#even if a realistic game does look like shit. guess what. there are stylized games that Also look like shit

[phoenixfangs]

okay so the hate on photorealism in video games is kinda goofy to me ngl. like, its fine to have a preference for stylized visuals (i definitely do!), but a game is not Better for it just on the face of it

and like, as a webbed site of creatives, are NONE of u interested in the mechanics of developing a photorealistic experience?? like the process of looking at something in real life and recreating it through art as closely to real life as possible isnt fascinating?? motion capture is sick as hell, especially because its not 2011 anymore and we dont have quantic dream/heavy rain as like the Peak of what mocap is capable of. supermassive i think does a good job with their realism. until dawn has some goofiness with how big the expressions needed to be for the mocap to work, and there are parts where u can Tell it was animated manually, poorly (joshs mental break in the mines... there are parts that are kinda oof), but otherwise overall it still looks pretty damn good to me! and brenda song in the quarry is like, there are moments where i feel like i am actually looking at the real life brenda song (particularly when shes in the car at the junkyard and screaming for dylan to get the damn werewolf off the car, that moment in specific looks Incredible to me)

and thats just people. developing accurate to real life physics/visuals for objects and like grass and water and stuff, does it not enchant yall to know that somebody, a team, whatever, had to meticulously plan that and build it? and even if its not absolutely indistinguishable from real life, isnt it cool how good it Does look? i feel like people say shit like 'its a video game i know what im looking at isnt real, why do they even try' and its like Fucking Duh, we all know that, the devs know that, but they do it because its COOL. and also sometimes maybe it fits the tone of the story or the play experience Better than stylization, idk

im not trying to say that stylization is less work than photorealism, but i also dont think the opposite is true, either. i dont think photorealism is less work than stylization. it ALL depends on manpower from artists that are passionate about their craft.

and again, as a webbed site of artists, i find it strange to bash photorealism and say its worse than stylization at all. like would any of u say half the shit u say about photorealistic games to a painter that works with photorealism? i dont think u would, because u understand that a painter is still responsible. a human artist created that. to me its the same with photorealistic games, people still have to design and model and code and animate all dat shit, and it has just as much opportunity to be impressive and impactful as a stylized game does

[sleepysplace]

Nostalgia

For a good while i have a very strong desire in my head to just go back to the past, 10 or 15 years ago and just live in a different time, both due to internal and external circunstances.

Im a child of the 90′s tho i dont think i could be considered one of the “90s kids” due to not having almost any memory of the decade itself, but, i did remember the early 2000s to a good extent, not as much as i want to but good enough to have some clear memories in my head. 

Now you could say “The 2000s are another decade” But i cant help but see it as an extensions of the 90s. Think about it, does going from 1999 to 2000 instantly changes the whole culture the second the new decade comes in? Of course not, well maybe a bit but it still takes time for culture to transition as a whole so i got a lot of the 90s merely by being a kid in this transition period so i still got a lot of things that the “90s kids” brag so much about, that includes that olde windows 98 computer, 90s cartoons and even some of the games that came around that decade, i could still feel some of that culture through my early infancy.

Oh boy one of the first things i remember is the fox kids channel, these really different times, instead of some shitty modern minimalistic or realistic visuals we got a nice stylized burst of colors with some goofy ass 3d effects. Instead of trying to look “cool” or modern it just really spoke to kids in their language and even included some goofy ass animations that plended real pictures with silly drawings, i can really describe the way things were announced or narrated but it was kinda loud and goofy (I know i use that word alot but i cant find other way to describe it lol), well, things in the 90s were really loud, just check out any anime dub of that time and you will get that notion.

I also got the “anime boom” of the early 2000s meaning i got to see lots of digimon as well as many crappy anime that never got remembered as well. The fox kids site was really colorful as well and it really showed how limited but also diverse the sites were at the time if compared with today.

Unfortunately fox kids met its end in 2004-2005 when it was replaced with jetix which is better than most garbage we got today but still showed signs of ugly modernization with a limited lifeless color pallete of grays and blues and use of a more minimalistic style.

There isnt much else to say about nickelodeon, most of the same thing except its orange all over that place but i think the visuals of early 2000s nickelodeon was pretty amazing. Instead of this “modern” “clean” pure text logo we had a splat filled with a bazooka font, it was rad and the same messy, colorful and energetic aura could be felt on the whole channel which also had a loud announcer just like fox kids. Nowdays its just a bland, boring modernized text saying “nickelodeon” and thats it, the whole aestethic of the channel was simplified and modernized, same thing happened with cartoon network which i wont talk for now but its mostly the same thing: A colorful channel full of life turned into a modern lifeless shell of its former being.

The internet was also pretty amazing and a big part of my infancy along with 90s informatics in general. We are talking about big fucking monitors with a huuge back end and not a lot of resulution, well, certainly beter than DOS or terminal crap but its shit compared with today. If you could run CS or early tomb raider congrats! You prolly have a gaming pc, so much potency! 

Instead of being stuck to youtube, twitter or furry art sites the internet was an entire world waiting for me to explore, that means i went to every kids TV channel site as well as every kids site i found by ocasion or really anything bright and full of colors that invited me to it, Playing every single clumsy flash game i could find and having a hell of a time just seeing what else could i find.

There wasnt any modern style trends at the time so even as rough as they were you got all sorts of different sites with different identities as opposed to one single site copy pasted probably done on wix or something. The internet was the fucking wild west, no ultramega big corporations (well maybe just a few), no regulations, no SJWs! Just a free land waiting to be explored and colonized by the few who were curious enough to explore it!

The lack of shitty trends and shitty corps also benefited the gaming industry as well, that means more creative games and no fucking empty dead open world copypasta but instead a huge variety of plataformers, rpgs and all kinds of shit, dont get me wrong, we still have variety and creative people but they are being limited by huge shitty companies and lifeless journos.

Being in the ps2 era meant no realistic graphics but it also meant creators had to focus and gameplay and do the best with what they got, just look at shadow of the colossus, that shit looks beautiful even by todays standards and it was pretty exprerimental, shit, the ps2 was the most legendary console to ever exist, point.

It had a huuuge library of amazing games, good fucking graphics (for the time, obviously) and it was goddam easy to run pirate games into it, so much that nearly the entire brazilian market (and i assume the entire latin american market as well) ran on pirated games, seriously, no one would pay 80+ bucks for a game at the time, fuck having 2 games a year, lets have fucking 20! The ps2 also had such good games that it was a nearly monopoly on the console market, nearly nobody had an xbox or gamecube, seriously, all the neightbors and their fucking dogs had a ps2 

I guess you could say what fucked a lot of the entertaiment industry later on were shitty industry trends, big shitty companies becoming shittier every year, excessive modernization of fucking everything and people trying to dictate what should be produced or not.

Shit, this is going to need a part two

[rlttp]

Dangan Rompa

Due to a error either on my part or PSN (which given reputations I can’t be overly confident in either) I have had to walk through the narrative of Dangan Ronpa a second time in a new found lust for Platinum trophies. Easy ones at least. In doing so, my mind is of course returned to the game and its story which has lead me back here in order to motivate myself to get the post count above one.

It helps that the game is really good.

Dangan Rompa (Bullet Rebuttal) is a visual novel published by Spike Chunsoft from the mind of one Kazutaka Kodaka. It has visual novel leanings with gameplay that can be similarly compared to Phoenix Wright. What sets it exceptionally apart from the Ace Attorney series and most visual novels is the style that this game oozes at every pore. The game is highly stylized in what the director calls ‘Psychopop’ (if this is a real movement forgive me, I am far from an expert on modern art, mmk?). There is very little in the game that couldn’t be described as exaggerated in some way, characters always presented as 2D cut outs in 3D space, a color pallette that relies on heavy contrast of bright colors, and a reliance on pixel art that creates a strong identity for itself rather than assist a central theme. A comparative game would be Person 4 which has a heavy root in modern Japanese culture that grabs those interested right from the start.

Where the game shines the brightest however is in the characters. While they have a tendency to lean on tropes at times and have literally explicitly stated talents as base lines, they avoid falling too deep into the tropes they represent and manage some roundness and charm that can have you very much mourning the losses as they come. There are very few actions (save for one or two characters) that feel unmotivated in at the very least a way that makes sense in the logic of the game which can keep them sympathetic with very few coming off as not relate-able in at least some way. Even a character who seems like a one shot joke from the start ends up being very lovable and charming. It refrains from distracting itself with a romantic subplot which is quite refreshing in many ways and keeps the game on focus

And it’s very good that the characters as so well written too, as it helps excuse just how stupid it can be at times. If you can’t tell already, I love the game; I think it’s great. However trying to explain certain elements of the plot can be difficult to some who want things a bit more serious than this can really offer. I mean, the main antagonist is a cartoon, robotic teddy bear. The game is fast and loose with what kind of setting it wants, seeming to be mostly based in a realistic-ish world but will occasionally throw some sci-fi or mystical device at you with no proper explanation of how it works in the world or where it comes from. This can be very distracting to the experience and, I feel, smells of moments of lazy writing that need a bit more establishment if they are going to be accepted well.

One of the main facets of the game is the mystery of all that is going on, which I fell the game handles well for the most part. I was interested in the progression of the plot as well as more and more curious as to what was going on as the game progressed, which shows good pacing of the story and mixing of reveals to keep you interested in what’s happening. That said, I feel that it did not give enough glimpses or foreshadowing to either dissuade a bit of frustration at how little I knew as the game kept going or to keep some elements from needing some bracing to keep it from seeming to come from left field. For example, take another game that I love: Bioshock. Throughout the game you get tidbits about the mind altering applications of Adam as well as some talk about a test subject who is being brainwashed to obey some commanders blindly. This keeps the player interested in the mystery and makes the reveal of you having this done to you down to being the subject being discussed in the tapes more believable. The player is ready to accept this because they are aware of a majority of the mystery save for the critical bit of information that makes everything click together. I feel like this game would have benefited quite a bit from give more hints as to what was going on, though can understand a reluctance to do so. I would imagine that, in writing a mystery, you want to make it difficult to keep it from being guessed too easily. Especially in this type of investigative game, it can be very frustrating when the player has figured out informatiojn that the game won’t let you use yet as the character is not.aware of it in the game universe.

The final conflict in the game though. Without spoiling, it does a few things that I am completely work for and really nailed cementing the experience in my mind. Most importantly, it completely justified itself as being a game. Many people look down on games such as this that are honestly quite light on gameplay: visual novels, walking simulators and the like. However, the final scene of this game alone is something that, if you were not controlling and interacting with the situation yourself, would not be able to deliver nearly the level of impact to the player as it could if it could a watcher of, say, a show or a movie. These are the kind of experiences that I remember the most and one of the reasons that I think Undertale succeeded so brilliantly. It shows why it should exist not only as an art form but as the specific form it is in. It takes aspects of the gaming medium and exploits them to their fullest to bring an experience that couldn’t exist otherwise. To me, this stands testament that this is not only a game, but one that has just as much right to exist as the shooters, RPGs, and simulators that are more prototypical of the idea of a game.

All in all, I’d say the game is brilliant if you are able to handle some of the hurdles involved with the setting/world. If you can deal with some anime-only logic or tropey ideas, it is certainly worth the experience. If it is too distracting for you? I honestly think you could still find the writing enjoyable, but I know it’s something that’d be a deal breaker for some.

Also play it for the Vita. Someone has to love it, because Sony sure as shit doesn’t.