Toss in a few simple enemies, and there you go. ![]() It’s really just the titular boy and his morphing white blob. The focus of this month’s NWR Game Club is beautiful in its simplicity. I make it a point to hug the Blob after basically repeatedly bouncing on his face to reach a higher area. I don’t know of many games which allow that. You could, theoretically, make a scene from Epic Yarn yourself-a handmade screenshot, if you would. and make them work entirely with handcrafting supplies. The brilliant art direction manages to take familiar Kirby environments-lava, ice, forests, etc. Kirby himself, as well as the rest of the characters in the game, look like simple yarn outlines that morph and unravel and pop apart (buttons and all) with visual pop. This game would look horrible in HD because of that. It’s a beautiful aesthetic that actually leverages the Wii’s graphical “inferiority” to its benefit: yarn looks fuzzy. Everything in the game looks stitched, woven, threaded, sewn, or knit. You see, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is made of, well, yarn. You can’t say it looks hand-drawn-more like hand-crafted. ![]() When you’re talking about unique-looking games, you can’t ignore Good Feel’s second effort, either. This screenshot proves that people on a.ahem."higher" state of mental function would perhaps best appreciate Epic Yarn's unique style. Composed with more care and effort than what goes into most modern television cartoons, the intro sequence is a marvel, and makes me wish for a fully animated feature film starring Wario and Captain Syrup. I was pleasantly surprised by the fully animated introductory sequence, just because you don’t see that anymore. The exaggerated motions, timing, and reactions of the super-smooth characters are jaw-droppingly wonderful, and I can honestly say that no game before or since has managed such a unique look. The whole game looks-and moves-like an animated film. The hand-drawn sprites of the characters mesh beautifully with the painted backgrounds. Good Feel knocked this one out of the park in terms of a look. The chip DID allow sprites to expand and contract in interesting ways, but the technology was used for the BENEFIT of the art direction, not the other way around-as it should be. And, in fact, one could argue that Yoshi’s Island, with its Super FX2 chip, was actually higher-tech than DKC. 2D animation is timeless, but 3D polygons (or sprite renderings of polygons) quickly become dated. Yoshi’s Island looks as beautiful today as it ever did thanks to its “low-tech” art design. It was crafted not with technological supremacy in mind, but with clever art direction and purposeful design decisions that would not be affected by the march of technology. And indeed, though DKC was made with advanced graphics technology, it’s Yoshi’s Island that holds up better, and will continue to do so. Miyamoto wanting his new game to look totally distinct from Rare’s recent Donkey Kong Country. This game’s stunning aesthetic, which melds chalk, paint, crayon, and colored pencils together to create a rich, brilliantly colorful world, was the result of Mr. Wait, so the stork thing is true? Have I been wasting my time all these years?! The games looked stunning on the Super Nintendo, and they still look great today. The very first level of the first game-New Junk City-is a sprawling trash heap piled high with moose heads, stone spires, endless hills of tires, and a blazing sunny haze. The environments themselves are often stunning in their complexity. The transformation of Jim’s canine friend Pete is a thing of beauty. These games look like cartoons (generally-Andy Asteroid levels never looked good), and it’s largely thanks to the animators’ great sense of exaggeration and timing. The hand-drawn look of Earthworm Jim melds perfectly with its often layered background paintings. It’s becoming harder and harder to find newer games (though they do exist) that commit to the hand-drawn art style. In a month celebrating WayForward’s splendid remake of A Boy and His Blob, it seems fitting to recall other Nintendo games that celebrate simplicity. A good portion of Nintendo’s greatest hits are 2D games with a hand-drawn aesthetic, and they are among my favorite games to look at. Something like Halo or Call of Duty doesn’t look anywhere near as good or interesting to me as something dynamic and iconic like Patapon or Super Mario Bros. I’ve said somewhere before that I put more stock in art direction than technical specs.
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