LogFAQs > #970732699

HanOfTheNekos posted...

In a general sense, it's not. An art appreciation class would be more likely to bolster your statements of color theory and tuning being necessary for aesthetics.

However, in taking those concepts further, you can enter a range of appreciation for things that break normal aesthetic.

A painting in all browns might look like poop to you, but it could be a representation of a rose bush seen through a certain type of colorblindness, adjusted so people without it can understand what an image would look like.

A piece of music with instruments slightly out of tune could be meticulously tuned to evoke a very specific degree of dissonance that creates audible beats in the music, meant to be a part of the composition.

There are things that are made poorly that still have artistic merit (6th grade band, for example). Or any sort of composition or digital creation that someone made, was proud of, and improved upon.

Likewise, there are things that are made well that seem to have less - however, even when talking about the era of brown games, one has to take into account settings and mood - even if it's less aesthetic, a game on Mars might feel more like it takes place on Mars if it's mostly brownish red.

The issue at hand where the disconnect is coming from is where the line of good vs bad enters play - and that's a line that is not cleanly defined in myriad ways.

In other words, I think your point is clear, but it's too wide a concept to be meaningfully applicable beyond a certain threshold.

Good post.

I will say while I see the point on things with respect to like "Mars type" environments there are a lot of games with similar styles that do this better than this one does. It just comes off as lazy here. Like I don't want to put any details in the backgrounds so I'm just gonna turn it into a homogeneous blob of color.

Compare the Glacier levels in this game to Ice Man's stage from Mega Man 1 (later MM games get much better at this type of thing, but even the first try). Same general idea but Mega Man just looks a lot more crisp-- the enemies actually popping off the background probably helps a lot to make it feel like there's life but like yeah. I just get really bored looking at Axiom Verge 2 and I don't think this is because it's doing something that people can't understand-- it's just lazy.

Also I think the shade of brown it uses in some stages should pretty much just not be used with that prominence I don't care if the stage is a sewer or underground or what. Use greys greens or different shades of brown