Doing it With Style: Age of Empires in PC PowerPlay
Also, FarCry 3!! Looking forward to that.
So I actually got two articles out of Age of Empires: Online. The second one is now available for your reading pleasure in issue #196 of PC PowerPlay. So that's also my first magazine publication, congrats to me! (Self-congratulation on one's own blog: 30 Narcissist achievement points!)
The article is one of the new 'Perspectives' column that PCPP are attaching to some of their reviews that David Wildgoose describes as 'criticism.' In this case, I'm examining the nature of AOEO's art style. Its an interesting issue given that the art style of computer games is so often relegated to 'graphics' and measured in objective terms like number of polygons and draw distance. Here's the first paragraph:
In art forms other than videogames, the pursuit of high visual fidelity or verisimilitude is but one style of art amongst myriad others. In videogames, this pursuit of a visual realism is the de facto standard, and anything deviating from that is ‘artsy’ and somehow on the fringe. Even this discussion, which highlights the artistic style of Age of Empires: Online as an interesting factor worth exploring in particular, can easily be seen as positioning the ‘normal’ way of making games look realistic at the centre.
Now go and buy a copy of the magazine so I can continue writing these things!