Here, let me put my head on the chopping block: I think graphics are incredibly important in videogames.

Before the axe falls, however, let me explain my reasoning.

First and foremost, good graphics – even excellent, bar-raising ones – will not save a bad game from being a bad game. Gothic 3, I’m looking at you; it doesn’t matter how much you tart up a whore, she will still be a whore. Unless you tarted her up as a a maid or Lady Liberty or something and she actually became one of those and ceased in her whoring, then she’d be something different – but if the shifts in appearance are merely cosmetic, then she’s still a whore. Similarly, dressing up a terrible game in the trappings of an excellent game will not make it an excellent game.

Hell, games are even disparaged for succeeding on account of being attractive and not a whole lot else – because the worst thing in the world is something that is vile and terrible that’s pleasant to look at, isn’t it? There’s something incredibly offensive about the idea of Hitler having actually been a beautiful, elegant, but coyly attractive woman.

Further, it isn’t just the graphical implementations of a game that make it beautiful and stunning; there have been many games that, while attractive and easy on the eyes, are nonetheless visually awful. East India Company, I’m looking at you – you may have been optically charming, but boy, did your interface and overall design suck.

That last bit – the design part – is where the importance comes in, and is vastly more important to me than how realistically hair follicles sway about in the setting sun. Are those human-tendrils drifting about framed by golden rays, or are they just kind of hanging around attracting computerized ions? Do the hairs caress the face of the avatar, speaking to some higher purpose, or are they merely .. just there, popping around at random?

Crysis is an excellent example of a game that succeeds on all graphical measures – as well as gameplay ones. The twisted contortions of a North Korean’s (is it more PC to just say, “Korean”?) face as you strangle him show a weird, oxymoronic care and love to design, as well as the interface encasing your visual field. The explosions, even though developed years ago now, remain among the most realistic I’ve ever seen, demonstrate not only enormous technical accomplishment on behalf of Crytek but also of their understanding of aesthetics. From a design point of view, trucks and men under grenades do not just explode without purpose – each injection of fire-red and burning-flesh orange into the visual field bring balance with them, highlight something, or merely contrast the calm blue of the sea and verdant green of the jungle.

Crysis would still be a good game if the graphical slate was wiped clean and replaced with primary colors and black-and-white smoke from the explosions – but it wouldn’t be a great game. Nomad’s often-desperate leaps from cover object to cover object to unfortunate North Korean would still be thrilling, and that first battle with the nano-suited guys would still be harrowing and demanding of the player. But really, would it be so compelling if it didn’t look as .. well, as bloody real as it does?

I don’t think so. Fallout 3 is a pretty good example of a graphically excellent but blandly-designed game; repetitive, post-apocalypse-red-and-orange environments, generic hills, and childishly violent mutant-man-explosions are pretty for awhile, but certainly got boring. The HUD, Pip-Boy or whatever Bethesda called it, was a nightmare of utility; while the aesthetic matched that of the yesterday-technology so prevalent in the game and looked nice, it was a nightmarish bore to use and the ion-green-refresh stuff became more of a hindrance than a utility, distracting from the damn thing’s purpose: to read stuff about the game. Design aesthetics, then, are about more than just looking good: there should be an actual /purpose/ to each design choice, and this purpose should innately reflect itself in the game.

A game doesn’t need, by any means, to be on the cutting edge of graphics technology. World of Warcraft certainly wasn’t, but it used low polygon counts and a dated engine to its advantage – Blizzard built a game that would run on damn near any computer, and would almost always look at least “alright” while doing so. But WoW’s beauty wasn’t in its textures – its beauty resided, and even resides, in superb color choice and shape implementation. Every set piece and costume item accomplishes something; it draws attention to an important area, lightens a dark-and-evil Whenever playing WoW, it was almost always painfully apparent to me that the guys that designed the game managed to get way further through design school than I ever did.

That’s part of my problem, I think – I was a design student. It taught me a love for aesthetics, an adoration for stuff that looked good, and that often, simple things have the most visual appeal. Right now, I’m playing two games; Heroes of Newerth, and Champions Online. While both are elegantly attractive, I’ll return to why the latter is successful shortly. Heroes of Newerth, like World of Warcraft, makes use of a dated graphical engine. In fact, it looks, at best, like a souped-up version of Warcraft III. Given that WCIII is like, I don’t know, almost a decade old or something, it’s hardly surprising that S2 games managed this – but what /is/ impressive is that they managed to retain Blizzard-level design.

Each of the almost-60 characters has a unique profile and color set, similar to the classes of Team Fortress 2; great care has gone into ensuring that each look not only unique, but are immediately identifiable when viewed by an experienced player for a nanosecond. Even when two full teams of five converge and spells begin flying, the difficulty is never in figuring out which blob of polygons is which character, and this holds true for their skills, too. Rather, the difficulty comes in figuring out how the hell to survive and maybe just maybe kill the enemy motherfuckers – and really, shouldn’t that /always/ be the difficulty in a game? Sure, part of this is because each character has, on average, only two activated skills that need a graphical implementation – but still, that’s almost 120 fully differentiated bits that, at any given time, are immediately recognizable not merely as specific spells, but of also belonging to specific characters.

I think a game that pretty much everybody in the world thought was awesome was Portal. Really, I’ve never seen a game sweep the gaming world in such a fashion – can any of us nerds hear “Still Alive” and not grin like a new father holding his newborn for the first time as if to say, “Look at how awesome this is!” Now – would Portal have even been able to /function/ without high-level design aesthetics? Would the heart cube have been half as charming if it was a mere cube, rendered grey-and-white with a heart? Would it have been nearly as panic-inducing had the final conveyor belt leading to the “cake” not looked and felt convincing? I do not think so.

Great design and well-executed visuals permit gamers to become more engrossed and, to use the buzz word, immersed in the game world. No longer are we required to imagine that we’re a chainsaw-swinging psychopath, because we can, through visual trickery and cleverness, actually be that chainsaw-wielding psychopath. This is not to say that things have to look real; Team Fortress 2 hardly looks like real-life – but just the same, everything meshes so well together that it feels like we really are a cartoon soldier rocket-jumping our way to victory.

To return: I’m playing Champions Online at the moment, and find myself compelled to continue playing, for more than any other reason, because everything looks so godamn wonderful. Nothing actually looks real, not the way Crysis’ Korean-jungle-valley-forests-at-sunset looked real – everything looks like a damn cartoon! But a wonderfully rendered and thoughtfully implemented cartoon, with just enough detail to be, inexplicably, immersive.

And it’s a weird feeling to feel immersed in a world of repressed-homosexuality supermen, fascist-fuck-half-man-soldiers, and cyborg-ninjas. The last, incidentally, is what my character is. One of the choices I found most initially jarring was this little black “horizon” line that appears on the exterior edge of most surfaces. It’s sort of like the kind of drawings us average dudes make – every object has a clear outline. This is why most of us can’t draw a nose or a hand for the life of us – these things are defined by their shadows, not their outlines.

Yet, somehow, the outlining in Champions Online works beautifully, drawing attention to game objects and making them stand out in contrast to one another, differentiating one building from the next, and even allowing giant lightbulbs to exist without looking like giant polygons. That, really, is the huge accomplishment of the system – the game doesn’t look, generally, like a computer game. It looks like a comic book! – and this is exactly why, on a visual level, the game succeeds so well. Cryptic knew exactly what aesthetic they wanted, and the designers followed up on this beautifully.

This – an actual /knowing/ of what the overall aesthetic of a game should be – is what makes or breaks a game for me. Knowing it alone isn’t nearly enough – the designers must also be able to determine if the design actually /works/, as often – like with Fallout 3 – I find that it does not. Heroes of Newerth, World of Warcraft, and Crysis have something in common – each game knows exactly how it wants to look, and knows that the idea works.

As said earlier, wonderful graphics cannot make a terrible game a great game – but they can make it an experience worth having. I’ve found that, over the years, far too many gaming writers just love to shit all over graphical considerations for games, stating the now-cliched idea of them not being important and don’t make up for bad gameplay. We know that. Everybody knows that. But to push them to auxiliary considerations so frequently is madness – if image quality isn’t important, why aren’t ‘Graphics-Aren’t-Important’ folks still using VHS? Fallacious argument, to be sure – but I feel it makes my point, if one assumes that all new films are available in VHS as well as DVD and whatever other new-fangled formats are out now.

What I will say is this: terrible graphics, design, and overall aesthetics will, to me, ruin an otherwise good game. I thought that the newly-released indie title AI Wars was a fascinating concept – but absolutely terrible visuals made the game such a chore to play that I just couldn’t get into it. Similarly, the still-in-beta Fallen Earth had such muddied and dated graphics that, even if the game was good (it was mediocre at best, alas) on all other counts, I just couldn’t have taken it seriously. Partially, this is because I spent a thousand fucking dollars a year ago, and I want to feel like I’m getting value out of that investment and pushing the old rig as far as she’ll go.

More than that, however, its because I feel that game developers that don’t hire talented designers simply do no respect gamers. If your interface is a chore to navigate and actually makes the game harder than intended, you’re doing something wrong. If a player cannot look on-screen and immediately identify everything he ought to be able to, you’re doing something wrong. If, at least once in awhile, a player does not stop and stare in wonder and awe at a clever bit of scenery, charming character design, or a humorous sign, then your game has aesthetically failed.

Good design is eternal, and can elevate games to legendary status. Poorly designed and implemented games are temporary and illusory, even if they sell well. Look back on your favorite games of times’ past, and ask yourself: how many of them are poorly designed? If you’re anything like me, then that number is very low indeed.

by way of RPS, whom got it by way of this guy’s Twitter, whom may or may not have found it from somewhere else entirely elsewhere.  I don’t know!  Here is what I do know: that the chair can beat the pyro!  Awesome video fun time below.

This should make you so interested that you go out and play it right now!  There seem to be a good few servers running the add-on, and it looks particularly charming – may end up reinstalling TF2 just to try and kill people as a desk chair.  Or a hopping-frog.  Or a bit of wood!  Or maybe a big lamp!  Or, quite possibly, as some SCRAP IRON!

Trine tells its story – that of an undead uprising, a time of generic, difficult struggles in a typical, fairytale/unimaginative kingdom, and one of companionship from unlikely but-always-come-together-character-types-in-RPG-games. As I played through the game last night, the story seemed to become more and more irrelevant as I progressed through samey-feeling dungeon-y type places. Although the game gave me a series of wonderfully painted-looking story panels (think: the first Fable), there didn’t really seem to be much innovation or cleverness here. The characters themselves weren’t quite RPG tropes. Well, at least the wizard wasn’t – he’s a womanizing playboy, and the game finds him knocked out after ingesting a potion he thought would allow him to cast a fireball.

But not a real fireball – a fireball that wasn’t quite real, but was nonetheless real enough to impress the ladies and the nobles. Which is a lot like what Trine turned out to be – a potion for a fireball, but not really a fireball. Something to impress the vapid, face-value nobles of gaming, and not the crabby critics of the dungeons. And that’s a shame, as Trine feels like it’s often not quite living up to the promise of a physics-based puzzle game.

The shame about the fighter guy was that I found him to be largely useless. Unless surrounded and overwhelmed, I found the thief’s bow to be a vastly more reliable weapon. Due to his requirement of proximity, I found myself getting beat up a lot. I blame the engine more than anything else for this – although control of the environment and puzzle elements often was intuitive and fun, combat felt .. off. As if Trine’s combat were being filtered through a browser game or something. At best, the combat felt distracting and rarely challenging, and at worse .. it was incredibly distracting and irritating. Note that combat is easily an aspect of the game that got worse as I became trashed, although the puzzles also began to take longer and longer. This wasn’t because they were harder, so to speak, but rather that I was drunker, and leaping from one ledge to another became exercises in something approximating hilarity.

This may, of course, have been an intentional design decision to limit the importance of combat over clever puzzles – but that doesn’t mean that the combat had to be more or less static and dull from the onset to conclusion (of the 40, anyway).

Really? What sort of video game – that actually includes a character meant for fighting – gives you a boss-monster and then expects you to have no problem just avoiding him? I’ll tell you: a cocktease of a videogame.

While Trine was initially incredibly magical-feeling and engaging, this feeling wore off over time. It wasn’t the the magical sensibilities of developer Frozenbyte dissipated, but rather that the environments grew somewhat stale. The first area, something like an underground castle, was beautiful – dark and lush red carpets filled the hallways, great lion statues perched, and the sense of depth created around the 2d-platformer was really quite impressive. And then .. the party moves into a cave. And then another cave, and then a dungeon of an actual castle – but the locale feels pretty much the same as it did when you first began playing the game. I guess the color choices for the “magical” game setting must not be a very large palette. Unfortunately, the same goes for the music – while initially captivating, the music becomes so similar that it begins to blend together and really fails to indicate whether or not I’m doing something different in a different place than I was ten minutes ago. The sad result of all of this is that I felt, after playing for six hours, that I was still on the first level and had just been running about in circles.

The meat of the game is delicious and tasty, however, although you won’t find the taste palatable if you don’t like drawing blocks and lines and swinging about on ropes. Although occasionally the thug guy with a sword has to be used to solve things, I found the most elegant solutions often revolved around the wizard. While you can create objects with the conjurer and interact with them with the other characters, like building a ledge high enough so that you could use the thief’s grappling hook, I never really found it necessary. I imagine I stuck with the wizard the most because of the animations – he looks positively /magical/ when casting. I really imagine that Rincewind would have looked just like him as a younger man, and would have moved similarly. You’ll find no elaborate fireball incantations here, no, but rather a wizard pulling at the strings working the guts of the world do enact his will. It’s great stuff.

Really, I can’t give high enough praise to how great the wizard-beardy-sort looked while casting. Fantastic.

Many of the puzzles appear to be solveable in a couple of different ways, if only because the objects that the wizard can draw – a plank and a box, when I stopped playing in a stupor, although there was an as-yet unfilled skillslot – are going to end up arranged in a different way. When working through the puzzles presented, I got the impression that I was solving puzzles in a fashion not-quite-meant by the developers, almost like I was cheating and abusing mechanics to get through the game. I find that this feeling often accompanies puzzle games, but I always leave with a sense that I’m not quite getting all out of a situation that I could be. That said, I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t quite cheating. Intentionally, anyway.

Most, if not all, of these puzzles revolve around Trine’s physics engine. This is, unfortunately, a little bit disappointing, as the physics don’t always quite make sense. I realize that this is a video game, and that processing power doesn’t exist on most PC’s to simulate true physics – but it still felt like physics-lite. For example, when picking up an object with the wizard’s magic, you can’t actually throw it – when the item is released, it simply falls to the ground. This deprives the wizard of a potentially fun weapon – hurling planks at monsters. This was possibly a design decision to bar him from being an offensive force – but if this were the case, then why can I drop boxes and planks onto baddies, killing them? The only time momentum seems to be modeled is when one object is directly connected to another – like a giant, weighted fist chained to the ceiling, or the thief with her grappling hook. Oversight, or design choice? I dunno.

My fixation on the momentum modeling was almost certainly a result of having spent the better part of last week with the excellent-but-not-quite-there-yet indie game Mount & Blade, in which you live or die by the momentum of your weapon. The shift between Mount & Blade – a game with absolutely no magic or mysticism, even including the lack of potions and in-combat healing – and Trine was palpable, and I think that it amplified the magical-ness of Trine all the more. As an aside, it’s kind of weird making a physics platforming game centered around magic – systems as opposed to each other as positive and negative magnetic fields – but it generally works out. Okay so, moving along:

As in almost every other puzzle game, one must sometimes push objects around to get them where you want them. This includes things like beams blocking your way and crates, of course. The physics does weird things with this sometimes – there are multiple ((screenshot for this …)) large objects that rotate in a fashion that makes little to no sense. For example, once in awhile the player encounters a large, cross-shaped and rotatable platform. It basically looks like a large + symbol, with a smaller, perpendicular beam at each end that the player can stand on. When standing on the lower-most ledge and facing the lower branch of the cross, you can actually push towards it, rotating the entire mechanism – while this feels mostly natural in-game, it’s so incredibly jarring to see that it’s difficult to sidestep the unreality of Trine.

Before I forget to mention it: Trine, on my system, alt-tabs /brilliantly/, with almost no delay in the changeover.

Trine was more or less an enjoyable game, and the experience was certainly a valid one when accompanied by a large bottle of shitty beer. The problems that I had with it are mostly technical and minor – things, perhaps, I’d have personally like to see, although I could never quite escape the feeling that each component of the game was a lightweight version of something that could be found elsewhere.

So, the penultimate question: will I return to Trine tomorrow, sober, and unarmed with beer? Probably not.