haha, my livejournal strikes again (sorry Bob!)

*sigh* Okay, so if you read around the internets for Zelda impressions like I do, you might have noticed a particular trend among people that Twilight Princess "sucks" or that the graphics are horrible.

I see what they mean, I do not agree.

Complain #1: "The beginning is slow and boring (first two hours), Link's ass looks like Oprah's"

Well holee shit, lemme guess who this is coming from (aside from Luke Smith at 1up) This person has played all Zelda games ever and goddamn right he doesn't need a fucking tutorial. How dare they!!! True, the beginning of Twilight is slow because hey, heres the Wii, a new system aimed at a new generation pf players and at people who haven't played games before. Do you think they need a dose of tutorials? Well, yeah you fucktard. Matter of fact, so do you cause if you hadn't noticed, its got motion controls in and last time I checked that was a new thing in the industry. If you're a Zelda fan, you'll skim trough the tuts in no time and move on to the real game, which is about 70 hours ... but fuck that, lets base our judgment of the game on the fucking tutorial. Awesome

Complain #2: "The graphics suck! WTF is this, the Game Cube? Resident Evil 4 and Wind Waker looked better"

The rebuttal to this has several factors. One, the person who complains wouldn't understand art direction if it hit him in the face with it and probably thinks of Halo and WW II games as pieces of fine literature. No game will ever look better or worse than Wind Waker for a simple reason: Those graphics were tailor made for that game. The graphics in Twilight are not worse, but rather they demand different things from the hardware ... actually scratch that. Twilight demands a vast amount of effort from all parts of the machine: the texture memory, the draw distance, the polycount, etc, etc.

Wind Waker however, required less texture space and could afford to put more into the draw distance and modeling ends, which is why you have vast nothingness (the sea) and then very intricate towns/dungeons. Twilight attempts to have everything going on at the same time (traveling with your horse across a full view of Hyrule, way bigger than the world in Wind Waker, etc). Hopefully you see what I mean. The comparison with RE 4 fails as well because the games have a different focus, RE 4 is slower and has less going on at the same time, hence allowing the game to have more detail.

Another obvious comment is the breathtaking art direction this game has. What makes graphics better? Awesome shaders and real time hair simulations or a variety and richness of colors, designs and compositions that are new, original and inspirational? I would take Zelda with less polygons than Halo or Gears of War any day of the week. Mostly because you don't need more polygons in order for a game to be beautiful. I mean hell, in my opinion the most beautiful games of the year were Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XII and Twilight Princess and none of those were on next gen hardware. Its like they say, you cant polish a turd, people notice.

Last detail to mention on the subject of hraphics is that Twilight is a Game Cube game. It doesn't use the Wii power at all and you may ask "but why not add more detail since they took an extra year in order to get the Wii controls working?" Fair question, three words:"different production teams"
In video games, the art team needs to have the graphical assets done waaay before the game is done, so that the engineers can do their job. So what I mean is, the artists finished all their work when the game was still a Game Cube exclusive and were moved on to a different project (most probably Smash Bros., if the rumors are true) Then the engineering team probably got divided, with some of them on new projects and the rest focused entirely on the new control system, adding widescreen and 480p support and of course, giving the localization team plenty of time to do their job (which also takes months of your time) To give you a practical example, on a yearly game like Tiger Woods we need to be done with the art about 3 months before the engineers are done. Twilight took four years to make, so you do the math :)

Complain #3: "Zelda has never evolved. Its always the same shit over and over again in every entry. IE: Its gay"

Another tricky one. This serving of bitchiness usually comes from the Microsoft fans who are blinded by the fact that Halo 2 only added dual wielding and that Halo 3 so far adds ... 3 new weapons. A Zelda game by nature cannot be the same game every time because its own nature changes constantly. Zelda was always a mixture of all the games out there, elevated to the 10th degree. You can fight, explore, talk, fish, fetch, save the girl, have the girl save you, etc. If you make a game that changes all that ... then what the fuck do you have left? Zelda covers pretty much every genre, so bitching about that should be considered more a critique of the state of the industry than the game itself. Lets see, to my knowledge, Twilight adds horseback fighting, motion sensitive controls, a remote aiming system, a world larger than Russia to explore, the more ambitious/adult storyline in a Nintendo game yet and COMPLETELY changes the art style and content from the previous Zelda game... you call that lack of innovation? Shit, as a game artist let me tell you about how much shit gets recycled from older games, you know how many Wind Waker assets they used in Twilight? Lemme guess, NONE. But yeah sure ... its the same crap, whatever. Nevermind the fact that in any FPS what you end up doing is always pointing to a head and shooting it, but since that person in particular likes doing that 328354634384534876 times, then it becomes, OK, totally awesome and acceptable.

Another argument that people use against the originality is that they say thats its the same shit as Ocarina of Time. Well holy fuck I thought that was the whole point! I mean, didn't everyone and their grandma say thats what they wanted when Wind Waker shipped? "WE WANT MORE OF THE SAME" they yelled out loud, and lo and behold that Nintendo actually fucking listens for once and makes the evolution and perfection of Ocarina of Time and, what do people do? Bitch. Of course this comes as no surprise, already I hear complaints about how people want Kid Link back and thats OK, its human nature to wish for what you dont have. I understand that gamers are shallow people, if the art budget for Twilight was the same as Gears of War and Link had 50,000,000 polygons on his left butt cheek alone, shiny skin, shiny clothes, shiny pubes and more strands of hair than any TV can handle the hardcore audience would have proclaimed the second coming of Jesus, Miyamoto (who didnt do anything in the game, btw), Gandhi and whatnot. I comprehend it, but it still makes me bitter because people don't understand how hard artists and engineers work to push the limits of the hardware just to hear some prepubescent asshole proclaim that "the graphix sux lol"

But to finish this crap, if somebody comes up and says he hates the game cause he doesn't have fun. Then awesome, I can totally respect that. The problem is that in games everybody finally became a critic. Your opinion is the best and anyone who doesn't agree is a stupid fuck fuck. This editorial made a really excellent point when mentioning that game reviews are on the way out ... because the person who reads them doesn't want advice whether he/she should buy "x" game or not. All they want to hear is whether the press agrees with him (awesome!), or does not (OMG LOL THEY SUK)

Alright, I'm done venting. Whats up?

Last edited by Xavi on November 19, 2006