The sequence is a prime example of how art design affects game's atmosphere.

I can say without any hesitation that Monkey Island 2 is more pleasing for my eyes than the new Tales of Monkey Island. That's quite an achievement for a game made in 1991. View

Yeah, Secret of Mana was great and is still today. There are so many evergreen games out there. I had really good time with Secret of the Monkey Island 1&2 as well as with Broken Sword: The shadow of the templars. View

It is obvious that games are losing their soul. I'm not saying that most games in the past have been full of soul, but the modern videogame design process is definitely more like craftsmanship than making art.

The so called hardcore games are mostly like sports these days. For example, a shooter is usually considered good by the gaming community only if it has online play with deathmatch, team matches and so forth. They are like pieces of commissioned craftsmanship: a social environment for running around and shooting things.

The high profile single player experiences are mostly very calculated in their design too. It is very rare to see truly innovative design. The reason behind this loss of soul in single player games/game modes is because a lion's share of the development money is used on the multiplayer mode and that which is left over, is ordered by the higher-ups to be very conservative and ordered in it's content. The whole process of game design is like standard factory work these days: you make this sound, you make this image, you make this animation... Again, the emphasis is not on intellectual content, but craftmanship. And the less risks a game studio takes, the more sure it is that the game proves to be commercially succesful, because the gamer audience is very conservative.

Leonardo da Vinci put it nicely: "Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art." View

The Conduit is far from being the best looking game on the Wii. Sure the engine is good, but some of the creatures are like generic plastic figures, and as you said, the real letdown are the amateurish and archaic looking environments.

The Conduit really reminds me of this game: http://www.youtube.com/watc... View

From http://www.livingislam.org/...

>>"Are you claiming that a man will eat and drink in Paradise??" He replied: "Yes, by the One in Whose hand is my soul, and each of them will be given the strength of a hundred men in his eating, drinking, coitus, and pleasure.">>

I'm not a religious man myself, but that sounds pretty good.

EDIT: WHO DISAGREED WITH ME??? Michael Jackson's conversion to Islam is old story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/... View

From the review: "Golf games just don't get any better than this". If so, then why is the score only 9/10? View

To Sidar: You said that it's easy to make a game look good when it's almost grey. True, but that doesn't mean a game with irritatingly bright colours should be given compensation if a studio made it look intentionally bad. Nor does it mean that Resident Evil 4 would look bad when the colours are saturated. I've tried bumping up the saturation and it looks still great.

The reason why RE4 looks great is because the designers of the game actually understand how humans perceive colours. In dark, the human eye relies mostly on rod cells, which do not register colours. That's why the world seems to get less saturated when direct light source is shadowed, such as on a cloudy/misty day or at moonlight. The cone cells which work well in bright light pick up colours. That's why we perceive bright lights as saturated. In RE4, the bright lights are correctly saturated and the shades are desaturated. The palettes they use are highly controlled and realistic too.

The designers of The Conduit seem to be less educated about the subjectivity of color perception and the behavior of light in general. The colours of some indoor environments are totally whacky too. As a result the colorscape and the light effects of the game are at places quite unrealistic and unharmonic. When you throw in some generic environment design, you get quite mediocre looking game, which is a shame because the engine is pretty good.

As for The Conduit having more action on-screen than RE4, please try to give some evidence for your claim. I don't recall seeing a single image of The Conduit where the number of enemies on-screen is more than five. View

To Syronicus: It's clear that Wii can do better than The Conduit. I mean, look at RE4. It's way above the Conduit level. The graphically greatest FPS of the PS2/Xbox/GCN generation was probably Black and it looked a lot better than Conduit too.*

I don't want to appear as a HVS basher. They gave it their all and that's all I can ask for. However, there are a lot better studios out there when it comes to programming knowledge and artistic talent. The reason why very few of them make games for Wii is because their talent is not best shown when designing games on Wii. That's why they make games for PS3 and Xbox 360.

If some of the craftsmanship-wise superbly talented studios, let's say Ubisoft Montreal (Assassin's Creed) or Capcom (Resident Evil 5), were given a couple of billion dollars and 5 years of developing time for the Wii, they would come up with something that looks great. Now that's not sensible for a telented studio to do, because it would pale in comparison to the greatest looking PS3/X360 games of that time. But it would definitely compete graphically with some of the first games for Xbox 360 and PS3 like Perfect Dark or Resistance: Fall of Man.

*Youtube trailers:
The Conduit (Wii): http://www.youtube.com/watc...
Resident Evil 4 (GCN/Wii): http://www.youtube.com/watc...
Black (Xbox): http://www.youtube.com/watc... View

To RememberThe357:

I think that when judging whether brainwashing occurs or not, we shouldn't concentrate on the ends promised, but the means used. McDonalds appeals to people's subconscious wishes and instincts just like Hitler did.

Btw. the Pokerap tune from the end of the Pokemon TV show episodes was forbidden in Finland and I think mostly in other Euroepan countries too. Is it currently allowed in America? I'm talking about this: http://www.youtube.com/watc... View

To RememberThe357:
You say that the fact that most of the people in US are able to avoid the brainwashing done by companies such as McDonalds proves that those people who eat McDonalds food have consciously chosen bad lifestyle. I completely disagree with you.

You see, brainwashing has never 100% penetrance in society. Even in Hitler's Germany there were lots of people who opposed the Fuhrer. Those people who were convinced by Hitler's rhetorics wanted to be evil as much those children who eat at McDonalds want to lose their health.

There are always those who are easy to brainwash. That is a fact you have to admit even if you believe that there is some sort of magical free will conflicting the natural laws which make our brains perform cognitive functions. To be more specific, our cognitive functions are based on the stimulus received from environment and the brains itself, which is a product of environment and genes.

Ronald McDonald and Happy meal are about as innocent phenomenons as Hitler Jugend.

As for videogame brainwashing, remember the episode "Chinpokomon" from South Park? View

This comment is not going to make me popular, but I disagree with your comment that "people choose to live bad lifestyle".

The truth is that children in USA are brainwashed by advertisers to be hyperconsumers of their products and some of the type of advertising that is allowed in the USA is forbidden in all other countries in the world. Some of the brainwashers are game companies, others include companies such as McDonalds. Here's a good article of the issue: http://findarticles.com/p/a...

The reason why the brainwashing isn't banned yet in the USA is because the politicians in US who decide of these things are tied with the interests of major companies. View

What kind of game project do you think he's working for? View

If I understood the article correctly, it truly is 120 feet long and that's why they only used a small portion of the screen. From the article: "Unfortunately, due to it being 120 feet long, it has a ridiculous aspect ratio that's not designed for regular things like TV or video games, instead acting as a strange art space most of the time. Because of this, we could only use one chunk of the screen." View

Yep, it's "My life for Aiur", Aiur being the homeworld of the Protoss. Starcraft had some excellent voice acting btw.

Funny thing is that I read the "I am Error" line from Zelda before I studied english, and since I didn't know what it meant, I just thought he had a super cool name. Almost as cool as Noob Saibot in Mortal Kombat. View

Looks very epic and atmospheric. The facial animations could be better though. View

To ThatCanadianguy420: The news is old and was even featured on this site about a month ago, which is why it shouldn't be approved. However, a new trailer will be shown tomorrow in a pre-premiere of Max Payne movie in Finland, as the story states. Max Payne hasn't been shown anywhere in the world yet and neither has the new Alan Wake trailer.

CViper: The information drought has lasted 2 years, not 10 years. I think there's nothing wrong that a finnish game studio supports a finnish game mag/site. Thomas Puha, the editor who wrote the finnish article, wrote about the news to 1UP too:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsS...

Puha has also written for Gamefan magazine, ign.com, Electronic Gaming Monthly, GMR and the Official US PlayStation Magazine. View

This is the lamest "news" I have read on this site. View

This article was about first party games. I'm curious about these numerous first party hardcore hits for the PS3. Could you name the ones you think top Nintendo's offerings?

IP stands for Intellectual Property View

I had predicted that all next gen consoles would have built-in flash memory instead of hard drive, because it's fast, silent, reliable and energy-efficient. Now it seems that there is even better alternative coming up in the near future. We'll see when this becomes the next big thing. View

Forget this post View