Remowned

As some of you may know, I currently serve as Editor-at-Large at industry trade publication Gamasutra.  Today, we ran a piece of mine looking at the idea of subtext in games, with an examination of titles such as Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Ico, No More Heroes, Full Throttle, and BioShock.  Here’s an excerpt:

On the surface, Full Throttle is a badass neo-noir biker murder thriller with hard rock music (on that level alone it is already more novel than most game premises), but underneath it is a melancholy reflection on the American frontier and the inevitability of invasive industrialization.

If you have any interest in a dialogue- and puzzle-driven game, Full Throttle isn’t overbearing or preachy in the least, but there’s a lot to chew on. Its subtext is essentially literary, hinging on classic themes of American fiction.

If you like, go check out the whole thing.

A couple of years ago, I was alerted to this gorgeous concept artwork taken from the development process of Fumito Ueda’s wonderful PS2 game Ico. It reminded me of the “sketchy” renderer from the well-known NPRQuake project, and I wished somebody would make a full game from the ground up optimized with this kind of art direction. Imagine how amazing that inset scene would look if it suddenly burst into motion, with a cel-shaded approach taken to the hard-edged shadows and maybe subtle animation on the hatching lines for objects that are moving.

Though it’s not quite the same thing, it looks like at least one team is doing something along those lines. SEGA Game Studios Japan is working on Valkyria Chronicles for PS3, an alternate history 1930s tactical RPG with some real-time elements. One screenshot is inset right, and I have a second and third as well.

Even though the overwhelming majority of games shoot for photorealism, or something approaching it, however unsuccessfully in most cases, I’m glad to see that even on today’s powerful systems not everybody is automatically going in that direction.

Still, I’d like to see this sketch concept taken further, to the more high-contrast, hard-shadowed look of that Ico concept art. It seems like it would be a perfect match for the downloadable services, where a low-cost title benefits more from the hype of interested hardcore gamers than it would amid the vast retail sea. With titles like Echochrome, flOw, and Everyday Shooter, Sony in particular seems interested in funding experimental projects such as that.