Oh man, Mittens is now my favorite poster. I've got a new paxy I argue with!
RANT ON
Yeah, sure, cartoony sprites can be good, but at the end of the day, they're just a novelty, and flat out lazy.
It's called creative
style. To say someone is lazy for creating "cartoon graphics" is like saying writers are lazy for writing "coherent paragraphs of text instead of metaphorical mind fucks." You're going on and on about creativity and doing new things, but this is
exactly what people are doing; trying out styles that work for them. Are you telling me a game like Earthbound or Wind Waker is inherently bad because
ZOMG TEXTURES AREN'T HI-RES 32-BIT FILTERING ANTI-ALIASED PHOTO-REALISTIC??? If everyone was to create gritty, realistic, Oblivion style graphics then you'd only succumb to what you're complaining about in the first place:
lack of different settings. If my game is set in a cartoon world, then like hell it'll have cartoon graphics. Going back to my original "coherent pages of text" example for books, if I'm writing a picture book for preschoolers, I'm not going to use Shakespeare-esque dialog.
They make anything possible. No explanation needed. "Hang on, how the hell did that happen?" "Dude, it's a cartoon, does it matter?" Of course it fucking does. That is lazy writing.
Now you're completely contradicting yourself by saying you're tired of seeing the same old fairy tale fantasy stories yet you blast anyone who comes up with
their own mythology. Everything
does not need an explaination. If people in
my world can fly because
I want them too, then I don't have to write a 500 page excerpt detailing this. It's my work, I'm the creator. It doesn't make me lazy because I don't want it to happen.
I'll use my game, Homeland, for example. It's an absurdist game inspired by the Mother series and Alice in Wonderland. There are evil, fanatical yard gnomes, trees that battle lumberjacks, a city in the sky, an evil corporation bent on ruling the world through a capitalist take-over, communities full of completely democratic politicians that don't get anything done... I mean, you fight squirrels, bears that lay eggs, you can use crazy powers like EYE LASERS, and one of the main characters is a 12 year old girl who's hands were possessed by demons so she wears sock puppets to hide them. You even fly to the moon on a doghouse and fight evil tofu monsters with magical vegan powers.
Let's look at my game's graphics.
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/1319/worldmapjh7.png[/img]
It doesn't sound conventional does it? It doesn't look conventional, does it? Yeah, because it's
NOT a conventional game. It's a game that I wanted to make. I wanted tofu monsters. I wanted evil yard gnomes. I wanted cartoon graphics because realistic graphics don't fit my style of absurd storytelling at all.
Does it make me lazy because I didn't want to explain any of this? Not at all. It's my game. My style. I created it. Don't like it, don't play it. I
didn't design it for people like you to enjoy it. I designed it for people
like me to enjoy it. I can't appeal to everyone, and game designers (or artists in general) who try to do this are the worst.
This all boils down to catering to your own appeals. Obviously, you don't like anything whimsical or fantastic. Go read a science novel or study bones or something. If realism is your deal, then play/watch/read something realistic. Don't flame the people who make up their own works because being an artist is an
abstract ideal. What's in your mind flows in your work. No explainations needed and that doesn't mean the creator is lazy.
If that were true, I'd call Picasso lazy because none of his pictures looked like real people.
Stick to what you like and what you love. If others hate it, then oh well. They weren't your target audience to begin with.
Bearcat, 'minimilism' is a very poor excuse. It doesn't highlight the story at all, it just points out that the developers focussed more on the story coz they couldn't be arsed working on the graphics.
Do you even know what minimalism is? It's not a "lol lazy excuse to ignore graphics" it's a
style that focuses on the bare necessities. It doesn't INSTANTLY mean poor graphics, it means the creator has chosen to eschew every detail that's NOT IMPORTANT and focus only what matters. Go play Ico or Shadow of the Collossus; those are minimalist games. Care to tell me the developers were being lazy?
Sly Cooper is still regarded as one of the more revolutionary platform games of the ps2 era and it's gotten 3 sequels and it's getting a spin-off. Try again.
Not everyone gives a flying crap about LOL PLOT. Me personally, If I want story then I'd go read a book. I play games for their fun gameplay. Some RPG's have fun gameplay, but most forget all the details about actually having fun and feature crazy stories with multiple plot twists and crap. This appeals to some people. It doesn't appeal to me. Obviously FF6 appeals to you more than Sly Cooper; don't say one game will be FORGOTTEN when obviously it's not a game you care for.
I just reckon peeps are dead set on imitating what's already been done. Fair enough, they'll add a few new features, but detail seems to be the only thing that differs from game to game.
It's not a question of immitation, it's a question of what they like and what they want to make. There'll never be a game that transcends all boundaries and makes something totally and completely new. We've seen everything. All you can do is expand on what's already there unless some new piece of technology is created like .HACK style virtual reality. You mentioned you liked Shenmue, well guess what? Shenmue is just another 3rd person adventure game with a hacked up Virtua Fighter battle system. The storyline is a generic revenge story that we've seen countless times in Asian culture.
Why do you like Shenmue? You have your own reasons. I thought Shenmue was about average. You probably think differently. Obviously the creators had something in mind when they made it. I'm not going to put words in their mouth and say they chose to make certain features because they were lazy or bad developers. Technology limitations
will create developer limitations. I'm sure the developers wanted to make a better game, but the style they chose, the story they wanted to tell, and the technology they presented it on prevented that.
Zelda is probably the best example I can use when I say that graphics set a more blatant tone, rather than having to sit through pages and pages of text before you get the jist of the story.
Did you even play Twilight Princess? The entire thing was gigantic cinema. While everyone else was drooling over it and calling it LOL SECOND COMING OF ZELDA, the real fans were saying "why is gimicky gameplay and a crappy anime storyline in my zelda??"
rant over
