Looks aren't everything...

Looks aren’t everything….

The new consoles are coming out with even more amazing power to create even prettier visions of 3D computer rendered beauty right before your very eyes!  Who cares?

Graphics have an important place in digital games.  After all, you have to be able to see where you’re going and what you’re doing.  Even beautiful graphics can be very fulfilling.  I remember scenes in Kingdom Hearts that made me mist up, and the immersiveness of the visuals did, in fact, go great lengths to draw me in.  

But graphics are just the icing on the cake.  Too many gorgeous games have made zero cash because once people discovered the game was all façade, they told their friends not to bother.  And yet, whenever a new system comes out, the emphasis is still on more and more amazing visuals.  

Well I’m here today to champion the games that may not be the most gratifying to look at, but they have playability in spades.  Ironically, I happen to be enjoying a handful of these at the moment.  

Puzzle Pirates!
“Please Heather, please do not talk about Puzzle Pirates any more!!”  Too freakin’ bad.  I’ve now been playing puzzle pirates for almost two years.  Which is way more time than I’ve ever put into all other MMOs I’ve ever played (and there were a fair number) combined!  Man, Star Wars Galaxies was a pretty, pretty game.  I loved just running around the different planets to see what they looked like.  But Puzzle Pirates I can still actually play.  It isn’t a lush beautiful world.  It’s populated by characters that look like Playmobil toys.  Why, it isn’t even 3D!!  But it is still a barrel of swash-buckling monkeys!

Snail Mail   
This little racing-type game is fantastic fun.  You are this little jaggedy-edged snail in space (I think) who races down these courses collecting packages and avoiding slugs (I think).  Anyway, the easy and extremely responsive interface is pure joy, the variety in the tracks is fantastic, and the sense of velocity of your suped-up snail is plenty immersive without the need for epic 3D.

Nancy Drew and the Old Clock
The Nancy Drew games are not ugly by any means, but put them next to some other contemporary PC games and they certainly can look – dated.  But I’d happily trade in the epic landscapes of Myst V or the gritty realism of Still Life for the varied game play and intriguing puzzles of Nancy Drew any day.  

Slay
A buddy of mine turned me on to this neat little strategy game.  The rules are simple and easy to grasp, but beating those little pixely enemies on the “clever” AI level is very tricky!  (I haven’t even tried “very clever”).  Not so tricky though that you don’t think there’s a chance.  Which is exactly what makes the game so compelling.  The graphics might look like a serious throw-back, but the gameplay is engaging and fun.  

Now, there’s nothing WRONG with having beautiful graphics, as long as the game underneath can back it up.  But I want to point out that all the above games are PC games.  I would suspect that it would simply not be possible to create (i.e. have published) a game for consoles which have sub-par visuals.  Which make the production costs higher, etc etc.  Fortunately there are still those putting out great games on a smaller budget who have the guts to try to persevere.  

So if there’s a point to all this rambling, it’s something like this: enjoy your beautiful graphics, but don’t take them as a major selling point.  The more you explore the world of games while being able to keep an open mind about how games “should” look, the more the gaming world will have to offer you.