A moment of clarity: gameplay over graphics

I actually love COD4. The controls are precise, responsive and well planned. The action is so frantic and intense, despite it's scripted shooting-gallery nature. I had a blast playing through. The harder difficulties are pretty unforgiving. Multiplayer is fantastic too.

 

A lot of this argument hinges on what you classify as gameplay. The Curse of Monkey Island has you clicking one of three icons on different bits of scenery. Without the visuals and the music and story, it would be an extremely pants game.

I know. You missed my point in my rhetorical question. Tetris = lots of replayability, right? ICO = next to no replayability. Therefore ICO is a poor game and Tetris is a great game? My point is, can you only measure a game's greatness by amount of time you replay it? ICO didn't have great gameplay, people don't return to it time and time again. Therefore it's a bad game? it wasn't gameplay that made ICO, it was the whole experience.

 

Well, let me just say this, manga, which is extremely popular, is still mostly in black and white and the attitudes in the "west" (particularly the US) towards technology and entertainment is why great products like this, this and this are rarely seen anymore. Enjoy irrelevance.

 

I'm sorry, but Beauty and The Beast sucked. it did.

 

Is Monkey Island any less good now? Not much. It's actually a perfect example of a game people shouldn't ignore just because it doesn't have cutting edge graphics.

The gameplay is a little bit weird in those point and click adventure games. You definitely don't play them because you love to click the mouse button, and a lot of the puzzles in those style of games got to be so easy they were irrelevant. They're kind of a slightly interactive cartoon where you just trigger the next scenes. I suppose at the time people really did play them for the graphics/art/animation. If they'd gone to ascii characters or stick figures the game wouldn't be so hot. At the same time, the game still would have been stellar if the graphics were poorer at the time. How much poorer, I dunno. It still holds up now, despite being massively graphically inferior.

 

So does the Xbox 360 and its games. See, I can do that too. The point is, what happened to cel animation in the US? Is it that cel animation is now seen as obsolete?

 

Here are two different ways of presenting chess.





Which one makes the game better?

 

At the time of its release, it did have 'cutting edge' graphics*. It was dependent on them.

Right, but they're still computer games. Which is my point, different types of games have different requirements. For some, graphics are nigh-on essential, defining the game. For others, gameplay is everything. Chess and Tetris aren't affected in the slightest by how they're rendered (although a good looking Tetris is nicer to play, just as is a nice marble chess-set over a cheap plastic effort - there's a little aesthete in everyone), where SOTC would have been nothing without its gorgeous renderings, and Monkey Island wouldn't have worked as hand-scrawled stick-figures, even if all the puzzles were identical.

* if you can call scanned art that, but it did need lots of colours anyhow!

 

This one makes chess better !

 

The way how chess is presented is irrelevant because chess is a good and solid game. That's the real reason.

Take Super Mario Galaxy for instance. The average person who enjoyed that game wouldn't care if it was for the Wii, the N64 or running on a $3000 PC. They will all tell you they ENJOYED THE GAME. Hell, you could put Super Mario Galaxy in 2D and they will still like it. If SOTC requires excellent graphics to enhance the experience that tells me that SOTC's game play is average to poor.

 

This.

Oh and replayability doesn't have to be a new experience every time you play it. You replay just because it's good. I replayed Mario and Luigi Super Star Saga at least 6 times, and it's not because it has great replay value, but rather it was the good gameplay that brought me back for more.

 

Does that make it a bad game though?

Okay, this is my cue to bow out of the discussion. If you define a game solely as gameplay, then our differences can never be reconciled. In my experiences, I have played and enjoyed some games because of the (immersive) experience, and that hasn't always been dependent on gameplay (still not defined!).

 

Monkey Island is still a good game, worth playing. I replayed Sam & Max a couple years ago, and it was still great. Plus, hand-scrawled stick-figures is an extreme. If the graphics were really terrible, then it would definitely hurt the game in a bad way. But if they were a poor, or mediocre, I don't think it would have harmed the games that much. That's all I'm saying. Cutting edge or otherwise top-notch graphics are nice and everything, but really matters is the substance of the game. That's not to say that having absolutely horrific graphics is ok.

 

People did buy Infocom text adventures, and, especially for the time, they sold a lot of them. Which means that you can essentially have good games without graphics or even much gameplay.

 

I want to play a game, and have fun. Gameplay is simply how you interact with the game. The non-interactive elements wouldn't be considered gameplay. I don't want to sit there and watch some poor dialog with hilariously bad cinematics for hours on end. I could pay 10 dollars to watch poor dialog and bad cinematics at my local theater. I play a game to challenge myself and test my skills. Some test my skill physically, while others mentally. A game like Metal Slug, Contra, or Bangai-O tests my reflexes while a game like Tetris, Fire Emblem, and ROTK tests my mental skills. I'm interacting with the game in more active fashion. It's what you do in the game, that is gameplay. There is of course do and bad gameplay.

Let me go back to COD4 again to show my point. The gameplay is all about shooting everything in sight. That was fun for the first time. I was experiencing the thrill of combat. That was based on a first experience. It was a combination of shooting and chaos that adds to the immersion and gameplay.

Now comes the bad news, the game is scripted. The feeling of experiencing the chaos of combat rears it's ugly head. Their focus in immersing the player ended up killing the gameplay. Instead of interacting with a well designed level, great AI, and fast paced action, I stumbled, literally, into victory. A section I was stuck at in the harder difficulty was suddenly won because I found the right place to walk into. Everything died and I looked around confused since I barely shot anyone this time. The more I play, the more I notice the infinite spawning of enemies that could kill you, or be vanquished by simply walking into the right place. I mean, there are certain areas that requires good old fashion skills, like the final part of the Chernobyl mission where you have to defend till help arrives, but those are rare. Ironically, it was the very same mission where the scripted gameplay became more evident.

Now, COD4 isn't even that bad of a game, but even though it had a lot of immersion, it was easily broken poorer elements. I can not overlook the uneven gameplay. Immersion worked the first time, but it won't work a second time, not when the gameplay flaws start showing up.

 

That's a very important point. Neither Braid nor Super Mario Galaxy nor any Monkey Island part has poor graphics, they're actually quite beautiful. They just use dated graphics technology.

It's a bit comparable to some Japanese anime, while technically lacking due to economic constraints they may still be beautiful works of art.

 

I feel the need to chime in.
Yeah im new, and i only occasionally read this forum.
But i try to find some Wii talk that doesnt degenerate into a fanboy company humpfest.

Anyways, my take on this whole graphics vs gameplay thing really stems on one thing.

What is the MINIMUM acceptable graphics that YOU can enjoy?

I this whole world of Next gen, and HDTV and all that mumbo jumbo, no one seems to answer this question themselves. Its all lumped in either graphics or gameplay.

Graphics worshippers tend to believe that it HAS to look real, it HAS to look awesome, it HAS to have the best graphical effects or the game just looks like crap. And when they define crap its always something in the realm of "it looks like a N64 game, my snes can make better graphics" or some ridiculous over overgeneralization. And they believe people who want gameplay over graphics would love a game if it was made with stick figures if it was fun. Or they tend to think that people want to go "back in time" to the old days.

Gameplay worshippers on the otherhand tend to be more open, more accepting, but they dont define what they believe to be acceptable. So its open to so many interpretations that it gets used against them in pointless arguments.

Now i only have a Wii and my take is that the majority of the games are visually displayed as the WORST the wii has to offer. To me i dont find that acceptable. Im not big on graphics but that doesnt mean i DONT want good graphics. I WANT good graphics, because like mentioned earlier, graphics and gameplay go hand in hand. They compliment each other to provide the user the gaming experience the creator wants to convey. I mean sure you got stuff in 2d that are simple fun, but you also got stuff that are much more complicated that just wouldnt work on a 2d world.

Those old games, like from the SNES days? Those work because of the gaming style that was used (and everyone knows about them) in that time frame. You KNOW what its like and your mindset automatically "drops" the visual bar to that level of that era. You become more tolerant of it because you know of its limitations based on its age. But HOW you see that game from 1992 from the mindset of 2008 determines how tolerant you are of the game.

When you move to the age of 3d the visual bar is raised significantly but only you can determine what youre minimum visual acceptance is. I can look at a PS1 game and see how just freaking ugly it is because theres no bilinear/trilinear/aniso filtering involved so its blocky as hell. I dont know how tolerant i am of something like that. I can also see the visual differences between something like PES2008 wii and what is seen in Galaxy. And quite frankly PES is ugly (and im not much of a soccer fan) so i dont know if i can play that. theres Guitar Hero and those graphics actually seem better than PES 2008, but i find the game fun and you're staring at those moving notes the whole time so you dont really see the graphics. But you get to something like Metroid Prime 3 and i noticed that as good as the graphics are, its missing depth. Bump maps and whatnot could provide that missing depth and make the world more immersive. The textures were top notch, the enviroments were varied, the HDR bright and colorful but the world seemed flat, and i wished they implemented some kind of bump mapping effects. That would have made the game better to me. I can play red steel, the graphics are good (not great) but the sloppy controls and unresponsive sword fighting kills the game for me (i can tolerate the shooting aspects but the sword figting parts pisses me off).

Eh sorry for the long story, but my point is that i believe gameplay makes up for lackluster graphics, but isnt neccessarily more important than graphics (or vice versa). However the whole issue stems from what is the acceptable minimum and what isnt, and it vares depending on people's tastes. Gameplay and graphics work together hand in hand but its what people accept as minimum which makes or breaks a person's viewpoint of what makes a game fun.

 

The justification was that people don't go to see hand-drawn movies anymore.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2003-10-28-2d-animation_x.htm