Gabriel Tosh. Enjoys music, and long walks on the beach. Also, killing people.
There are two things that Blizzard is known for – addictive gameplay mechanics – often likened to virtual “meth”, one hit and you’re hooked, your brain reduced to a mass of pixels, pulsing with a resolution incompatible with the refresh rate of your eyes, giving you the jagged edges of a world without anti-aliasing – and dramatic and fulfilling cutscenes.
When we say “dramatic” here, we mean edge of your seat, “holy crap I can’t believe that just happened” kind of dramatic, and when we say “fulfilling”, we refer to a range of awesome and satisfying things, depending on your preference and physiological makeup, many of which we don’t need to hear or write about.
Your fulfillment, how it happens and whether you need a cigarette afterwards is your own business, thanks.
But, regardless of how you experience them, you’d be dead inside to not feel something, experience something, love something you see in a Blizzard cutscene. Many of the scenes from Diablo and World of Warcraft – the “Wrathgate” cinematic, as an example – have entered geek culture lore for both their graphical and emotional impact.
That’s the crux of it, really – emotion.
If you’ve seen the Kerrigan-on-Tarsonis cinematic, we dare you to not give a crap. Try it!
Crap will be given, we guarantee it.
Even if Blizzard’s cinematics were of low-quality, with poorly-rendered polygons and jagged edges galore, their emotional impact would likely still bear you under like a one-ton man belly-flopping down onto the sad metal rowboat of your heart.
Blizzard has learned the lesson of “the story”, a lesson too few companies have bothered to sit down and study up on, preferring instead to rely on flashy graphics, screaming frame rates and a great deal of blood and gore.
Do Blizzard games have blood, gore, and the occasional bout of cigar-smoking and moonshine-swilling? Sure! Anyone who’s seen the last “Tosh” cinematic in Starcraft II knows what we’re talking about here – but these things are simply there to enhance the experience, not stand alone and encompass the entirety of the meaning.
We’re cinematic suckers, and we get very angry whenever anyone in the house – or neighborhood – or that damn plane flying low overhead to the airport – gets in the way of our maximum enjoyment of Blizzard’s latest crafted work. We want to hear every damn thing Jim Raynor says to us – on-planet or off, whether it takes five seconds on ten minutes.
Such is the magic of Blizzard, and such are the quality of the scenes they’ve crammed into SCII. We can’t claim to have finished the game, but it’s actually a case of deliberate slowdown rather than lack of interest. We’ve mentioned this before, and it still stands – it’s about savoring our first time through this thing, enjoying every last cutscene and laughing at every bad joke.
So don’t bother us, and don’t be surprised if you get a snarky response when we’re watching, re-watching, or thinking about watching an SCII cutscene.
In fact – just don’t bother us.
We’ve scene all we need to.
