Couldn't get the spoiler blocker to work so I left them all out. Would be better if I could actually say what they were, but don't want to list anything out in the open.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey - Got me a few times, no spoilers have to see it yourself.

Beyond Good & Evil - A few times again. No Spoilers, you should play it.

Crysis - Seriously one of the happiest moments I've had in a game.

Homeworld - Highs and lows, really wanted to help them get home.

The Darkness - Such a sad game.

Mass Effect - A couple of really good points.

Bioshock - Left me stunned.

by ut3, i actually meant gears, which i think nails the feel of the atmosphere with its visuals. but since most would pick ut3 over gears because it improves on the gears look, i chose ut3 for the poll.

and you don't think wic looks great, especially for an rts? i pulled the very first picture off gamespot (so i didn't even look for the best example), and i think it looks terrific. and tf2's st yle (don't know why i'm forced to spell st yle in this way...) is just absolutely perfect for the game; i can't think of another game that does it so right. plus, everything is so smooth and feels very refined - it's really pretty to look at, imo.

bioshock has tremendous atmosphere, to be sure. i don't disagree with you there. it does nail that retro 40s look perfectly.

but the game is trying to be creepy with all those crazy people with their disfigured and scarred faces muttering to themselves and yelling at you as they charge you. i can't think of any reason to do that except to creep you out (which is supposed to be part of the overall feel).

and it looks cartoonish because, well, everything's so extremely glossy and blue and green and other light, almost-pastel colors; plus, the characters themselves have kind of a cartoon villain look. they even act a bit cartoonish with the over-the-top, almost outlandish, yelling. plus, they run kind of cartoonish - don't know how else to describe how they behave but to call it cartoonish. everything looks like...hard candy (like real, eatable candy - like you could take one of the npcs and bite into him). sorry, i'm not doing a good job explaining it, unfortunately. but even the main character has plump sausage fingers, which adds to the cartoonish feel.

anyway, just my opinion, of course.fireandcloud

Hope that cut the double quote and picture out. EDIT: It didn't get everything right, but close enough.

I agree that WiC was a really great looking game, but when you're in the top-down "playing the game" camera, it's not that impressive, all the low and tight "watching the game" shots look fantastic but that's not what you're going to see on a normal play through unless you spend all your time looking at your tanks while you infantry gets pounded elsewhere.

As far as UT3 being superior to Gears, I'd agree on the technical side, large environments, better modeling, etc. In terms of aesthetics it's a definite step backwards. I think Gears looks great, but I played it on the 360 nearly a year before it hit the PC so it didn't do anything for me other than provide a new benchmark for a while.

I like the look of TF2, but it's technically unimpressive and since there's really no story the characters didn't make a lot of sense to me (I loved TF and I think the cartoon approach in TF2 was a sad step backwards for the series).

I can agree that a lot of the surfaces in Bioshock were "glossy" (never noticed any characters having any type of sheen to them), but it worked for me since the majority of the environments are metallic in nature and would have a hard shiny coat of paint on them and there is an excessive amount of neon lighting that would give the pastel look at the beginning. All that ended after Fort Frolic which I wouldn't even consider a half-way mark and things slowly but surely start to look grittier as you move along to the areas that were most affected by the revolts and that really started to show how much work went into the art direction as posters turn from advertisements to propaganda (and it gives a great feel of plunging further into the insanity of Rapture).

And just a last opinion, I think you're mistaking the "dementia" aspect of the game for "creepy". For me it was a look at the insanity that slowly destroyed Rapture and so anything that might have seemed "cartoony" at first I would now consider the effect of the people of Rapture losing their minds (cartoon villain looks, masks, strange behavior, muttering, yelling, etc.) as a result of ADAM. It's all in the eye of the beholder, but just feel like Bioshock easily trumps anything that isn't Crysis in terms of looks.

For in game openings:

Half-Life 1: Tram Ride and Walkabout before the action.

The Chronicles of Riddik: Escape From Butcher Bay (say that 3 times fast): Not quite the opening, but the march into Butcher Bay at the beginning.

Half Life 2 Episode 1: The "car ride".

Crysis: Skydiving is fun.

Bioshock: Plane crash, bathysphere ride and discovering the lighting plasmid.

Call of Duty 4: Rapelling from the helicopter onto a ship in the middle of a storm.

Oblivion: The escape through the tunnels.

The Darkness: Police Chase. Not on the PC, but still an amazing start to a great game.

Nothing but first person games in my list, their openers have the greatest effect on me I guess.

[QUOTE="Crzy1"]None of the above. I'd go with Bioshock, best art direction, best lighting, best water effects. All the rest you listed are pretty, but I don't see how you overlooked Bioshock, absolutely stunning and a good bit of fun to just walk around looking at the posters and such.fireandcloud

yeah, it was between bioshock and cod4 for the 5th spot. i personally don't think either cod4 or bioshock can compete with ut3, wic, and tf2; i think the three are breathtakingly beautiful, while i wasn't completely blown away by either cod4 or bioshock.

plus, bioshock is pretty in a lot of places, but it has a kind of cartoonish look, which goes nicely with the loony feel the place has but makes it tougher to take the creepiness aspect of the game seriously. i feel it fails to strike a good balance between the two, so i left it out in favor of the other games that i feel strike the right style while pulling off very aesthetically pleasing visuals.

UTIII is good looking and possibly the ugliest game I've ever played at the same time, the bump mapping and normal mapping were not put to good use and the coronas around every light in the game add a terrible "glare" that ruins it for me.

World in Conflict wasn't a major leap in any direction imo, it's great to look at when everything starts to go boom, but beyond that it didn't bring anything to the table that really made me stop and stare.

TF2 was nice to look at, but everthing about it was limited, the maps look the same and the same textures are rehashed over and over, definitely wins in the "fun" section, but cel-shading is nothing new.

COD4 is a good looking game that runs really well, that's about it.

As for Bioshock, I never thought the game was trying to be "creepy", and it nailed the "Ruined Utopia" look that it was trying to achieve without a doubt. Don't really see the "cartoonish" thing either except in the aspect of the lighting. Didn't feel the big daddies were all that cartoony nor the splicers even if they wore the funny party masks. For me, it's the only game in a long time that's really given me the feeling of being there in quite some time, and that's more than I can say even for Crysis.

Don't see why everyone is buying into the whole "If it's not Blu-Ray, there isn't enough space." malarky. All it is is a marketing ploy to make the uneducated masses buy something that they really know little or nothing about. The Xbox 360 is at the 2 and a half year mark and there are how many games that need you to swap disks? One? Maybe two? And there are how many that are sitting pretty on just one? Two hundred? Maybe three?

If you just take a step back and look at it, there really is no limitation from the DVD format, the dumb masses just got herded into believing it through propaganda, which Sony seems to be really good at. I don't see what could possibly be put into a normal game besides lots and lots of prerendered cutscenes that could possibly fill a DVD-9 asside from uncompressed bloat.

Just my two cents, but after games such as Oblivion and Mass Effect which have enormous amounts of spoken dialogue and still do just fine on a normal DVD, I just don't see any apparent limitation. As for a game like MGS 4 which supposedly uses nearly 50 GB, it should take a year to see everything in the game or they're just throwing a totally uncompressed mess onto a disk just to fill it.