Your game is ugly. This is something I want to tell so many game developers lately.
I know video games come from a world where process and rules are usually thought of first, but I hate seeing games that look like the art design was handled by a programmer who is socially inept and generally doesn't understand the world. The comedy of it is that generally the most “mature” games are the most childish. The prime example of this is Gears of War. It looks like it was designed by a 13-year-old boy who just bought his first metal album. But I guess that is their target demographic.
I can imagine the development meetings. “Well, killing stuff with chainsaws is fucking badass, but killing stuff with guns is also badass. We need to come up with a way to do both without confusing the player with switching weapons.” “Hey, you know how guns used to have those knives on the front of them back in the day? No? Whatever. We could totally have a gun with a chainsaw on front!” “The gun part would be all PEW PEW and the guy he shot would be all AAAAHH and then chainsaw part would be all RRRRRRR and the blood be all SHHHKLSH.”
This is nothing new of course. In the 90's every other game had a male lead that looked suspiciously like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, games back then were a much more modest affair. 10 people gathered in a garage and made Arnold Van Damme capable of walking from left to right and punching a ninja and everything was fine, but with the increased capability for art in games comes increased expectations.
When I was young I sketched hundreds of pictures of Megaman in my notebooks. I did this because Megaman has an interesting design. He looks like nothing that I had seen and nothing I could ever come up with. Of course it helps that Megaman has a simple design that is easy for a kid to draw, but don't confuse simplicity with good art design. There are tons of games with generic simple anime designs, which are just as boring as your typical space marine.
The game that put me on this whole train of thought was Darksiders. There is nothing wrong with the game graphically, but it is insanely ugly. The art design fits perfectly with the clusterfuck that is the game. The fact that a bunch of people spent a large amount of time to put together this Frankenstein's monster is mind boggling. There is the big debate over whether or not games are art. The fact that Darksiders is generally referred to as a good game that is completely derivative is proof that games themselves are not art. At the very least, games contain art, and that art should be good. I can't imagine how nobody during development just stood back and said, “wait a second, this is totally retarded.”
