Panzer Dragoon Orta

I would like to write something about Panzer Dragoon Orta but I can't. I'm having a little difficulty. As though games with mechanics from a time when game design criticism ended like this:

GRAPHICS 88%
SOUND 76%
PLAYABILITY 82%
LASTABILITY 71%
OVERALL 81%

...can't really be described with any greater sophistication. This was a time when the main criticism of a game review, apart from simple disagreement, was "...but the sub-scores don't average the overall score!"

Panzer Dragoon Orta is from the Xbox era, and is part of a sequence born on the Saturn, but its roots are back with early Sega arcade classics, and it proudly continues that trend. It's an on-rails shooter where you lock on targets and dispatch them in salvoes while dodging or shooting down counter-fire – like After Burner, but on dragons.

I've talked about judging visuals according to more interesting criteria that simply "quality" before. Orta's detailed, lots going on, no slowdown - good for its time, but all this is just not fucking up in a representational game. (Representational of dragons: what that word means in terms of game art is another matter.) The imagery is stunning: all steampunk air-warships and bio-engineered snakes bursting through waterfalls.

Although the gameplay lifts from After Burner, the look is pure Space Harrier. Part of the drive to progress lies in wanting to see something amazing and novel. (Level 6, "Forbidden Memories", is a highlight: an archive and its security systems, depicted as hallucinated tunnels and spectral guardians.) Most games don't reward you in this way - modern games are notoriously grey- or brown-tinted - and it wouldn't necessarily be improved by HD. You're being dazzled by a different sort of spectacle, more Pan's Labyrinth than Spider-Man. Instead of impressing us with scale, like the promise of a thousand elephants, we are slowly inching towards being impressed with inventiveness.

High Definition

My housemate bought a big TV a couple of weeks ago - a 50" LCD rear-projection. It is, by the tenets of conventional interior design, too big for the room. However, it with an HDMI feed from an Xbox 360, it resembles a portal into another world. I was a bit cynical about HD, but the improvement over a normal widescreen CRT is huge. Everything's sharper, brighter, more real. Graphics are a dazzling sensory experience again.

The effect on my housemates has been especially interesting. They've gone from occasional dabblers to fanatics. Games have been bought, battle stratagies refined, cars compared. Some aliens abducted my housemates and replaced them with gaming doppelgangers.

The new TV has changed the games that get played. Forza 2 has become a staple, with much track study and pimping of rides. GTA4, which was a previous favorite, has been ignored. Bioshock is a new and popular purchase, as is DOA4. Table Tennis is gathering dust. Lego Star Wars has only seen the light once.

It's not yet obvious which games are most improved by HD, but I guess it's those that depend on sensory output to impress the player. GTA4 is a funny game whether explosions are crisp or not. Funny is funny: you only need to see what's going on. With Forza, the pleasure of driving fast is proportional to the fidelity of the image presented. Ninja Gaiden 2 is surprisingly underwhelming - DOA4 in comparison is stunning.

That's not to say the HD approach is wrong - in fact, I'm glad there is a school of "gorgeous" visual design in games. It doesn't even require the creation of vast textures and meshes, as Geometry Wars shows. It will be necessary for some games to develop a more informative style in contrast. The only surprise has been the games that seem to need it most.