Does anybody take creative risks with video games any more? For this article in Computer Arts Projects magazine, I was commissioned to look at games that are pushing the boundaries of visual design.
Last year was a fantastic year for video game design. Thanks to the HD capabilities of the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, game characters, backgrounds and objects were sharper and far more detailed than ever before.
Some games even stood out thanks to their striking visual design. Consider the ‘destroyed beauty’ of Gears of War 2; the sterile, high-contrast futurism of Mirror’s Edge; or Braid, which used the impressionistic artwork of David Hellman to memorable effect.
PSP oddity Echochrome, meanwhile, challenged players to guide an artist’s mannequin through bleached, space-twisting M.C Escher puzzles.
So what’s next? While today’s titles are powered by increasingly sophisticated middleware, it’s not the mathematical cleverness of Epic’s Unreal Engine or Havok Physics that will ultimately turn heads.
It’s going to be the visuals. But in an increasingly crowded market, 2009’s wannabe classics need to do something different to catch the public eye.
Take Namco Bandai’s Afro Samurai, for example. Based on a Manga comic by Takashi Okazaki, the game is a head-on collision between two distinctive styles – Japanese feudalism and African-American pop culture.
Like the recent Afro Samurai animé series, the game draws upon the voice of Samuel L. Jackson and a hip-hop score by Wu Tang Clanner RZA in its pursuit of cold-blooded ‘cool’.
The article goes on to cover MadWorld for the Wii, Bioshock 2, Resident Evil 5, Heavy Rain and the stop-motion animation of Cletus Clay.
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