Graphical Styles

A post to accompany the poll. I was just wondering what people think about the art styles used by different video games. Which are your favourite? Which don't you like? Do you think a game should be as realistic as possible, or should each game have its own unique style? I've got some examples in case people haven't heard of any of the ones in the poll, or just want to compare:

Crysis is quite probably the most realistic looking game to date. After all, there's no better artist to imitate than the Universe itself, right?

Gears of War takes realism and makes it look a little too real. Desaturated colours and rough textures make this what I call a 'gritty' style.

Beyond Good & Evil is a great game, and if you haven't played it, you should. Its visuals are jaunty and every place, person or thing seems to have its own character.

The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker recieved some negative critisism for its cell-shaded art style. I personally thought it was beautiful.

Team Fortress 2 is a brilliant arcadey multiplayer shooter from Valve. Their art style is inspired by 1920s cartoons, and is at a comfortable point between pure cartoon and realism.

Viewtiful Joe is a fast-paced, movie-themed beat-em-up by Capcom. The graphics look cell-shaded, but with ink outlines imitating comic book illustrations.

I haven't played Okami, but from what I've seen, and what people tell me, I think I should. The visuals, and some of the gameplay, are based on Japanese brush paintings, as is fairly obvious.

Metal Slug is fairly well known as a series of wacky side-scrolling shooters. The visuals, while old-fashioned, carry a style that's near-impossible to acheive with 3D games.

Super Mario World features simple, smooth sprites and bright, vivid colours and, despite lacking detail, still manages to be full of character.

One of my favourite games of all time, Yoshi's Island was gorgeously cute all the way through. Miyamoto's idea for crayon-drawn graphics are possibly the best on the SNES.

Last, and possibly least, are the simple but colourful shapes of trancey minigames like Geometry Wars for the Xbox Live Arcade. It's a bit like being on acid, so I'm told.

So, what do you think? Did I forget any? Leave a comment, if you want.

Angst and Internet Dating

Read this.

Done? Okay.

Funny how when you look at the Maths of something, anything, it always seems a lot more bleak and frightening than it did before. Way to go, Maths.

I think a lot of blokes out there would benefit from seeing that, though. It makes me wonder how people even used to survive without the Internet. Has it raised our romantic standards, now that we have millions more potential dates? Do we rely more on personalities for first impressions, and exchange pictures afterwards? Is the time spent composing an e-mail a way of arranging and perfecting a message of our true feelings, or is instinctive, spontaneous speech the only way to convey our emotions without concealing anything? I find myself to be much more open to people on the Internet - even when talking to people I know in the real world. But I can also lie a whole lot more easily.

Is it good to fabricate a façade of sorts - to engineer our ideal personality, and fall in love with people's fantasies instead of their real, boring selves? Perhaps knowing someone's ambitions from the start would mean a relationship with no nasty surprises. But if we can build an alter-ego on the Internet, could we simply trap gullible fools in our web of lies?

In truth, things are rarely extreme positives or negatives. There is no black or white, only so many shades of grey - or maybe some other colour, who knows? My point is, my questions have no real answers and are thus a little pointless. The Internet has done a little evil and a little good. I like to think it's a tad more of the latter. Like any revolution, it causes harmony and controversy, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. Which leads me nicely back to the topic of Mathematics.

If you read that link, you'll have seen how hopeless our chances of falling in love are. One blind date every week, and it would still take 67 years to find an ideal girl.

But do you know what would be worse than going 67 years without a girlfriend? Finding the most perfect girl in the whole world only to have her march off with someone better and more attractive than I am. That would be pretty lame.

... I'm sorry, I'm just being a bitch.

Acta non Verba

So, I finished Battlefield: Bad Company a few days ago. I suppose I'll tell you what I thought of it, as if my opinion matters to whomever you might be.

I was initially intending to buy Call of Duty 4 for myself, but decided to spend the money instead on a birthday present for my brother. He seemed to be more interested in Bad Company, and it was a game I was quite eager to play myself, after watching some of the trailers. So, Battlefield it was. Naturally, he lost interest in the single-player campaign after a few minutes, so I completed it for him.

My Internet connection is fairly unreliable, and wasn't working when I first tried to take the game online, so I decided to play through the story mode first.

My first impression was that DICE are awesome. The graphics are gorgeous. The trees look like real trees, the tanks look like real tanks, and the people look like real people. The Frostbite Engine's lighting is entirely dynamic - as it would have to be in such a dynamic game. My only beef with the graphics is the smoke effects - although it looks pretty in screenshots, they animate rather poorly, flickering and disappearing in a rather distracting way. It's a minor issue overall, though.

If anything is more impressive than the graphics, though, it's the sound. The Frostbite Engine uses HDR sound, as explained briefly by excited Swedish men here. This generally means that the whole experience is very loud, and I reccomend you buy a pair of fancy headphones if you want to fully appreciate this game. Combine that with plenty of explosions, funny characters and a beautiful soundtrack, Bad Company could well be the best sounding game I've ever played.

The big deal with this game, though, as I'm sure already know, is the destructible environment. The Frostbite Engine can render 90% destructible environments - that's only 10% away from real life. One can literally blast a path through a row of buildings, a la Juggernaut, and even the ground itself can be blown to pieces. If you like destroying things, buy this game.

But, regardless of how much fun it is overall, there are a few issues I still have with the thing.

The game has three difficulty levels. I played through on Hard, and that was still quite easy. What made it so simple was the way that the player's character is completely invincible. Upon losing one's hit points, one is simply teleported to the last checkpoint, and sometimes given a new vehicle. The enemies, though, stay dead. So all one has to do is march into the game, kill at least one enemy, die, repeat, and the level is as good as done, and since the enemies die from so much as breaking a fingernail, anyone can pretty much breeze through the game without encountering much of a challenge. The only time the player does have to restart a level is when they've failed an objective, which can only happen about three times in the whole game. DICE apparently wanted to make these three times really count, because there is one part of the game that is so frustratingly difficult, it will make you cry, not least because the player's AI squad is pathetically stupid. Trust me, they live up to their name.

The great thing is, there are Achievements for completing each level on all three difficulty modes, and, unlike other games, I can't get them all from doing it on the hardest setting. This means I have to endure a large portion of deja vu with a side order of boredom as I waltz through the entire game again, against even less challenging enemies. Twice.

Battlefield has always been about the multiplayer, though, and, although the matches are a little smaller this time round, there's no less fun to be had. It's difficult to get bored of a multiplayer where, upon spawning at my base, I am presented with several armoured cars, a helicopter, two tanks and an artillery gun. Very difficult indeed. All of the problems with the single-player, such as stupid AI and overly forgiving difficulty levels are, of course, not present, although that's not to say my fellow players are guaranteed to be any more intelligent.

So, to draw this dull, rambling excuse for a critical review to a close, Bad Company is an excellent multiplayer game with a surprisingly deep and enjoyable single player experience. I'm quite glad I chose it over Call of Duty 4, now.

Well, I'm sorry this ended up so drawn out. I guess I have a tendancy to ramble on a bit.

f1RsT P0sT!!!1

Funny, that. I've always been meaning to start a blog, but now I have one, I can't think of what to put in it. I suppose I ought to start with some kind of introduction, but I'm not brilliant at introducing myself. So I'll just start posting, and I'm sure you'll quickly learn what sort of person I am.

Wikipedia and other informative links are provided for convenience.

You ought to know the basics, if you don't already. My name is David, but I'm often called Pocket, for some reason. I'm a 17-year-old student from England. My e-mail address is dark_pieman@yahoo.co.uk but I use my MSN messenger account to chat - that's dark_pieman@hotmail.com.

I have an Xbox 360 and a Gold Membership to Xbox Live, with the Gamertag Dark Pieman. I play Team Fortress 2, Battlefield: Bad Company and Gears of War. I've got an Xbox headset, so drop me a line if you've got a 360 and you want to know what my voice sounds like at a low bitrate - or, of course, if you wish to play with or against me. I'm not the best gamer in the world, but I'm alright.

Well, I'm happy the holidays have begun. I don't really have much else to say. Sorry to disappoint.