse of great atmosphere… but recently i got to play a bit of it… and my heart was broken: it seems that all that great artwork, instead of being used to create a ton of atmosphere was just the background for yet another shooter. Why did i feel that way? Because in the trailers it felt like each enemy would have personality, it’s own tragedy, and drama… but then they popped out more, and instead of feeling different they felt the same, just thrown at me to keep me busy…
Can’t talk from experience but I suspect that’s a biggie with MMOs too: they’ve got to keep you busy all that time. And what better way than having you kill monster after monster? 58 of type A, 25 of type B … etc etc etc. Add to that the inventory management that seems to be a big part of what people call RPG-ing… and you’ve got busy players. But are they happy players? Sure there is some satisfaction to be gained in these things… but I believe not nearly as big it could have been if they were exposed to more content, to more artwork, to more reason for the endless slaughter, to the choice of solving things in other ways…
I’ll leave you with some quotes from Ernest Adams’ writing, warmly recomending a full read:
Dozens, hundreds of beasts have I slain, in considerable variety of species; but each individual is identical to all its fellows of the same species. There is none of the variation one expects to find among living things, and I find myself wondering if they are not creatures of machinery or magic, all conjured from some template somewhere. They attack in groups of four or five, seldom more, and although there are obviously hundreds of them in the dungeon, they never mass in overwhelming numbers. They are clearly extremely stupid, possessing neither any organizational skill nor a communications system to summon their fellows. They attack blindly, marching towards us, taking no advantage of cover or tactical opportunities. And so we mow them down. The simplest expedient is to stand in a door and slaughter them one by one as they approach.
This is not the way Beowulf fought Grendel. In this business I am no hero, no warrior; I am an exterminator, a dog killing rats in a crate.
…I said above that I do not know what I am. For sure I am not a hero; a greedy and bloodthirsty mercenary, perhaps. Yet when this is done, I have sworn to regain my pride and my self-respect. I shall study again the virtues of the legendary heroes of old… between the covers of a book.
Am i game obsessed?
04 years ago
by Void
in Literature
gamesindustry.biz has a great presentation of Will Wright’s BAFTA Video Games inaugural lecture. Somethign that moved me was this story he told in the context of society more and more worried about it’s youth getting obsessed with games:
“There was this guy, and he walked into a room, and he saw a person sitting on the other side of the room, absorbed in this device. And he was so fixated on this device that he didn’t even notice this fellow walking into the room – he could tell, it was like he wasn’t even there, and he’d displaced himself to another time and place.
“And it creeped him out, he thought this guy was possessed by the devil.
“What this was, it was the sixteenth century, and it was the first time he’d seen somebody reading a book.”
Am I obsessed with games? I guess so… but what people who know me forget or don’t know is that games haven’t really changed who I am, just took over my previous inner life. Before games started having more artwork I was deep in imaginary worlds in books. I’m talking 10-12 hours a day when I had the chance deep. I guess there’s just some people out there who prefer to live in a immaterial world and build their reality in there… be it books, music, games…
Devil May Cry 4 artwork
04 years ago
by Void
in Visual Arts
I was impressed by the way the Devil May Cry games managed to depict Dante as a so-full-of-himself guy and gave it such a high coolness factor… but that alone wouldn’t have kept me through the fighting gameplay if it wasn’t for the superb architecture and refined storytelling. An interesting backstage story goes like this:
Devil May Cry began its development life as a Resident Evil title for PS2, after the completion of Resident Evil 2, under the direction of Hideki Kamiya and “Team Little Devil”.[18] Early research and development work included a trip to Spain, to examine various castles as a basis for the game’s environments. However, in prototype status, the game proved to be a radical departure from the established Resident Evil formula and the survival horror genre in general. Rather than abandon the project entirely, the premise was changed and the game eventually became Devil May Cry.[19]
(wikipedia)
And i think it may explain a lot: one of my favorte elements of the game is the interesting and quite intricate architecture and attention to decorative detail. Also looking through the superb gallery PS3 Fanboy has for the game I’m amazed how the team manages to express so much tension even through 3d, not just concepts.
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Zero Punctuation: Super Paper Mario
04 years ago
by Void
in Entertaining
Just a reminder that another wednesday has come and gone.Can’t say I relate to this one… but I faithfully wait for the next wednesday. On the note of jrpgs: I have nothing against turn based rpg… Fallout 2 proved to me that turnbased can be quite okay… it’s the extremely linear stories that bother me. In my mind RPG still stands for *role playing*, as in the live roleplaying where you express yourself, and not as in micromanagement of a zillion items and leveling up of stats that are only useful in battle… as the term is being used nowadays (seems to me). I guess my reasoning is on the lines of: “if I’m gonna play an extremely linear thing than at least be straight with me and give me an action type game, isntead of making me hope that by all that inventory management I’m actually going to be able to get off the beaten path and make my own story in this virtual world! But i want a _role playing_ game! If i wanted a linear experience I would have watched a movie… and I wouldn’t have had to work through my linear experience”.
Umm… I’m ranting again about games with options, aren’t I? (straightening posture) Wednesday=day of joy=Zero Punctuation!!! Yeayy!!!
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be-witcher-ing
04 years ago
by Void
in Literature
I must admit I had pretty much written The Witcher off. Not only did it seem like a lower budget product (engine, animation in particular, possibly not so great audio…) but besides forcing me to play through the point&click interface of PC RPGing when I have grown to like so much playing with a gamepad it committed what to me is one of the worst sins ever: yet another "been there done that" medieval world with the promisses of lots of hack and slashing. Why can’t people make a non-standard medieval world? I mean, town, inn, swords, outlands of the city infested with monsters… it’s been soooooo done. And then some. I don’t expect all the games to be as original as placing the setting in the Planescape universe, or constructing something as intricate as the Legacy of Kain mythology, but even other cliches would be better. Or a White Wolf setting? Vampire The Masquerade anybody… Or even better… something new, something creative. Or at a least something with a different aestethic feel. Morrowind for example managed to make a medieval setting feel somewhat fresh with interesting architecture types. The Witcher in the meanwhile besides putting me off with the promise of a combat oriented game showed me standard out of the box medieval houses. And inns!!!
So why I am writing about it? I certanly don’t like bashing things or being all critical like… The reason I’m writing this is because there’s new hope: this video… well, i had seen other videos that hinted the game might have a bit of that grey morality that would be so fresh given all the "be super good"/"be cruel evil" choice games… but this video promissed a lot more… it promissed options. Branches. They don’t even try to kid us with "there’ll be a kazillion gameplay modes"… but they do say 3 completelly different ones, and they do say something that I’ve dreamed of for so long: choices that matter. Choices who’s consequences show up hours after the decision sounds VEEERYYY goood. Then again my heart has been broken before by games which promissed choices and moral depth only to discouver that they were only for marketing or amazingly shallow… but if this is true, well, then all other faults of the game I may be able to forgive, I might even play it on the PC (should i one day get one that will play it well and be able to configure my gamepad to fake a mouse)… That makes 3 games I can dare hope will create choice rich experiences: Fallout 3, Mass Effect & Witcher. Now chances are (from past heart breaks and realizing what an incredible expense and unreasonable thing it is to create a choice oriented game) that 2 out of 3 will barely touch meaningful choices… but that still leaves 1 game i may hope will encourage self-expressing immersive gameplay in the next 2 years. Yeayyy!!!!
PS: I know the chances are slim, but wouldn’t it be cool if Final Fantasy XIII decided to so embrace western approaches that it offered choices or GTA 4 ended up having so much content that it pretty much turned into a self-expressing rpg type experience?
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Memories of Doom atmosphere & Heretic artwork
04 years ago
by Void
in Literature
Can’t say Doom is a title that pops to mind when I think of an artistic game: it feels more like a gameplay game. A game about shooting, survival… And yet it feels like it’s made an emotional mark. It may be just repetition/familiarity/my time spent on figuring out Carmack’s programming through playing with code in DosDoom (Plutonia and TNT wads most of the time) or more likely the fact that I was so freakin excited about all the amazing maps people made for it and spent countless hours trying them (one with a very emotional atmosphere given by NiN midi music pops to mind). My point being: to me it still feels like it has a certain feeling. It’s technical limitations of 2d bsps resulted in a very specific style of artwork, a certain kind of design by symetry/asymetry. Anyway, just found myself on this whole memory-emotional rolercoster reading a gamedaily retrospective of the Doom series. I’m talking about Doom 2 & associated wads mostly. Doom 3 had a very promissing start that made me feel like a writer was behind it, and indeed the audio journals were a great touch, however it too soon turned into maze walking (even backtracking i think) through all too similar environments and though i finished it from that point it lost artistic value to me and all the great graphics, shadows and bumpmapping in the world couldn’t save it for me. Unfortunatelly in my opinion ID software have always been more of a technology company… and though they shaped and led 3d graphics through time my heart still remains with those who use technology for artwork. Take Raven Software: they took the doom engine and made the amazingly art-oriented Heretic. Sure, it ran horrible even ages after, and it didn’t cast any blazing trails… but the artwork in it… yum yum yum. Inspiring.
Note: I make a HUGE distinction between graphics in the sense of technology and in the sense of artwork. IMHO you can have a top notch engine running on high end hardware producing things that feel ordinary, even if they do it in super high detail, or you can have a world with low res textures, running on a weak engine and ancient hardware that still hints at great artistic elements or even manages to make you forget the technology and enjoy the artwork. For example for me the Heretic game is so full of story, one told just by it’s artwork: i completelly forgot it’s game story, but it’s artwork has told my mind a fascinating story, of a magical world, and yet not fantasy, but somehow dark/scifi.. of ancient civilizations and ritual temples.
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Mythology in God of War 1/2
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Mythology is soooo awesome!!! (even real one, not only game stuffs) Always loved mythology! …well, that’s not entirely true, back in 8th grade when it was mandatory reading i skipped it in favour of Karl May, Jules Vernes & Agatha Christie, only to return to it a couple of years later when a couple of years of digging into psychoanalysis a la Jung convinced me that i better brush up on these often refered to characters & stories. But from then on I loooved it! So, needless to say it was with great pleasure that I went through what i think is the best retelling of mythology in the modern day times: the God of War games. And with superb artwork too! Here’s a documentary I found very interesting made by the God of War team that Gametrailers have kindly provided for the world to enjoy. Above is part one, here are the other 5 parts:
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