yeah i can only assume that he was talking about how jaggy the characters were up close, or how occasionally the darks got hella muddy. graphics =/= atmosphere though and SotC definitely has atmosphere.
I personally loved viva pinata, but i'm a sucker for color, and cuteness.
as far as MadWord, the screenshots say it all. They need to need to need to get their shaders sorted and look at the inspiration. When you look at comic books, at least, the good ones, there's usually a figure on a ground no matter how you spin it. even
as busy as they come you still have a bright character against a dark ground. sure, there's a LOT of meaningless grit involved too (as in many art forms), but when i look at their screens, i don't have a clue what's going on or what the action is. It's a bold move but it's going to fail visually if they don't put some more effort in.
I always thought the metroid series was visually
interesting, if less inspired or stylish than most.
supposedly miyamoto is interested in continuing pikmin in the next few years, that would make me happy
i tend to look to handhelds for color because you need so much of it to even see the screens well. They still have the same deficiencies that all the old platofrm had (mostly because all of their games are drawn similarly to those of the old platforms) but at least they aren't gritty and ugly.
...unless it's The World Ends With You, which is Squaresoft's way of saying "Suck it, we can live off of ports and shitty games FOREVER as long as we've got Cloud and Sora" (to be fair, their other new games, trite and tedious as they are, are cute and colorful).
new prince of persia looks good - DAMNIT huZba you beat me to it!
one thing 'm not convinced of those is that we're in a recession. Has there ever been a time period where more than a handful of beautful games were breaking into the market? it's easy to look back on 20 years of games and cry about the new ones...but there has always been the ugly mainstream and the rare few pretties.