[...]
For instance, at the time of this writing, I have a still-unopened copy of Remedy's Alan Wake, a just-released game I've been anticipating for about five years, which I'm saving for some free weekend. It's an atmospheric horror tale which reviewers assure me is on the cutting edge of non-ridiculous video game storytelling. But I'm browsing around gaming blogs and message boards and I'm getting worried. I see dozens of comments like this:
Oh-oh. What's the complaint that has everyone up in arms? Is there a cheap twist at the end? Is the main character two-dimensional? Is there a frustrating minigame where you have to carefully groom Alan's pubic hair?
No. It turns out somebody took a screenshot of the game, zoomed in 500 percent and counted up the pixels to make sure every frame was rendering at the maximum 720p resolution the Xbox 360 is capable of.
It turned out some parts of some frames weren't. All hell broke loose.
Here are hundreds of posts on the subject at gaming forum NeoGaf. Here are hundreds more at B3D. Here's 2,000 posts on the subject at the Alan Wake site.
On some level we know this is wrong, because we know to hold films to a different standard. We know that advances in CGI couldn't save the Star Wars prequels, and that pretty 3D doesn't make Avatar the best movie of the year. Yet, in the next breath after mocking Avatar fans as slack-jawed yokels easily amused by a cheap technical gimmick, we will fly into a rage if some new game's technical gimmicks aren't up to par.
Nothing else matters. Who's that woman Alan is talking to up there? Where are they going? How does it play into the story? What emotions is this scene going to elicit? Tension? Dread? Humor? HOW CAN YOU WORRY ABOUT SUCH THINGS WHEN THE ROLL CAGE ON HIS PICKUP TRUCK ONLY HAS A 19:25 PIXEL RATIO...
