| greenmedic88 said: Plenty. It's important to make use of new developments as they are innovated. That includes both the technical aspects and the design aspects. Someone placed the emphasis on the "game" aspect of video games. The same thing could be said in that they are "video" games to distinguish them from text games, board games and physical puzzle games. I don't agree that video games have become static over the last ten years from a design standpoint. Most developers will agree that advances in technology allow them to realize game play and design elements that simply weren't feasible on older hardware. But problems arise when too much emphasis is placed upon the technical aspects of the visuals at the expense of solid design and game play. So in that respect, I have to agree with the article. This is similar to the film industry when film makers rely too heavily upon digital effects to sell a movie RATHER than use digital effects as an effective film maker's tool to visually tell the audience aspects of a story. Every film maker working within a scenario that requires settings, events or characters that cannot convincingly be created with models and make up would have to limit what they wanted to visually convey on screen depending upon the tools available previously. Currently, film maker's with access to the high end tools are only limited by their imagination and the skills of the graphical artists re-creating that vision in the most realistic (or stylistic) manner possible. Chrono Trigger is a bad example of an excellent game (a personal top ten of all time) with solid design but "poor" graphics. For the time and for the hardware it was running on, they were well above average. And even though bit mapped graphics are almost non-existent for epic story telling games these days, Chrono Trigger still represents very well for hand drawn animation. Back then, the challenge was conveying as much visual data as possible with a few pixels as possible, and in that respect, few games performed as well as Chrono Trigger. That being said, a part of me would still like to see a FFXIII engine based remake of Chrono (or FFVII for that matter), but I don't believe it would actually improve the game unless more depth was added to the combat system, more in depth background was added to the world of Chrono Trigger and its inhabitants. |
Actually I think every single game I listed had excellent or at least on par graphics at the time. My main point was to refute the point he seemed to make that a game with good gameplay and poor graphics are bad. From your post you seem to agree entirely that these games, which are many miles away from todays standards of graphics, are still more entertaining than most modern games due to their excellent design, you're right in saying that art style was prominent in some of those and things like Chrono Trigger are still pretty today due to their artwork but games like pong never were actually pretty.
I also agree with your point that remakes that merely change the graphics don't actually add anything to the game experience in general. I know I'm not going to buy FFIVDS as I own FFIV Advance =P.
@Parokki.
Actually now you mention it I loved the look of the original Halo, its look kind of crossed boundries between comic book style (ie. XIII) and realism. I don't know if they meant for it to look slightly fake but to me it did and I loved it =P.
Edit: @Griffin. Actually I would prefer if they put a little more life into the world, probably not the unicorn though.
