Are graphics really that important?

[The Anarchyz]

ookaze said:
This thread is yet another stupid one.
Of course graphics are important, they are how you can get feedback from a game.
The video part in "video game" itself involves graphics. Without graphics, no video, so no game.

It's even better when you have good graphics. But then, what is good graphics?
That's when you start to separate those with poor picture culture from the others.
Most people won't even notice that the graphics are good, they will just be naturally drawn to them, and they have no need to understand why.
That's also when you start separating the graphics whore from the rest. Of course, "graphics whore" has a bad connotation. That's because most of the time they're wrong.
"Graphics whore" are people with very limited picture culture. It's extremely limited because what they consider good graphics can be easily described: the more pixels, the more polygons, the more colors, the more effects, ... there are in a picture, the best the graphics are for them.
Notice that game reviews are based on "graphics whore" stats and thus are completely wrong most of the time (I noticed that more than 10 years ago).
That's what leads to stupid reviews of Megaman 9 that gives it a 3 in graphics and yet says it makes the game better. That's so stupid it's unbelievable, and yet, those that put this nonsense are so entrenched in their nonsense they don't even see they look insane.

Of course, good graphics are not stupid things like number of polygons or effects. No, good graphics are just the graphics that suit the job of a game. Of course, for this to be understood, the concept of "overshooting the customer" must be understood or at least fathomed. Most "graphics whore" are so limited they can't understand it.
Tell them that Tetris or NSMB or Wii Sports have perfect graphics is impossible to even understand to them. That's where the problem is. I don't know if Megaman 9 have perfect graphics, but at least they look very good. The repeated failures of Sonic games should have told Sega that they were overshooting with the 3D aspect of it. 2D graphics were better for Sonic games than 3D. It seems like it was the same for Mario games, and nearly every other platformers.
The same seems to be true for 2D fighters games. They had good enough graphics, and overshooting them just destroyed their gameplay.

So yes, graphics are very important, as they go hand in hand with gameplay. But number of polygons, effects, resolution or others stupid stats like that are not important when taken alone. At least not for a game.

 

Exaclty my point...

Same goes to sound, if we take NSMB and listen to it, we notice that it has samples from past Mario games done in NES, Super NES, GBA and N64 along with the new ones, and it sounds just cool... If we hear Megaman 1-6 vs Megaman 7 and 8 we notice that the sound that suits Megaman is the one done in the NES games, that's why the MM9 soundtrack is really amazing, the same doesn't apply to Megaman X which sounds better with high-fidelity because of it's theme... A FPS needs to sound more like a war action movie, etc.

It's what suits better...