May 9th, 2009
inkdick: may 09 2009 pixel beauty
The Sega Dreamcast: the most under-rated game system ever made! I love it! I admit, I personally only ever owned two games for it, the awesome Sonic Adventure 2 and the ho-hum-but-still-kinda-fun-in-it’s-own-weird-way Star Wars Episode I Jedi Power Battles, but still.
I wonder, with more and more games trying to strive towards photo-realism, will we start to see a backlash of gamers wanting more “low-tech” graphics and more simple gameplay? I’ll take a poopy looking FUN game over a pretty looking BORING game any day of the week.
I am half tempted to draw all my comics for the rest on my life like I did in panel three. Tempted, but I won’t.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:40 am
I feel like this should be in a Philosophy book. ‘There is beauty in pixels.’
June 8th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Weird, I just played a whole bunch of games on a sega at a friends today - plain, not dreamcast though, ren and stimpy, sonic, beavis and butthead. I agree. I sucked though.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Here here! Classic 8 and 16-bit graphics do the same thing for me. When I played my old-ass Atari 2600 I knew it was just a few blocks firing straight lines at other piles of boxes, but in my mind it was a cool spaceship blowin’ up asteroids. Seeing a cool spaceship for reals takes the fun and imagination out of it.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:37 am
One of my favorite games is around 15 years old. That seems to be back when people were more about how to make something really cool and exciting to play as opposed to just pretty pictures. Part of what I like about old games and comics is what’s not there: the imagination fills in the rest and makes it all that much better.
Love the comic, by the way. Been reading for about three to five months now. Keep up the great work. :D
June 8th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Dude, Jedi Power Battles is great, if only for one reason: Plo Koon. Dude was *tits*.
…and my two Dreamcast games were Power Battles and Phantasy Star Online– though I rented the hell out of Shenmue back in the day.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Ever see Kochalka’s “low-rez” art style? Looks kinda like that 3rd panel but I think it was done entirely on the computer. There was a “low-rez” Magic Boy story in the SPX anthology “EXPO 2001″ (I’m pretty sure it is in that volume). At the time I thought it was very cool.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Ha ha. You talk about the Dreamcast like it was the Sega Genesis of The Master System. You make it sound really old, which is funny, because in retrospect, it was the first of the new 3D gaming consoles to offer really pretty 3D graphics. When my friends played Soul Calibur the first time, we felt we were finally getting to play an arcade quality fighting game in our living room.
In the end, I suppose it’s all relative to the time you first started playing games. Translation: I am old. >.>
And I think “There is Beauty in Pixels” would make a great title for a an art gallery exhibit featuring nothing but amazing pixel art.
Somebody get on that! :)
June 8th, 2009 at 11:49 am
surely you read diesel sweeties? http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
June 8th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I’m pretty sure this is the reason most games I play on a regular basis, or at all, were from the early ninties. Pixels just have that quality to them that realistic graphics dont give. They can make anything either the cutest or scariest thing ever, but realistic games just cant do that as well.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
less = more ?
June 9th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
i prefer the oldies. i never went beyond playstation. i’d stick with the old final fantasies, sagas, dragon quests, and good old tetris.
i dont think we should excessively orient art to being minimalistic so as to stimulate the greatest imagination. theres just a right and wrong way or proportion in the use of graphics to convey an experience, and propose a wolrd of choices, challenges… without being just repetitive, endlessly killing…