Although I do understand the notion of trying to please everyone with a well-rounded video game that no-one is unhappy with, I think they captivate people in a different way. When I was playing Shadow of The Colossus, I was absolutely enthralled by the whole design of the game - not just the etheral visuals, but the enivironmental sounds, the subtle changes in the world as you moved between areas, and the awesome feeling when clinging on to a stone giant's fur in order to have a fighting chance... It was a very different overall feeling than I remember having from most video games. It's an amalgamation of many things from different senses, rather than just the visuals of a painting or the witnessing of a movie, so it's not really like it.
But if movies really can be classified as art, then I don't understand why games can't be. A lot of people work on both, (as is also the case with music, and no-one has a problem with calling music art), most movies have to have some commercial success; unless the only movies viewed as art are independent movies with no hope to gain any profit.
But that said, I don't remember a lot of games that were more art than great entertainment. But this genre of entertainment is still growing up.
I was born in 1983 and played with Legos helluva-lot when I was a kid. I never knew anything but the pre-made packages, and I would at first carefully build the models according to the manual.
But quickly I got bored of those creations, took everything apart and built something completely different. I'm sure most kids would do the same - or at least I hope they would.
I disagree in saying that 128kbps is a hopeless bitrate no matter what, didn't you ever learn to never say never?
What all the people developing codecs over the years have been doing is create better algorithms to squeeze more quality into those 128kbps - sure, 128kbps sounds very badly in the typical, ancient mp3 compression, but that doesn't mean it sounds bad in all other codecs.
Besides, 'testing samples that are all 128kbps' and 'finding the best sounding samples first and then seeing what bitrate it was' are two sides of the same coin - you're just wasting time and work in coding everything in so many different bitrates and then trying out the quality of each.
Though it would of course be interesting to see how the codecs would fare in 64kbps or 80 persay. I wouldn't bother with the higher bitrates, because as we go into them they all begin to sound about the same, and approach the sizes that the lossless codecs are getting to in their highest compression settings - besides, I think it's relatively safe to say that those considering lossy formats at all are trying the most to save space (and thus venturing towards the lower spectrum of bitrates).
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But I can't really hail Keita Takahashi as some new Game Designer God until he comes up with something not-Katamari Damacy.
:/
I do understand his desire to do the katamari sequels himself rather than seeing someone else at Namco possibly sodomize it
Although I do understand the notion of trying to please everyone with a well-rounded video game that no-one is unhappy with, I think they captivate people in a different way. When I was playing Shadow of The Colossus, I was absolutely enthralled by the whole design of the game - not just the etheral visuals, but the enivironmental sounds, the subtle changes in the world as you moved between areas, and the awesome feeling when clinging on to a stone giant's fur in order to have a fighting chance... It was a very different overall feeling than I remember having from most video games. It's an amalgamation of many things from different senses, rather than just the visuals of a painting or the witnessing of a movie, so it's not really like it.
But if movies really can be classified as art, then I don't understand why games can't be. A lot of people work on both, (as is also the case with music, and no-one has a problem with calling music art), most movies have to have some commercial success; unless the only movies viewed as art are independent movies with no hope to gain any profit.
But that said, I don't remember a lot of games that were more art than great entertainment. But this genre of entertainment is still growing up.
I was born in 1983 and played with Legos helluva-lot when I was a kid. I never knew anything but the pre-made packages, and I would at first carefully build the models according to the manual. But quickly I got bored of those creations, took everything apart and built something completely different. I'm sure most kids would do the same - or at least I hope they would.
I disagree in saying that 128kbps is a hopeless bitrate no matter what, didn't you ever learn to never say never?
What all the people developing codecs over the years have been doing is create better algorithms to squeeze more quality into those 128kbps - sure, 128kbps sounds very badly in the typical, ancient mp3 compression, but that doesn't mean it sounds bad in all other codecs.
Besides, 'testing samples that are all 128kbps' and 'finding the best sounding samples first and then seeing what bitrate it was' are two sides of the same coin - you're just wasting time and work in coding everything in so many different bitrates and then trying out the quality of each.
Though it would of course be interesting to see how the codecs would fare in 64kbps or 80 persay.
I wouldn't bother with the higher bitrates, because as we go into them they all begin to sound about the same, and approach the sizes that the lossless codecs are getting to in their highest compression settings - besides, I think it's relatively safe to say that those considering lossy formats at all are trying the most to save space (and thus venturing towards the lower spectrum of bitrates).
Hurray for Strange Loops! hahaha:)