>craftsmanship can be far more powerful than the latest hardware or software
I was just listening to the original Warcraft soundtrack for nostalgia's sake and the Youtube video had scrolled through some of the old artwork. It brought back memories of playing at my friend's house when we were kids. The game also had such nice craftsmanship--the artwork, character and themes. It reminded me of what those old games on small budgets were able to do. Something about that seems missing in today's big gaming titles.
While reading the articles over at Filfre, i ran into a quote from an early Lucasarts adventure games guy lamenting that the computer games industry had a bad habit of rebooting itself each time some new hardware was released.
Meaning that if you went from say grayscale only graphics to color graphics, for years afterwards the industry would produce glossy but shallow games. This because the game devs were more focused on showing off how far they could push their new toys than making engaging games.
And with Nvidia pushing out a new GPU seemingly every quarter, i wonder if this has lead us into a kind of "eternal september" type scenario regarding games development.
That said, there are a number of good indie games bouncing around Steam these days. Many of them taking design cues from the NES era of gaming.
I was just listening to the original Warcraft soundtrack for nostalgia's sake and the Youtube video had scrolled through some of the old artwork. It brought back memories of playing at my friend's house when we were kids. The game also had such nice craftsmanship--the artwork, character and themes. It reminded me of what those old games on small budgets were able to do. Something about that seems missing in today's big gaming titles.