DP ServBot
11-14-2015, 05:41 AM
http://forum.digitpress.com//images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles/1/7/9/3/9/8/4/exploring-the-peculiar-magic-of-screenshots-1447405091498.jpg/EG11/resize/300x-1/format/jpg/1793984.jpgSure, they may be called video games, but I was brought up on the pictures. The screenshots. Split-second snaps of moving, musical, playable things; peering into worlds somehow changed through being fixed to the page.
Yes, occasionally there'd be a VHS cassette bundled with my monthly video game magazine, which was impossibly exciting and - to greener gamers - probably sounds inconceivably outdated, like conveying E3 news by smoke signal. But on the whole, it was a different time. My visual map of gaming was less montage than collage, a network of screenshots scatttered across the printed constellations of magazine page layouts.
This was not some charmingly quaint video-lite, but something else altogether, and I reckon the first images I ever saw of Metal Gear Solid 2 were intimidating in a way a Let's Play video couldn't be. For a start, just looking at them made it clear that the visual shorthand of older consoles - the 32-bit era's unique impressionism of painted darkness and pixel edges - had been replaced by the shipping tanker's cold-steel realism; actual light, believable surfaces, not just textures. And of course Snake himself, fringed by a rain-drop halo and bearing an unbelievably face-y looking face.
Read more… (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-14-exploring-the-peculiar-magic-of-screenshots)
Yes, occasionally there'd be a VHS cassette bundled with my monthly video game magazine, which was impossibly exciting and - to greener gamers - probably sounds inconceivably outdated, like conveying E3 news by smoke signal. But on the whole, it was a different time. My visual map of gaming was less montage than collage, a network of screenshots scatttered across the printed constellations of magazine page layouts.
This was not some charmingly quaint video-lite, but something else altogether, and I reckon the first images I ever saw of Metal Gear Solid 2 were intimidating in a way a Let's Play video couldn't be. For a start, just looking at them made it clear that the visual shorthand of older consoles - the 32-bit era's unique impressionism of painted darkness and pixel edges - had been replaced by the shipping tanker's cold-steel realism; actual light, believable surfaces, not just textures. And of course Snake himself, fringed by a rain-drop halo and bearing an unbelievably face-y looking face.
Read more… (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-14-exploring-the-peculiar-magic-of-screenshots)