Style

Style:

Think Yoshi’s Island 2, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. These two games have a beautiful style that is pervasive throughout the game. Their styles let them portray characters from cute to menacing, but still keep a sense of cohesiveness.

These screenshots provide a lot of context for what I’m talking about. The top screens (obviously Yoshi’s Island 2) show the kind of cel-shaded style that I’m talking about. The second Yoshi’s Island screen, with the pink ballon creatures in the background is a good example of this style going through every nook and cranny of the game. Even in inanimate background objects, they have very cool looking, attention-grabbing objects that stick with the style. Castlevania too does this, with the four different statues in the second Castlevania screenshot, or the building in the third screen.

One of the worst graphical mistakes is to break style. This, however, does not mean that animate objects can’t have different styles than inanimate objects. In fact, that is often a good idea; it helps your characters stand out. Look at the first Yoshi’s Island screen. Yoshi doesn’t look so cel-shaded; nor do the enemies in the bottom right of that screen. However, it helps Yoshi stand out from the cel-shaded background. It’s one way graphics can contribute to gameplay.

That’s all for my criteria on Style. If you have any other criteria, either for style or graphics, post it in the comments.

-Ben OUT.

August 19th, 2006 | 2D, Graphics | No comments

The Art of a First Post

In thinking about how I should make my first post, I started wondering — how do successful blogs make their first post? Candy Blog started pretty simply, stating what she’ll do. Slashdot started off just by doing what they’d do for the next six years. So did TechCrunch. Hell, even Google Blog did. So I guess I’ll do both.

What is it about games that appeal to us? What makes a good game? What makes a fun game? Are they different things? I can’t answer these questions, but I sure as hell will try.
I’ll do my best to keep politics and other polarizing factors out of this — however, there may be some things that you may disagree with. I’m not a shock jock, but I will sometimes have to bring an opinion or two in.

So let’s jump right in.

Graphics versus Gameplay — The battle that has been raging on for console generation after console generation. Where do I stand? Glad that you asked; I’m in the middle. Nintendo Fanboys say all Gameplay, and Sony Fanboys say Graphics are all that matter. I’ll state this right now: I really like Nintendo. I lean towards Nintendo most of the time (the exception being Wii — I’m used to the name, but that’s still a bad choice). However, while I feel that Nintendo does focus on Gameplay a lot of the time, they really do a lot of work on the graphics. That is, when you consider graphics on criteria other than polygon count. My four criteria for awesome 2d graphics are Style, Detail, Fluidity, and Variety. I’ll tackle each of them in a separate post.
Thanks for reading. I hope you stick with me while I figure out what I’m doing.

-Ben OUT.

August 19th, 2006 | 2D, Graphics, Self-Commentary | 3 comments

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