Above is a video of de_vangogh, a custom Counter-Strike level made by famed CS mapmaker Nipper. It’s a rather interesting bit of work—look at the way the under-saturated, oil paint-like textures complement the use of Starry Night as a skybox. Crazy!
Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to play Counter-Strike in a Van Gogh painting, because that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not even really saying that I want games to approach visual styles more vigorously, because all evidence says that things are getting better and better in that department. But looking at this it occurs to me that there aren’t any games that really look like this, which reminds me that despite all of the jumps in graphical fidelity, we still haven’t seen everything yet.
After playing about a half-dozen gritty photo-real games in a row, it’s nice to have reassurances like this, and to then go look the comic book stylings of Super Turbo HD Remix or the sketch anime of Valkyria Chronicles to have it further reinforced.
Where are the post-impressionist games? They’re coming, you can count on it. In the meantime, I’m going to sit here and dream one of my favorite dreams—that Square Enix finally gets around to remaking Final Fantasy VI in the painterly style of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art, with its bleak beauty and hand-drawn artifice the perfect foil to that game’s story of fragility and loss.
Thanks to Tom Chick’s wonderful blog Fidgit for the find.
