Two days ago, Aeropause posted an interesting article about the colors of the next generation games. Nick Lowe collected some screenshots from several new games (Saint Row, Halo, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, and Rainbow Six) and compiled them into one image and guess what… They look brown-ish and grey-ish 😕
Dull colors?
You can read the full article on the following links:
http://www.aeropause.com/archives/2006/10/the_colour_of_n.php
http://www.aeropause.com/archives/2006/10/the_colour_of_n_1.php
I agree with the author that this is very disappointing. Console machines are able to show more than 16 million colors and yet the game developer only use the several tones of brown and grey. Well, I don’t expect to have pink helicopters or purple guns but can’t we see at least blue sky on our game?
Colorful does not mean we have rainbows in our game all the time 😉 Lucky that we still have Nintendo:
http://www.aeropause.com/archives/2006/10/the_colour_of_n_2.php
Well, most of the Western games use grey, brown, and darker color while the Eastern (Japanese and Korean) use more bright and pastel colors. Not only for games, but for other things too. For example, it’s hard to find someone using blue-marine-colored mobile phones in Europe or America. But have a look in Japan. The mobile phones there are so colorful even the ones for man, not only grey and black.
Phones from NTT Docomo, Japan
(http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/product/foma/903i/index.html)
Bright colors are only for kids and teens, that’s what Western people think. And if a game use colorful colors, most gamers would say “This is for kid.”, “Too childish”, “I am an adult, not a kid anymore”, or “This game is so gay” 🙁
This is not only about colors but also about the current trend of game themes, which are always about war, rebellion, fight, violence, depressing future, and other dark themes. The use of dark and grey colors are perfect for this genre. It makes the atmosphere more depressing, tough, and dark, just like what the game designer want for the game theme.
That’s why I like Japanese games. They use more colors and have a big variation of game themes, not just dark or war themes. Time to play my Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova 🙂
Metal Gear is made in Japan and it features the dull colors of war, based on the screen montage most of the games that the author select to review have a subject matter based on war. If you average out the colors they will be bround, just like mixing real various color paint together! Unfortunately the author is not aware of other art styles of next-gen games.
I was at the recent Tokyo Game show and there were a few PS3 titles that were quite colorful, example Monster Kingdom and Genji. Xbox 360 Blue Dragon also feature cute and balance color design on their game and not forgetting IDOLM@STER from namco featuring realtime anime cel shading for the 360 there were other but I can’t remember(^^).
But I do agree that western devs tend to based their games on subject matters such as War or try to focus more on realism. So in doing so they try to “dirty up the graphics” to give the illusion of reality. This techique has been done alot in CG films such as Jurassic Park & Star Wars. I prefer Japan devloped games such as FF, Dead or Alive or Korean online games such as Pangya. I think cutural appeal is also important so for a game to maybe succeed in the West they have to use that approach and vice-versa for Asia. 🙂
That’s right. Again, it’s about culture and the game themes 😉
And of course, if we collect only the war games screenshots, we’ll got this brown and dull color. But don’t forget that this kind of game is quite dominating the market, at least in USA (while in German, Singstar still rules 🙂 )