Golden Axe:Beast Rider

[Strider77]

this is to bad.... dave over at play has gotten to be to much. sonic was CRAP and now he raved on about this.

don't get me wrong I still love to read play more than any other mag... but the reviews I take with a large spoon of salt.

[PainAmplifier]

Some guy once told me Daytona USA was a poor game because it was too colorful. Today's gamers... *sighs*

DOH!

It's definately an issue with games these days. There seems to be a major disconnect in artwork and color in games these days. Everything either tries to go 'real' and ends up brown. Or a concious decision is made to exaggerate colors everywhere in a kind of anti re-action to the browness and you end up in a World of Warcraft explosion of Hello Kitty levels in primary color (and/or Light/shading) blindness.

I can deal with games that are intentionally dark. Doom 3 was a good example of this. It was *supposed* to be dark. And yet there were lots of spots of color. Bright LED type lights everywhere, gun explosions and bullets had appropriate levels of light and color. As did the lighted sections of the environment. Yes, it was overused, but it wasn't inapproriate or unwelcome. It was the overly repetitive survival-horror w/monster closet military/industrial facility levels that really wore the games welcome out first.

Other games like Morrowind, Oblivion or GA:Beast Rider just drove me out of my mind with the sheer brown/dark blandness of the scenery. There are others of course, but I don't think I really need to list them all. Although I recently bought Warhammer Online and I think it deserves a mention here as coming oh so close, yet missing by *that* much on getting the whole color/brightness settings in a game right. (Gameplay is a different story altogether.)

I think that 'color' in games peaked somewhere in the 32 bit era of games. Maybe not so much the 'years' that the genre existed, but more in terms of the graphical limits of that era's hardware reached a very good balance of color and 'realism' that didn't dip into the uncanny valley of light and color.

Now that hardware has passed that point, it seems like developers don't like to think that not all 'limits' on graphics in games needs to be solely the result of hardware limitations, but perhaps one should also have a art direction that knows when to say when, and when the rules should be broken. Although this may be a lost cause, as the game buying public seems to be at that stage where the latest and greatest draws far more sales than the games are actually worth. A media fad being driven by large numbers of 'first time' buyers if you will. Ones who have yet to be able to discern between what is crap and what is quality.

It's not all doom and gloom though, as I'm excited by games like LittleBigPlanet that seem to have reached a very reasonable compromise between color, light and graphics. We could just use more games like that instead of the now standard 'brownout'.

[Turrican]

zeruda

Why god, why

[Ed Oscuro]

I like the N64 Zeldas more than the 2D ones...that's not saying a whole lot, though.

[dave4shmups]

^Ok so its brown

and its 3rd Person (3D)

They did this to Rygar didn't they? (not SEGA) - Turned it 3D.

As far as I'm concerned, 3D is not a sequel to a 2D game.
The industry is still believing that 2D won't sell.

Rygar, for the PS2, is awesome, I'm hoping that the Wii port will be the definitive port of the game. Both Metroid Prime games on the Cube still look incredible.

I didn't expect much out of Golden Axe: Beast Rider-only one playable character is ridiculous. IGN gave it a 3.2:

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/920/920761p1.html

Nice job Sega, another franchise in the dumpster.

As far as the color issue goes, a lot of the games today take place in gritty war zones which aren't the place for bright colors. Although, I give major kudos to DICE with all the brightness in Mirror's Edge.