Quote:
Originally Posted by Fien
Your post and some comments on the AG review are in fact saying that for many people modern graphics would detract from the experience of playing Gemini Rue. Why? The story, the characters, voiceacting, everything would still be great and have much better graphics to boot. And a less cumbersome interface.
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Fien, you are begging the question by assuming that higher resolution would mean better graphics. Low resolution is a restriction, and graphics artists have developed styles that fit within that restriction, taking advantage of its limits. Those styles have their own appeal, and saying that art in some unspecified different art style would be better is completely subjective.
I'm not saying Gemini Rue would necessarily be a worse game with higher-resolution graphics, but it would necessarily be a
different game. You couldn't just take the same art and triple the resolution: that would look terrible. Low resolution helps "trick" the eye by hiding artifacts of the drawing. Joshua's style is pretty sketchy, and the downsampling converts some of his scribbles into realistic texture. He would
at least have to retouch every screen if he was aiming for a higher resolution.
But there's more to it than that. In low-resolution, elements that are realistic and ones that are quite stylized don't clash as badly as when you can see them more clearly. And when you can see more detail, the artist has to provide more detail, or the screens look bare and simplistic. That affects how foreground elements stand out from or blend into the background, and that in turn means the screen composition may need to change. Sprites (moving characters etc.) will probably need softer edges, not to mention the animation must be very different.
So what we're really talking about is a game with completely different graphics. Now, we can imagine those graphics to be as good or bad, artistically speaking, as we wish. Without a specific proposal for what the graphics would look like, it's a moot discussion. What I do know is that within the style he has chosen, Joshua's graphics are, both artistically and functionally, very good - if not perhaps 100% perfect. Personally I have a hard time believing he would be more successful and effective in a high-resolution style, but if he was I would have no objections to it.
If we take for granted that fewer restrictions and more "realism" is always better, why stop at higher resolution? Shouldn't all adventures be 3D games? Shouldn't all comic books be photo-realistic, and shouldn't all cartoons really be live-action or CGI movies instead?
