drohne said:
uh, the original prince of persia featured some very graphic death animations. this is hardly a new or uncharacteristic element.
i have some real concerns about this game, but the backlash is already getting tiresome. mainly because so much of it involves tossing around dead buzzwords like "angst" and "goth" whether they really apply or not. which, when it comes down to it, is in the something awful school of "let's trash geek subcultures that differ somewhat from our geek subculture HAHA LINKIN PARK FURRY HOT TOPIC." it's specious and moronic. you also see claims that the game's purity has been somehow tainted by avarice or pop culture. typically this comes form nintendo fans. save your moral outrage for something with a moral component. it's just games.
No. Don't be pointing fingers at Nintendo fans just because some of them have a problem with the look. If I can play Metroid, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, etc. on GC, I wouldn't volley against this game because of how dark it is. I'm volleying against the look and approach because it's not
just dark, it's slap-you-in-the-face-xtreme-angst dark.
Just because you seem to be completely oblivious to horrible pop culture references doesn't mean the rest of us are. This "X-Treme" approach has been making its way to almost every side of mainstream consumer products and marketting. It's also a stigma that is attached to the videogames now.
Even Vexx had these ties. Vexx!!
It's all too easy to make a game over-the-top and violent to help feed it to the masses. "It's just games" doesn't cut it here. This medium
has artistic sides to it, but it's examples like these that cheapens the image of the entire industry.
Let me tell you something. I have ties to a particular developer who are making a 3rd person action adventure game. Early on in the process I had a chance to play it in its early form (before any of it was shown to the public.) The art design was really great and the main character was charming in his own way. Then about a year later they tried to shop the title to the major publishers and were getting a hard time.
All the publishers (even big ones here folks) were saying that the game needed to be darker and more "mature". Soon after I came back to the studio and tried the game again. I couldn't believe it; the main character had gone from really unique to totally-over-the-top guy with freaking blades on his arms. Furthermore, they had spent lots of time not tweaking the gameplay at all and simply adding blood and what not. If you look hard enough you can see this throughout the entire industry. It makes people like myself sick to see something so potentially artistic get turned into fast food for the masses.
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