Tag: pixels

#oneaday, Day 249: Remember Reach… Uh, Kombo

The death of a website is a curious thing. In practical terms, it’s no different to deleting a file, switching something off, throwing out a piece of technology that is no longer used. But it’s more than that. A dying website normally knows it is dying before the plug is finally pulled. And, these days in particular, it’s not just a website that dies. It’s the community that the site built. The readers who came back every day, whether they were vocal ones who commented on everything or people who just diligently read every article because they’d chosen that particular site to be their “home”.

I’ve witnessed the death of several websites I’ve been involved with either as an employee or an active community member of in my time, and it’s never pleasant. 1up.com isn’t dead, of course, but when The Great Exodus occurred some time back, the Squadron of Shame and I left the site behind and never looked back. The site still maintains an active blogging community, but it’s a shadow of its former self when I think back to the glory days of the 1up Radio boards.

Then came B4HD, a relatively short-lived retro games project that I was involved with. We had a team of dedicated writers who loved games of the past with a passion and loved writing about them. But for various reasons documented in the site’s final post, it had to close and those involve seek other outlets for their work.

Most recently, of course, is Kombo. Kombo is still there, of course, for now. But the staff aren’t. Sure, there are some who are still there diligently posting articles on the site and holding things together as the site’s last few commitments are fulfilled. But some time soon, that site and everything attached with it—the content, the artwork, the community, the recognisable writers—will cease to be.

What happens at that point? Where do all these lost souls go? Sometimes they have nowhere to go straight away, and simply have to pick another place to call home and latch on to it. Sometimes they have to start from scratch again, building a reputation from the ground up like they once did. Sometimes they float aimlessly for a while. And sometimes they immediately land on their feet and produce something awesome.

It’s perhaps premature to be holding a “wake” for a site like Kombo when it hasn’t even died yet. Rest assured that the talented crowd from Kombo are not going anywhere. That dedicated team who knew and loved their audience (even Wiiboy) and what they wanted to hear are alive, well and waiting.

“Waiting for what?” you may ask. That’s not for me to say… yet. But let’s just say that those of you who enjoyed the writing of myself, Jeff, Brad, Joey, Eric, Keri, Ryan, Mike, Matt, Joel, Dan, Ryan and Geoff won’t have to wait too long to see what we’re up to. It’s going to be great, and we hope you like it a lot.

A love of the cloak and dagger prevents me from saying anything else right now. For those of you who care, though, we’re fine. And I know that I for one am hugely happy to have met such an awesome crowd of writers, and even happier that we’re sticking together for new and exciting projects.

Watch this space for the latest.

￭

#oneaday, Day 219: I Like ‘Em Chunky

I’ve been playing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game recently. Besides being an excellently fun game that hearkens back to the golden days of the brawler, it also has some of the most adorable graphics you’ll ever see. By deliberately rendering things in low-res pixel art, it somehow manages to have approximately three thousand times more charm than the shiny brownness that is Gears of War. Granted, Gears isn’t a cartoony game, so it’s probably not an apt comparison. But even 3D-rendered “cartoony” or light-hearted games pale in comparison to some good old-fashioned pixel art.

It’s been a curious transition for art styles over the last few years. As 3D technology got better and better, the pressure was on developers to produce something that looked more and more real. The expression “if graphics don’t get any better than this, I’ll be happy” was trotted out with every new console generation. People spent hours looking down at the floor in Halo marvelling at how realistic the grass texture was. (Just me? All right then.) Putting things in higher and higher resolution was seen as the gold standard; something for everyone to strive for. Getting something running at 60 frames per second in 1080p? The Holy Grail.

Somewhere along the way during this process, pixel art spent some time being undesirable. I remember emulating Final Fantasy VI on my PC back when I first discovered emulation, and finding the huge pixels made incredibly clear on the PC monitor to be very offputting. I felt like I couldn’t see the detail. This wasn’t taking into account the fact that by the very nature of pixel art, some detail has to be omitted.

Today, though, I find myself playing PS1 sprite-art based games on my PS3 with all the filters turned off so that I can see those sharp edges. And Scott Pilgrim handles this in the same way. All the artwork is rendered in a deliciously unfiltered manner, which means you can see the “stepping” on diagonal lines, the black outlines around the character sprites and the necessary omission of detail. No-one has a nose, for example.

But you know what? It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. And I’d take a hundred games drawn in this way over another Unreal Engine 3 game. Perhaps it’s just oversaturation or “next-gen fatigue” and I’d eventually get sick of pixel art again. But certainly right now, I find it to be an incredibly attractive art style that I’m really glad to see a resurgence of. And my favourite use of HD graphics is, ironically, to render low-resolution pixel art in all its sharp-edged glory.

So you can keep your next-gen sweaty-faced protagonists. (Except Nathan Drake and Elena. They may live.) Give me a good old-fashioned big-eyed protagonist with giant fists and no nose any day of the week. KPOW!