I’ve been thinking recently about how the visual appeal of a video game has so little actually to do with the technical details of its graphics. Last week when I was complaining about some damn thing I ended up linking to screenshots of Super Mario Galaxy and Halo 3 to make that point, and I’d like to expand upon it here.
There really isn’t any game on any hardware that I’d rather look at than Super Mario Galaxy. Even a year and a half after its release, I think it’s the most attractive video game on the market. The Wii — whatever strengths it may have — is not renowned for its graphical muscle in comparison to the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but it does possess what is, to my thinking, the best-looking game on any of those systems.
This is not unrelated to something I noticed several years back with World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. My computer could run World of Warcraft with all the pretties cranked up without a hitch, but it would choke on EQ2’s high-quality mode, so EQ2 was clearly the more demanding game. And yet… World of Warcraft looked (and looks) better. Granted, there are fewer polygons being drawn, but they’re using their polygons for niceness instead of evil.
A lot of people seem to evaluate graphics purely from a technical perspective; if it’s pushing a lot of polygons and it’s using fancy-ass shader techniques and texture layering to make that dried brown blood smear really look like it’s smeared across that big grey slab of concrete, well shit, them’s some good graphics! I humbly beg to differ. The real measure of a game’s graphics is not in the power of the system but in the skill of the artists. Blizzard understands this. Nintendo understands this. Both companies routinely get derided for using "old" technology to make their games — people cry constantly on the World of Warcraft forums about how it’s not taxing the latest-and-greatest hardware, and we still get doorknobs like Mike Capps talking about how the Wii is "going backwards." And yet, World of Warcraft and Super Mario Galaxy look terrific. And World of Warcraft runs on a computer people actually own. And Super Mario Galaxy runs on a console that doesn’t cost $600. So maybe it’s time you jackasses stop sweating over your triangle fill rates and start hiring some people who can take what’s already there and make it look good.
December 16th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
no comments
I love this. The Mets and the Yankees are the best teams ever when it comes to making sure they’re loaded with expensive old talent. I mean, sure, the White Sox and Tigers pretend to the throne (with a special nod to Detroit for managing to finish not only behind a Cleveland team that had long ago thrown in the towel, but also Kansas City — seriously, Tigers, all that money you spent, and you lost to a tee-ball club, a team that very obviously quit in July, Ozzie Guillen’s all-stars of the eighties reunion tour, and a Minnesota squad that I think only had five players), but only in New York do you see the truly massive free agent spending sprees. The Yankees need starting pitching? Okay! Hire all the free-agent starters! The Mets need a closer? Why not sign two? Then those games’ll get the shit closed out of ’em!
The Yankees are better at it than the Mets, though. The Mets always seem like they’re trying really hard to be the Yankees but can’t quite figure out how; the Yankees need a pitcher, so they sign the very best pitcher on the market, money-is-no-object thank-you-very-much-ma’am, and then make sure they get the second-best pitcher also (and spark rumours that they’re in on the third). The Mets need a closer, so they sign the most expensive closer that they can find, and then they say "hey, the Yankees don’t stop at one" and sign a second closer also. Though it makes sense, since they were so embarassed about their number of blown saves last season, that they’d sign J.J. Putz, who hardly ever… oh, he did? Blew 40% of his save opportunities? Damn, Omar, what was the thinking there?
The Yankees dole out big contracts to elite pitchers like CC Sabathia, headlining sluggers like Alex Rodriguez, and Japanese imports like Hideki Matsui. The Mets respond in kind, giving huge amounts of money to Carlos Beltran, who was really good in Houston for about one month and has been totally average before and since, so he can hit .284 with 27 HR. They decide they need a Matsui of their own, so they import Kazuo Matsui, who bombs so badly they ship him off as soon as possible, only to see him head to the World Series immediately after they cut ties. Then they decide they need a star pitcher and dump a tremendous amount of cash on the ghost of Pedro Martinez, since apparently they fell asleep and forgot it wasn’t still the nineties.
I cannot tell a lie; I love this shit. The Mets are hilarious.
Though equally hilarious is how division rival Philadelphia just gave a starting pitcher a contract well and truly through his forty-eighth birthday. Yeow! If Jamie Moyer eventually breaks Nolan Ryan’s strikeout record, they’re going to have to add an asterisk to that indicating that he did it by playing for seven hundred years.
December 16th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
3 comments
