Wellllllll? What's your favorite art style for a game (or a style you'd really like to see)? Personally, I've always liked the Max Payne dreams (in the second game way more than the first; jumping over invisible gaps until you got tired of dying and uninstalled the game might've sounded good on paper, but...). Also, I want to see more fighting games with cel-shaded 3D characters (something about the feel of Viewtiful Joe just beats the crap out of Marvel vs. Capcom's...and I think it's the 3d.) on 2d backgrounds. That's always been an interesting thing.

I thought some of the graphics in FF7 and FF8 were amazingly beautiful. (Materia pools, some of the monsters that looked like fantasy animals such as griffins, Sephiroth's character design...) Several adventure games have also had beautiful 3-d graphics, particularly in the areas of architecure and lighting effects.

OTOH I think the sexiest character designs are always 2-d anime or anthro style, probably because the human mind is very picky about whether the shapes it sees in anything labelled 'person' are just right, and it takes amazing modeller skill and huge numbers of polygons/absurdly high-rez texture maps to be able to fool our picky human-attractiveness-judging instincts as well as good 2-d art can. Like, take Sims2 - the character models are well-proportioned, the skins have nice suggestion of muscles, every user can design a face that they think is attractive, yet it still doesn't manage to look consistently great because the user-deformable face polygons don't look quite natural and the deformation ends to warp the skin of the face unpleasantly, and there's only the one body type available, you can't have slender androgynous bishounen and broad-shouldered muscular barbarians.

An then there's the question of which art is appropriate for which game. The surreal childlike scribble of the graphics for Yoshi's Island makes that game tremendously fun and personable.

Ohhhh...art deco like the building interiors of Grim Fandango. Detailed pixel art always struck my fancy as well, like the animations in Metal Slug (or any SNK game I guess).

Quote:Original post by doynax

Quote:Original post by modena
Ohhhh...art deco like the building interiors of Grim Fandango. Detailed pixel art always struck my fancy as well, like the animations in Metal Slug (or any SNK game I guess).

There's just nothing more beautiful than a well made pixelated game. No amount of cel shading could ever compete with Metal Slug..

...did you not play Viewtiful Joe or what? I don't know about you, but I think it looks wayyyy cooler to see 6 Joe's fighting about a hundred enemies on-screen, then slowing it down with "red-hot" on and laying the slow-mo zoomed-in smacketh down.

do no one like wind waker style? I really like them, doesn alienate both kids and mature

Quote:Original post by NicolasX
I really liked the style of Vagrant Story and Fable as well.

Oh yeah, I love Vagrant Story! :) The clothing designs are the best I have ever seen in a game, andthe characters designs are good too. Architecture is pretty cool... the only thing I didn't like about the game's art is the color-scheme, too grey and washed-out for my taste.