Ben Meredith

Oh also, yeah In Bruges is amazing (just thought I’d throw in my support with the rest of you ;))

Nice article and I agree with most of the points you’ve made. One thing I would bring up is what do you think of trailers which are misleading because of an artistic choice? So they’re deliberately misleading and treat themselves as part of the movie experience, designed to give the audience false expectations that the feature can prey on to it’s advantage. I’m thinking of stuff like Cabin in the Woods which shows a trailer for a standard horror flick, then has the feature deconstruct the genre in front of an audience who expected standard horror. Or even Pan’s Labyrinth, so that the audience is already questioning the content of the film (since they expected a classic children’s fairy tale) when the movie starts to bring it’s own account of events in to doubt.

Definitely true! It would be interesting to see some side by side comparisons of all the sequels from this E3 compared to their immediate predecessors. I suppose we’ll see another leap when 4K screens come into general circulation (just like SD to HD) but still, we definitely are slowing down on that front.

Ah, I never really considered the technical side of things, good point!
Well, that “supercharged PC hardware” they tout is nothing more than a mid-range gaming rig at the moment. Of course it’s all custom built for playing games, but they just don’t have anything near the power that a PC will get you for the same price because the space limitations with consoles keeps their price/performance ratio way worse than desktop PCs.

And thank you for the feedback, yeah it’s definitely a case of keeping the graphics thematically consistent with the game you’re trying to make. As long as they serve a specific purpose within the design of your game, then I have no beef. The big problem is when developers whack in expensive graphics just ‘cos that’s what’s done.

Thanks for the feedback! I’m not saying that good graphics are bad, but the quest for photo-realism in games is. Games, like Journey often benefit from great beauty but that comes from a striking art style and good design instead of making sure you have the highest-res texture on a road! It’s more about designing graphics around the games, rather than games around the graphics.

Thanks, it’s always great to hear that people are enjoying the stuff I’m writing!

Thanks! I agree, people are just getting fed up with big, boring games. It’s easier to make games now too, so happy that people can just have an idea and (albeit with a lot of effort) make a game out of it.