Chris

Well, people don't seem to mind holding books to read the words.

What, the GBA game?? It got ok reviews, nothing even close to Riddick.

Well, clearly it's just more of a combat-based game.

Exactly. That was my point about accountability. Games just don't really have to worry about the backlash.

Well, I don't know about that. I'd say the theme is very common in popular music (Rage Against the Machine, tons of punk music, etc.), and extraordinarily common in popular music of the 60s and 70s. Also a lot of the non-superhero genre comics (and some of the superhero ones too) deal with that theme. There are tons of fiction written in that spirit as well. I haven't watched TV in several years but as far as I remember it also tends to be more common in TV drama than in Hollywood. However, I do think it tends to be at least a bit more common in video games than in most other mediums, and I think one reason for this is that video games are the form of entertainment least dependant on story (with the obvious exception of music, but it's really not a valid comparison), and so video game designers/writers don't really have to deal with the "consequences" about making such controversial material in the same way that, for example, Hollywood producers would. In the video game industry, accountability tends to be more about violence in general than about violence targeted towards the government--I mean, we hear more from the media about prostitutes getting killed in GTA than about police officers getting killed. My point about low dependency on story is that government conspiracies in games don't really have to be justified or explained in any sort of meaningful social context; they can sort of just be laid down as a backdrop for the game. Now, sometimes they are meaningful and valid, but the accountability that would be held to a screenwriter or director or an author of fiction is not the same as what is held to a video game designer. This is, I think, one of the possible reasons the government conspiracy scenario is so common: it's easy to do, it's very compelling (governments certainly have the capacity in real life and in the public consciousness to be shadowy and manipulative), and in the long run in terms of a game's success, it doesn't really matter. If a game has a fairly shallow but serviceable plot and the gameplay is rock-solid, it's still a good game. This is not a criterion that can be applied to other mediums. The closest comparison is music, which (not coincidentally, I think), probably features the second-highest amount of anti-government sentiment. If music is well-constructed and well-written, it's pretty much good regardless of what the message is. The message can broaden the fanbase or increase the music's relevance, but it doesn't really determine the quality. The same is true for games.

Adventure games haven't really undergone any major fundamental changes. Today's best adventures, such as The Longest Journey, play pretty much the same as the old-school 2d adventures. The most "evolved" adventure games these days aren't counted as real adventure games by fans of the genre (things like Beyond Good and Evil), so for that classic puzzles-and-story-and-nothing-else feel, the old ones deliver about the same as the new ones. On the other hand, the FPS genre is radically different than it was ten or fifteen years ago. Technological improvements as well as more elements of character and plot have put the genre in a very different place, so older entries feel more dated. Games like Doom and Quake still deserve their place in gaming history for being revolutionary for their day. That they no longer provide quite as satisfying gaming experiences does not diminish that.

Definitely a trend, or at least a common story element. Conspiracies make for easy plots, and who better to orchestrate a conspiracy than the government?

It makes me depressed.

That's sort of cheesy, but also totally awesome. If they do it right the game should have a really urgent and compelling feel. I can't wait.

Pigeon porn comes into every discussion.

Awesome obstacles courses come into every conversation.

STAHP IT! STAHP IT! SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUTTTTTT UUUUUUUUUUUUUPPPP!!!

Funny you should mention this guy now. I just picked up Freedom Fighters (which is a blast, by the way) and particularly enjoyed the music. I was planning on searching for what else the guy has done when I saw his name in your thread title.

Hey, believe me, I'm with you. *nervously peeks around for Jim*

The touch screen is actually pretty cool (if not by any means revolutionary), but the two screens seem extremely redundant and contrived. And even with the touch screen I suspect Nintendo will get the most mileage out of it and third party developers won't have quite as much to offer. That seems to be the way it always goes with Nintendo's crazy-ass innovations.

This has got to be the first time in history that a film-licensed video game has critically outperformed its movie counterpart. The film has been almost universally panned, whereas the game has been almost universally acclaimed. Craziness!

Oh, there always are. You've hung around AG enough now to know that...

There's not really any way for us to do that without you playing it. I can explain why I think it's so beautiful, but if you've seen shots and don't like it, seeing it in motion is the only thing left really.

If I recall correctly, most people were excited about it. Sure, there were the requisite hardcore fundamentalists, but I remember most of the Zelda fans I knew looking forward to Zelda 64, as it was called while in development.

Yes, you're obviously missing something.

The point is to achieve a 2d look. That seems kind of obvious to me. Have you seen Wind Waker? It's certainly one of the most gorgeous games I've seen, and the art direction is amazing.

I agree, but I think that no matter what photorealism will continue parallel to whatever other styles become trendy. I was not trying to equate technological advancement with photorealism, but I will say that photorealism is furthered with more advanced technology, whereas certain other styles do not rely as much on increasing graphical capabilities.

There's no way I'll buy any of them at launch, but if I had the money for one I'd get the PSP. DS looks way too gimmicky and silly to me, and N-Gage is obviously worthless.

Well, the problem with this example is that the current Hitman/Silent Hill/whatever "style" you're talking about is the one un-stylistic style, if that makes sense. The developers are going for absolute realism, so their goal is clearly laid out for them, and they will be able to work towards it as the years go by. Those crazy foreheads and crazy hands are just roadblocks on the way to an eventual style, not really the "style" itself. You're talking about technological limitations, not a style. It's like saying that the style of early 90s cartoony games was big pixels. I would disagree, saying that big pixels were just a side effect the technology had on that style. The Hitman people are just going to make their next characters look slightly more realistic in the next game, and maybe they won't have the crazy foreheads. This isn't abandoning the current style, it's just improving it to work more to the obvious goal of photorealism. As much as styles in games have obviously cycled around throughout the years, I think we're in a pretty stylistically diverse period right now. The "realistic style", if you can call it that, has sort of been chugging along the entire time. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released in 1992, tried to make the characters as realistic it could with a fixed resolution of 320x400. Some of its 2d adventure contemporaries did not shoot for that goal; they took on their own more cartoony styles. As the years went by the realistic characters (including stuff like Tomb Raider, if you forget about certain...unrealistic parts of Croft's anatomy, as well as stuff like Gabriel Knight 3, SSX, and a thousand more examples I annoyingly can't recall at the moment) got more realistic, and other styles swirled all around them doing their crazy thing. Now the realistic characters are in the same boat as all the ones before them: they're obviously supposed to look like real people, but they're not there yet. The problem with this generation of Realistic Video game People, as you point out, is the crazy-ass death mask thing, as a result of the character models being super realistic but not quite realistic. As far as your hypothetical future game in which you receive critical acclaim for constructing crazy-foreheaded Hitman characters, I suspect you're right that you could do that, but I also suspect that if we were to take that game out of the future and look at it now alongside Hitman, Hitman's characters would still look more realistic. My guess is that your characters, utilizing future technology, would be able to reproduce the crazy foreheads so well that it would look quite deliberate and part of the character design, whereas in Hitman's case it's messy and obviously just a side effect of lacking technology. Anyway, I agree with your point (seriously) about there not being a right and wrong way to do things, and I even agree about style cycles, but I think the "realistic" thing can't be approached in the same way as other styles, which are conscious artistic decisions. The realistic deathmask/foreheads/whatever thing is just a side-effect.