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Column > Can Graphics Get Any Better?
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Can Graphics Possibly Get Any Better?
We're in a time, the Final Fantasy Movie has just been released. The quality of the effects and animation cannot be put down by anybody. The lifelike character models, the huge expanse of landscape, the HUGE magical effects. It worries me, and probably has Hollywood quaking in its boots, the fact that people are becoming irrelevant in the entertainment industry. If we can make actors that never misbehave on set, never forget their lines and never turn up late. Why do we pay so much to the likes of Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie?
At first, no-one could have predicted the overtaking of computers over our own workstaff of actors. Can you imagine pong on the big screen? Early signs of non-nesscessary actors is nothing new though. A long time ago, a man sat down with an idea. And now, Walt Disney is at the forefront of animation. All that requires is voice actors. Then putting cartoons into films came with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Eventually it came about that these techniques could be used to add flavour and the "wow" factor to films. Special effects using computers has also been around a fair bit. Nowadays it is incredibly easy. In 1993, graphical supremacy arrived courtesy of Jurrasic Park. You'd have to have eagle eyes to be able to spot the changes between large animatronic models and the computer generated products.
Games are no slouch either.Yeah, sure, we all love the old side scrollers. In todays world they wouldn't stand a chance, but we still hold them dear. Things have evolved. It started with dots. Games like Pong and Space Invaders had a resolution to make even TV remotes laugh. Eventually, someone had the brainwave of putting lots of these little "dots" (otherwise known as pixels) together. This was the birth of sprites. Pictures that when put in sequence with a lot of sprites could make objects look to move and animate. Gaming got hooked on these sprites for a long time. The NES and Master System all took them to a level of recognition. The SNES and the Mega Drive took it a step further with all manner of wonderful shading and art used to make the sprites. Everyone was amazed by these small moving pictures and found it hard to imagine life getting any better. Then the inventors or mode 7 technology graced the scene. They found a way of making all of the sprites into such complex patterns that the illusion of 3D was given. Pilotwings, F-Zero and Starfox all benifitted from this.
The world was a changing place, things were moving along. We had 3D-esque games that were at the forefront of technology. Then came the next step... The Playstation and Saturn were released. Primarily these consoles also used sprites, but taking detail and animation to new heights. (Poet didn't know it) Then a revolution occured. Amazing things began appearing, 3D, lovely looking 3D. The public got a hold of it, and by god they loved it! Now if your game wasn't 3D, you had your head in the sand. It took a very special game to slap the face of this 3rd dimension and still remain a favourite. Unfortunately only the fighting genre could truly manage it, with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat keeping near the top of the sales.
Then came THE 3D game. The one you HAD to have. Tomb Raider. There you have a solid game, massive set pieces and lovely looking scenery. Oh, and how could I forget, a lead female most men would give their left arm for! This showed that sprites were dead, you had to be with the future to be in the future. Even those that thought they could hold the 2D division up in it's hour of need gave this new invention a try. Street Fighter EX and Mortal Kombat 4. Both not exactly leaders, being easily beaten by the likes of Tekken. Those that once held the 2D as theirs, had strayed into a foreign land. Midway have decided that MK will stay in it's new home. But Street Fighter went immediately back to its roots with Street Fighter 3. People bought that game, showing that 2D ass-kicking, is more than a match for 3D beat-em-ups.
The N64 graced the scene with all new high polygon counts. Everything with that precise, if not annoyingly cute, sheen. Not only did Mario's face now want you to punch it, but gave you a very real feeling that maybe you could. I have not counted the number of broken televisions... Textures were smooth, and landscapes were large. This new working of 3D once again made the world stop and take notice. But still, everything had a very gamey feel to it. You could see the jagged edges of the characters, you could see that this was not a sim of real life. One game once again stepped up to challenge our beliefs. Final Fantasy VII had been out for some time. The large cartoony heads made us chuckle but still everything was choppy. This was illuminated by the pre-drawn backdrops that had characters just placed on them. It's successor more than made up for this. Final Fantasy VIII's pre-rendered opening sequence gave us a taste of exactly how far our consoles would go for us. You could see people on the screen. They were in proper proportion, they looked like people, they acted like people. Maybe they were people???
For some time after this, the revolutions died down. We saw bog standard or already done things time after time. The next saving grace was just around the corner. Everyone knew it, it was in the air, but no-one could see what was going to happen next. Consoles were not going anywhere fast, we knew this. We had already seen the amazing technical effects used in films. Toy Story had been released some time earlier and it looked smooth. This was when rumours began coming about for a next step from computer animations. Even films didn't do it. Just as all hope was fading for the next leap, we sat down, turned on the television and were sat staring at the answer. A new wave of digitally produced programs were on the air. Well surely if they can do one episode for every week, it's gotta be quite easy to do? This kick-started the console market into over-drive. Yu Suzuki (Sega) had been sat on his tod, when he also got this dream. A few years later, the gaming masterpiece, showing how real it's getting was released. Shen Mue... These people looked as good as those on the start of Final Fantasy VIII. But wait! You control them!
With the dawn of a new generation of consoles just on the horizon, we're in THE time to be around. Sure Pong was a revolution, but this is where games might just become that little bit more real. No-one can have failed to notice the screenshots of Luigi's Mansion. Though personally I find the game to be a little simple and misdemeaning, the graphics are second to none. Actually no, backtrack, they are second to one.. Rogue Squadron for Gamecube has incredibly realistic graphics. Seeing pictures of this can be an unnerving experience. How real do they want to take it? Compare the game with the film and the game comes off clearer and most realistic. That worries me. Do we really want to hand this seventy year old tradition of film making over to computers? Do we really want them to be that realistic?
Which brings me to my final point. Throughout, we have been striving to make games all that more realistic. Personally I think we have reached a peak in how good we can make them look. Now we have to make more good graphics at once. The Final Fantasy Movie received good and bad movie reviews. One of the comments I picked up on was this. The characters didn't have anything in their eyes. No matter how good they looked on face value, they lacked some "human" elements. What I have to ask you is, do we really want to lose that distinction? When it comes to a time where there is no divide, will we be happy, or will we realise that it's the biggest mistake we ever made and we have just signed away our indiviualism as a species?
© Cook Train- August, 2001 -RareDark.com
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