Artsygamer
4 those who see(k) the art in games
Artsy Photo Duel Round 2: Portal VS Bloodlines
23 years ago
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Artsy Photo Duel is back… and here to stay!!! We might even try for a more than weekly edition…
So, without further delay, we present the contestants!
In the left corner, in full more than HD resolution, widescreen and beautifully motion blurred we have a great photo from Portal, as taken by our very own Razvan: dark & gritty, but speaking of the joy & liberation…
Meanwhile, in the right corner we have a picture of a haunted penthouse, still burnign with etheral flames from the fires of jealosy & insanity that consumed the hotel, photo taken by myself.
Ladies & gents… cast yer votes!!! See you next time! Awaiting your photography!
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Bonus Round – E3 preview: 360
03 years ago
by Void
in Entertaining
i’m sticking by my opinion that a non-bundled peripheral cannot really change the market that much. My example would be the EyeToy, which has been aroudn for so many years and yet it never achieved critical mass…
Also i believe anybody going after the Nintendo audience has smaller chances simply because they’ve defined themselves as that niche. People see a product and associate it for one thing… rarely many things.
My expectations for E3 would be a price drop and possibly some new high end model. What i’d be excited to see would be a lower priced, hdd included model better built (less heat, smaller size, less power consumption…)… though I’m not banking on that.
In terms of games… well, they’ve totally lost me… not one single (non kid) artsy game, big western rpg or impressive non-war fps…
Metal Gear Solid 4 – GT review
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Wow, this is a seriously reverent (and to me moving) review. They didn’t even start with the usual wordplay on the good/bad game…
This game is soooo going on my TODO list. As for the cutscenes: I’ve only played MGS3 but it has convinced me that it is actually possible to be playing a game and yet not only not be bored by cutscenes but be impressed by their cinematic qualities and on the edge of your scenes for their story.
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Zero Punctuation: Haze
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Ha ha ha… Yahtzee is back in form as far as i’m concerned. Loved the review. Loved the things he underlined… linearity, a game that actually wants you to see your teammates as annoying/bad unlike all the others where you’re supposed to love them even though they seem to be the same…
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Zero Punctuation: Oblivion
03 years ago
by Void
in Entertaining
I’m not at all thrilled to say that I quite stronlgy dissagree with Yahtzee’s views in this one: I’m sorry he may turn away people who might genuinely enjoy this experience. I for one still find it the best game I’ve played in the last two years, and strangely enough it’s exactly because of the reason he criticised so much: immersion. I think the trouble is in his point about spinning plates: I believe that they have tried to do big things, sure, they may not have come out as polished as if they had tried little things, but I would love to have big attempts any day of the week rather than very polished shallow ones. Yes, sure the landscape is repetitive, and sure I would have loved it if each single place was uniquely crafted by a large team of tallented modellers, but that would have probably been prohibitively expensive. So what do you do when you want to create something big but you don’t have 1000 good artists at your disposal? Well, they resorted to reusing assets: sure, it wasn’t great seeing the same cave walls/elements in every cave, sure I would have liked completelly different ruins… BUT, within those limitations of asset reuse I have seen some trully brilliant design decisions and settings. Take for example the haunted mansion scene: yes, it looked like a zillion other houses in many ways, and instead of the ghost(s) being moving and unique they looked and acted the same as many others i had seen, but the story was movign and the moment was strong. Similarly, even with similar architecture, some ancient ruins were trully fascinatingly designed.
About the teleport system: for the sake of exactly the immersion I chose to not use it. Thus the world for me was bigger in a more real sense and i had to think more of where i’m going and what i’m doing there.
In short, I’m opposed to the views expressed here and I am so very happy they made Oblivion, even with it’s repetitions: it showed that big dreams can exist, it raised the bar and it dared put something I find unique out there.
PS: after many hours of play the music did get a bit repetitious… but I make my own fun where i see it worthwhile: you can use your own music… so for me oblivion became the most fun and immersive music player ever. It really puts the similar looking cities in a different mood when each time you enter one you may be treated to a classical masterpiece, or a fight could surprise you with the soundtrack of a energetic punk tune.
Unreal Soundtrack
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I simply have no words enough or powerful enough to describe the impact this soundtrack (the original Unreal game soundtrack) has made on my life. I find it imensely powerful, and mixed with the moments when it appears in the game it simply makes my heart shiver. First time you get out of the opressive wreck fearing for your life and you see the alien sun, the openness, the discovery, seeing the Spire climbing to the sky, walking through the cloud city large streets, traversing caverns with shimmering crystals… all are fixed strongly in my mind due to the powerful emotions expressed through this music. For years afterwards i listened to it day and night, for many lights i’d leave it on while i sleep hoping that somehow it would burn into my brain and I would be able to myself create a fraction of the beauty that the guys at Straylight Productions put in there.
Later on I realized that several other soundtracks that I liked were made by the same people (Crusader, Jazz the Jackrabbit, Unreal Tournament…). Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, Andrew Sega (Necros) and Dan Gardopée will forever remain my musical heroes, to me more precious than most of the big band/singer names which everybody has heard of. I wish I could tell everybody at the top of my lungs of them and see the recognition in their eyes like they do for some well known bands.
I was all the more impressed by their magic after Marius showed me how they were actually modules, how they had managed to create such amazing music, trully high quality, and yet put it in a restrictive format that managed to have a low CPU footprint and with songs taking a fraction of even compressed audio like mp3. Mindblowing. Seeing all the channels that they used to create panning shifts or echoes & reverbs, loops and audio gradients… aaaamazing!
I have just discovered you can actually listen to (part of?) the soundtracks online… trully amazing! Meeting any of these guys even through a email or message board is a lifelong dream of mine… maybe someday…
As I’m writing this the music is running and even after so many years and so many hundreds of listenings I’m amazed how my eyes tremble on the virge of tears of joy and how my mind is alive with visual imagery & emotional snapshots of the moments they described in the games… WOW! And the way they can so seamlessly transition from meditational and contemplative to the adrenaline that makes one feel so alive with the need to respond urgently… WOOOOW.
Some of my favorite songs (though it’s so hard to name) would have to be “All hallows sunset”, “Chizra”, “Dusk Horizon”, “Surfacing”, “Isotoxin”, “Vortex rikers”… sorry… i may find myself naming them all. The Unreal Tournament soundtrack I also found very fit for the adrenaline gameplay, though I can’t say it moved me quite so much. Still, it had some songs like “Razorback” which really rock my world and made me feel amazingly alive, and they were all pretty much what kept you going when you had reached the repetition and familiarity…
Big biiiig shout out for Straylight Productions and all their friends!!!
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All Roads – interactive fiction
03 years ago
by Void
in Literature
Games come in all shapes and colors, and while you might think that we’re now in 2008 and text mode games have died in the ’80s that is not quite true: there are still those of us who love a good story and are even willing to read text for it… especially when, unlike books, movies, and unfortunatelly most games, it’s a story that at least seems to respond/branch according to your input. In comes the interactive fiction competition, the 2008 edition being it’s 14th annual incarnation.
And all this was just the intro for my favorite interactive ficiton: All Roads: this game totally took me by surprise… i don’t want to spoil too much of the story for you, but a game which starts with you being the person being hanged, involves morally strange situations and time travel paradoxes… all through a personal emotional veil… well… let’s just say I never thought a political conspiration in medieval Venice could be so immersive (the image of entering the room of conspirators is still so powerful in my mind).
Winner for best story, best game, best writing & best setting awards for 2001.
PS: forgot to mention: to read the story you need an interpreter, but ther are tons of them, for all OSs, devices and environments imaginable. To go through the story you just communicate simple action words like "look" "stand up" "open" "wake up" "go north" …
PS2: amazing the variety of the stories and settings, from horror to emotional, from action to abstract (btw, I once played a mindblowing abstract one… i couldn’t believe the imagery)
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The Most Stunning Metal Gear Solid Artwork
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Great discovery: www.racketboy.com . They focus on retro gaming but it seems they have regular game art collections, now featuring MGS.
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Giants
0A couple of days ago a friend reminded me of this game… quite a special game. I liked it because of it’s original artwork, great sense of humor (the Timmy scene cracked me up) and some quite innovative gameplay. I still remember the feel and intuition of the jetpack and some great gameplay situations. Where it did go wrong in my opinion though were the lack of saves combined with lack of a really easy difficulty, which lead me to never finishing it, despite considering it quite the masterpiece.
Haze – GT review
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‘fraid to say my fears are confirmed by the review. And it’s not as much what they’re saying as much as what they’re showing: generic artwork, unimpressive technology, and a story that I don’t expect to be particularly moving or spectacular (I think it’s hard to make both a strong story and leave space for 4 player co-op). I really had hoped more from Free Radical. I may play it someday with a friend for the fun of a shooter, but I was hoping for more original level design and possibly a heart moving story with moral grey and paths…
PS: obviously until i play it myself this is just confirmed intuition… but in my experience i’m seldom wrong about this stuff (in terms of my own enjoyment)