sephfire

Interactivity and art have gone hand in hand for a long time. Robert Rauschenberg was one of the best known artists in American history, and he experimented with all kinds of interactive art. Paintings that could produce sounds that the viewers controlled. Layered, painted discs that the viewer could rotate to change the composition. Here's an example: He's not the only artist to explore this sort of thing, but he's one of the most famous. It always seems funny to me when people insist that art can't be interactive. I'm not sure where they draw this conclusion.

Reading that Blizzard reply, I'm even more confident in their artistic direction for this game. I can't wait to get completely sucked in when it comes out in like five years or something.

He's written about the gaming webcomics issue (particularly his issues with CAD) before. Quite an interesting read. He mentions his own terrible webcomic in a footnote at the bottom.

I like the edits, but I still think Blizzard's painterly look is really cool. I don't see it as an issue worth complaining about. Or petitioning over.

This week brings us a fun little change of pace. Gaming Webcomics

This is great news. Let it go.

Again, I don't mind the new color palette, but these edits here look pretty nice too. Perhaps perfection lies somewhere between the two. Or perhaps we've only seen two areas in a much larger game and should just drop all this silly speculation entirely.

The comparison shots I posted don't really prove anything (I didn't make them), but it does help to show that the new Diablo look isn't completely "WoW-ified." As far as we know.

For perspective. Personally, I dig the new style. It's very painterly, in a way. And I imagine we'll be seeing more gritty environments as Blizzard shows more anyway.

Given time, the internet will complain about anything.

Now THIS is how you announce a new game. I've barely played the older Diablo games and even I got chills.

Another distinction worth making: "Art" vs "artistic medium".

The usual distinction people start making is that games are a commercial art, not a fine art. Personally, I feel that people write off the value of commercial art too hastily.

The "message" does feel a little blatant as the story progresses to new settings, but I like that Pixar doesn't sit there and beat you over the head after introducing the place. It just becomes the setting of a delightful fiction story. After the initial shock, it just sort of fades to the background and lets the characters shine on their own. I thought it handled the whole thing pretty well. All of that aside, Wall-E is one of the most amazing works of animation I've ever seen. I don't deserve to work in the same field as these animators. But darn if I'm not going to try anyway. And Presto was awesome.

Well crap.

Right. God of War 1.5. That's what I meant. I have no idea why I typed "2". I did. Now I want to play them on a tiny screen. ... actually, it's probably best I don't have access to Disgaea on the go. That game has a way of consuming my day. Disgaea 3 is already going to destroy my productivity in a few months.

I was so perfectly content to not own a PSP for such a long time. Now with God of War 2, the FF Tactics remake, Disgaea 1 remake, Crisis Core and now THIS game, I'm starting to get all ... "want-y".

So that's what was going on. I kept staring at iTunes and thinking "there's no way this mix is seventeen minutes long." Great work guys. Good to see you around still, Zeratul.

I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that image is actually in the game somewhere.

I feel the same. I think MGS4 has really refined Metal Gear stealth experience. There's still room for improvement, definitely, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sneaking experience.

The Escapist knows that Yahtzee is their claim to fame. They're just trying to advertise their stuff in the one place they know everyone is looking. Seriously, at least 90% of their site traffic probably hits wednesday at noon.

MGS4 is definitely passive storytelling, but I'm not entirely convinced that passive storytelling in games is a bad thing. It's very easy for us to make broad assumptions about what games are supposed to be. But they're still such a young medium. There's all sort of untapped potential in games. To shoehorn games into a narrow concept of what they should be would stunt the medium's growth. I think there's room for the completely immersive storytelling like Half Life 2 and the passive cinema stories of MGS and Final Fantasy. At this point, what developers should really be focusing on is adding decent writers to their staff. If you can't put a decent story together, it doesn't matter how you tell it.

Yeah, Yahtzee is an SA goon. He doesn't post there terribly often, but he does pop in occasionally to reply to people.

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Compared to every other Guitar Hero game and Rock Band, GH3's hammer-ons were veeeeery forgiving. They gave you a very wide margin of error in your timing. Guitar Hero 2 and Rock Band are more strict, requiring you to be a little more precise. Guitar Hero 1 hammer ons were almost impossible. Personally, I kind of enjoyed the forgiving nature of the GH3 system, just for the way it made seemingly impossible songs pass-able. Through the Fire and the Flames would be three times harder on the other games.