One of the reasons that I usually don’t care either way about HD visuals is that today’s developers seem to be so focused on using that extra fidelity for stuff like pock marks and realistic acne. If that kind of “realism” was my thing, I wouldn’t have gotten into videogames in the first place. I would have chosen to write about movies, television, or some other more acne-prone form of entertainment.
That said, I can totally get behind the big, beautiful pores seen in this Street Fighter 4 fan art (by Cazetta). By juxtaposition, the realistic textures here only serve to make the impossible skull shapes and facial features found in the official SF4 art-style more evocative and expressive. I hope that more game developers learn from this lessen in graphic design and run with it. Photo-realism and cartoon-realism together can equal more than the sum of their parts.
More Street Fighters depicted in the same style, like Abel, Sagat, Gouken, and Dudley, can be found in the gallery.
Realistic Street Fighter portraits by Cazetta [Shoryuken.com]
