SAM'S PROFILE

I've got Street Fighter 2 HD on my XBox, and the online play in that's keeping me quite content. Besides new characters, graphics and maybe some balance changes, is there any point to me getting SFIV?

I'm grabbing this now =)

This whole topic could be cut down into a short statement so easily.

Yes, you should always make your graphics suit your settings, unless you're going for a planned irony. If you have a dark setting, with an equally dark story and characters, with events as dark as the midnight sky (minus the moon) then your graphics should reflect that, being dark, dingy, and downright demonic!

If your game is quite arcadey, then you can have simpler graphics, which stand out, and immediately communicates important information to the player - always making everything as obvious as possible (ala Fenrir). Of course, in that kind of game, the level design should also reflect this.

If your game is quite cute, fun, and innocent, then chibi graphics are fine. Chibi games can be fantastic, simply because someone's not droning on with a monologue about the purpose of their existence every five minutes, or preaching about the terrors of war. (But please no hyperactive girls as your main character - ala Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemy)

If your game is more along the lines of your average RPG, then most people just go with edited Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest graphics. I feel you can use First Seed/ REFMAP/ Mack & Blue/ pick-one-damned-name-for-it-already-and-stick-to-it graphics, but I think that RMVX's graphics are just that little bit too cute for such a story.

For someone to say there's a lack of graphical resources for any 2D game engine is plain ignorant. Look around any spriting community, such as the Sprite Database, or the Spriter's Resource, and you'll quickly find hundreds of ripped and custom sprites for your amateur, non-profit, made-for-the-Hell-of-it game created on an often illegally translated or cracked engine.

If you're making your own, 100% legitimate game, on a legal copy of a legal engine, then you should be making all your own assets anyway. That includes sprites, music, everything, so complaining about there being a lack of premade resources avaialable would again be pointless.

Along with this, always remember where we came from. Sure, we now have detailed heroes walking around a stylistic world, but Link used to be a few green pixels poking around some other single coloured enemies. The game was still fun though. Garphics do not always make a game, but you can get them horribly wrong if you use the wrong style in the wrong situation.

I've restarted it. I must've redrawn the first page ten times now, and I still can't get it to look quite right. Once I have the first page done, I'll fly through the rest, but that first page has to feel right before I can continue.