More Colour Please?

As I was shopping for cheap games to pick up before I started university I picked up Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 for Wii.  The game plays rather well, and at its time of release had the best FPS controls on the Wii and the best online Multiplayer, but something was wasn't quite right with it.

It’s gray, and very little of anything else visually.  Granted, graphics aren’t everything, but seeing one bland throughout most of the game is pretty strange.  After all, I’m sure there were some buildings in Germany during WWII that had some paint on them, or perhaps the sky was at least blue.  Perhaps somebody should tell game designers that the photographs from that time only came in black and white, and there actually was colour.  That’s not to say that Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 is the only offender though…

It’s all over the place.  Gears of War, one of 2006’s biggest titles touted for it’s great visuals, is gray.  Maybe it’s just me, but that is not a good looking game to me.  On a technical aspect, it’s impressive, but the lack of colour makes my eyes bleed.  Epic was going for a bleak future, but really, when there’s foliage, I expect to see some sort of green.  Not gray-brown-dark brown-black.

So we arrive at Unreal Tournament 3.  Earlier Epic Games said the game had a much richer colour palette than Gears of War did, and, well, it does.  There’s now richer grays and browns.  Playing the game on my PC, I noticed gray environments, dully coloured weapons (for the most part), and then you have brown characters.  Maybe you’ll get some dark red blood in there, but, really, it’s a fairly black and white game.  I don’t really understand this art direction for the series, as in the past it at least had what looked like the game trying to look like the real world, if not a bit futuristic.

The games above are all great games, but what’s with the lack of colour?  It can’t be the engine for the last two, as Bioshock proved to have a very rich look to it.  The one positive I can see for Medal of Honor is that it looks pretty clean (unlike the muddy mess that was CoD3 on the Wii), but it seems pretty plausible that they could do that with colour to me.  Maybe others don’t care about it as much as I do, but the lack of colour just turns me off, and I know I’d enjoy these games so much more if there was a larger color scale.

So, for those games that decide to go colourful, here’s a shout out.  Thank you Clover Studios for Okami and Viewtiful Joe.  Thanks Grasshopper for Killer7 and No More Heroes.  Heck, thank you Valve for Team Fortress 2 and Half Life (Hey, at least Half Life looks realistic in it’s color).  Thank you for putting some colour and style into your games.