This blog is not quite a gamebreak, but it is an accessibility break. I was recently struck by an interesting thought, and I wanted to blog about it. We are an interesting people. We do a lot of interesting things. In particular, and the subject of this blog, is the way we raise our standards, but also keep them in check in a way. I\u2019ll explain what I mean.<\/p>\n
Have you ever heard the phraise \u201cmovie quality graphics\u201d applied to video games? I\u2019ll bet you have, and in fact I\u2019ll bet you\u2019ve heard it several times over several years. You want to know how far back I heard that phraise? I heard it in a description of Mortal Kombat 1. Yes, the original Mortal Kombat, with its revolutionary use of digitized actors and such. Mortal Kombat 1, whose entire arcade imprint was only a hundred megabytes or so. Movie quality graphics.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not actually me ragging on MK1, or the quality of its graphics. My point here is that we never, ever stop raising our standards. If we did, one would have to wonder exactly what movie quality graphics are these days. Follow the trail of graphically praised games, and you\u2019ll see phraises like \u201cmovie quality graphics\u201d or the word photorealistic used quite often. Yet, graphics keep improving. Games keep expanding, and the systems that run them keep getting more powerful.<\/p>\n
This is what I meant, though, when I talked about how we keep our standards in check in a sense. We all know that progress is happening all the time, yet we are willing to hoist games on a pedestal that, quite honestly, many may not actually deserve. I genuinely think this is because we have a sort of maximum expectation. We believe in our hearts that a video game can only look and sound so good, so when it looks as good or sounds as good as we believe it possibly can, we hold it up to the highest height, only to bestow the exact same praise on the next game.<\/p>\n
And speaking of sound, don\u2019t worry, we blind folks aren\u2019t immune to this either. I remember listening to the trailer for Mortal Kombat Deception and thinking, \u201cMan! That sounds real!\u201d The game didn\u2019t sound as good as the trailer, but Mortal Kombat X, the most recent MK game, sounds far, far better than that trailer ever did. Yet still, at the time I was utterly convinced that this was it. My first reaction to hearing the fully voiced cutscenes and full motion videos of Final Fantasy X was that I was certain the game would be short, because there\u2019s no way the PS2 can handle all that. I was glad to be wrong.<\/p>\n
Again, I\u2019m not trying to send a specific message with this blog. This sequence of thoughts that I\u2019ve laid out on this page is simply something that intrigued me, and I hope it intrigues you too. We are funny folk, aren\u2019t we? Thanks for reading, keep on gaming, and continue to be awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This blog is not quite a gamebreak, but it is an accessibility break. I was recently struck by an interesting thought, and I wanted to blog about it. We are an interesting people. We do a lot of interesting things. In particular, and the subject of this blog, is the way we raise our standards, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[24,253,251,252,255,254,91],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-audio","tag-graphics","tag-mortal-kombat-deception","tag-mortal-kombat-x","tag-movie-quality","tag-photorealistic","tag-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}