Reply With QuoteYet... Shigeru Miyamoto with his "toon shading" made a physically realistic universe that you never questioned. As much as I think he's running Nintendo into the ground, he has an incredible ability to own us all in hindsight.
It isn't just realism in visuals that exposes flaws. Realism in game design does it too. I can point out more flaws in games that attempt realism like Morrowind, Shenmue or Deus Ex than I can with most games I hate. This is because every little instance that doesn't conform to reality gets noticed.
Wu-Tang is for the children!
Yet... Shigeru Miyamoto with his "toon shading" made a physically realistic universe that you never questioned. As much as I think he's running Nintendo into the ground, he has an incredible ability to own us all in hindsight.
Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim.
Electric bug
You're all going to say mean things if I mention I don't like the graphics in Riddick, aren't you? I can tell. Or maybe the art direction, at this point I think it's all the same.
Anyway, that Scott McCloud bit is from his book Understanding Comics, which is a bit over 10 years old now. The bit on icons and how people relate to them should be required reading for anyone wanting to create an artificicial world. It's actually a big part of the reason I prefer less realism in games now, honestly.
James
I thought that The Getaway for the PS2 had great character models, and the motions were perfect. I know that they used real actors and whatnot, but that is still the only game I can think of that pulled off the whole "realistic" thing. Deus Ex 2 was a nightmare
SWEET CHRISTMAS!
What...?Originally Posted by AstroBlue
He just makes games, he dosen't even have a seat of power at Nintendo I don't believe.
That's like saying Yuji Naka is responsible for Sega's crappiness.
R.I.P Kao Megura (1979-2004)
punks not dead
Its pretty true, i noticed this when i was playing swg. A freind of mine plays 2 human characters, and i play various non-humans. i noticed that while my chars look fairly good for what i was going for, his are always odd to look at, despite the level of facial customization that it allowed you. It makes sense that since my characters have no real world reference to look odd to me, his look very much like people we know, so it looks really weird, because you see the ways that all that detail just leaves more room for strangeness to be noticed.
was thinking the same thing, it was yamaguchi and iwata who made the real decisions in nintendo. yamaguchi in particular, in my opinion.
purify weird soul
as for riddick, it's realistic but it's also stylistically rich. this is why it works so well. if it were realistic but stylistically devoid, it would falter (like alias, i presume, but i haven't seen that game for myself so can't judge it.) this is also why half-life 2 is one of the first games from a western developer to have "realistic" humans in it and actually for me to consider it to have aesthetic value. the artists understand how to portray realistic characters in a visually exciting way, instead of as a bad copy of the real thing.
in terms of working with a limited visual pallate, japanese have more practice due to anime/manga/games throughout history. they are hands-down better at appreciating emotional subtlety in visual representations and parlaying that into emotional realism in portrayal of characters. i mean, there's even an emotional shorthand expressed through anime that's much broader (and more codified) than you might expect. if you look at something like the wind waker, it has an extremely rich emotionality to its characters even though it's incredibly unrealistic visually. if you watch anime, you are well aware how the talented artists use still scenes and low-framerate much more than western animation but are able to communicate action, emotion, and visual richness to incredible degrees.
and of course manga is a sequence of still images, which is the basis for this richness of expression quite probably, which portrays action very differently than western comics: as a snapshot of a moment -- something that's happening in time. western comics are more about setup and scene in a single box (a broader picture of what's going on at that moment.) manga is often like a candid polaroid snap of a moment, one that encompasses the emotions of that very instant.
Braaaaaaainssssss
I'll be damned....An MSN article on video games...and I belive every single word of it! Never thought I'd live to see the day.
Great article.
purify weird soul
as for riddick, it's realistic but it's also stylistically rich. this is why it works so well. if it were realistic but stylistically devoid, it would falter (like alias, i presume, but i haven't seen that game for myself so can't judge it.) this is also why half-life 2 is one of the first games from a western developer to have "realistic" humans in it and actually for me to consider it to have aesthetic value. the artists understand how to portray realistic characters in a visually exciting way, instead of as a bad copy of the real thing.
in terms of working with a limited visual pallate, japanese have more practice due to anime/manga/games throughout history. they are hands-down better at appreciating emotional subtlety in visual representations and parlaying that into emotional realism in portrayal of characters. i mean, there's even an emotional shorthand expressed through anime that's much broader (and more codified) than you might expect. if you look at something like the wind waker, it has an extremely rich emotionality to its characters even though it's incredibly unrealistic visually. if you watch anime, you are well aware how the talented artists use still scenes and low-framerate much more than western animation but are able to communicate action, emotion, and visual richness to incredible degrees.
and of course manga is a sequence of still images, which is the basis for this richness of expression quite probably, which portrays action very differently than western comics: as a snapshot of a moment -- something that's happening in time. western comics are more about setup and scene in a single box (a broader picture of what's going on at that moment.) manga is often like a candid polaroid snap of a moment, one that encompasses the emotions of that very instant.
and take for example, another game coming up beyond riddick that does the unreality just right: final fantasy XII. i don't know how many of you went to E3, but the characters animation and especially the facial animation is completely stunning. (FFX-2 had a preview of what to expect.) there's an element of focused unreality to the characters in these games that is incredibly effective. being driven by aesthetic concerns IMO anchors games rather than limits the reality of them. it provides a basis for the artists to create toward, something that includes a very necessary degree of fancy into the image, something that holds the characters apart from the "doll/death mask" problem.
So much ****ing semen.
this is why motion capturing sucks. you can have the most realistic model and graphics but if the animation and motion sucks it makes it totally unbelieveable. i may not understand the process entirely but is there a reason they still mo-cap using those little balls other than speed? because it usually produces a horrible effect. its like "look wes spent all this time modeling this character. lookit this render. sooooo realistic. now lets watch it jump. ACK! oh yeah. we didnt spend the budget on animation. soory bout that."
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