by Tone Franco

Created on: April 17, 2009

I feel dirty. Cheap. Downright traitorous. One day I was sitting there playing Tomb Raider on the Wii and I caught myself thinking, "Tomb Raider is supposed to be a pretty game, and here I am staring at a blurry, blocky mess." Really it wasn't all that awful, but I knew that I just had to power up the 360 and my eyes would instantly glaze over from the beautiful high-resolution textures. I really don't know how I became so fixated on graphics (I've been out of the PC gaming scene forever because I didn't have the interest in chasing hardware requirements,) but more and more I am finding myself placing aesthetics pretty high on my list of reasons to play a game. Maybe I'm shallow.

Then again, if I'm not sporting the latest in PC hardware then I'm not really asking for the kind of bleeding-edge graphics that will bore their way into my brain and ruthlessly assault my pleasure-centers, leaving me numbed and drooling on the couch. No, what I'm asking for isn't some epic-inspiring goddess of beauty; I'm asking for no more than the cute girl next door. Video games are an experience; the aesthetics are integral and it is too much to ask for the gameplay to shoulder the entire load of creating that experience. A gorgeous game can get by on sketchy gameplay (Bioshock, in the eyes of many,) but it's awfully tough for a solid gameplay experience to get along with shoddy visuals (try booting up most anything from the N64/Playstation era.) If we were all seeking out gameplay to the exclusion of visuals, we'd all be playing chess.

That being said, I have to mention again that it's not all about the hottest tech, the most dynamic physics engine, the most hyper-realistic lighting effects. A game doesn't have to be photo-realistic to be beautiful. Tons of games have great visuals based on superlative design. Any number of retro-styled games come to mind: N+, Cave Story, and Mega Man 9, for instance. Other games with a more modern bent can still be beautiful without breaking the tech bank, too. Super Mario Galaxy has been one of the most visually pleasing games for me in a long time, and the developers did it with a lot less horsepower than the guys that put together Far Cry.

For a lot of folks this is all going to come down to personal preference (or maybe some ideological position on the "true heart" of gaming,) but for me it's awfully hard to wrestle with the ugly, the bland and the barely adequate. The technology is there to make gaming a visually pleasing experience every time; if something is missing it's imagination, skill, and work. As a gamer, I'm going to be staring at a screen quite a lot- why keep looking if I could close my eyes and actually hope to see something better?

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