泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Hit effects of video games

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
 
Hit effects of video games
 
Anyone who likes a movie probably knows Nowhere to Hide, a 1999 South Korean film. Most people, at least, would have heard of the movie title and watched the trailer with the two main characters' punch scene in the rain and the murder scene on the stairs. The murder scene on the stairs, which is one of the film's most famous scenes, is a tribute to the best-known sequence 'Odessa steps' from Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 Soviet silent film.

The reason I describe the scene tediously is that it is very useful to explain effective directing. Before explaining it, first, let me talk about hit effects led to mentioning directing.

A term 'hit effects' is commonly used in the gaming industry. Although it literally means a feeling of a hit, the point of the word is to make a gamer feel quite real watching action scenes of characters inside the game where nobody actually beat up. It is a very important factor for a fun game, especially in action games.

Hit effects include character movement, hit-effects directing, and sound, etc. Recently a lot of local mobile games focusing on actions have been released. These games show splendid images and spectacular effects which are incomparable to the previous ones thanks to the big advancement in hardware technology. But it is hard to find a game with excellent hit-effects once I play the games.

The biggest reason among lots of causes, as I think, is a problem of directing. With getting back to the 'Odessa steps', in spite of numerous meanings and undertones hidden in the sequence, one of the most important things is good editing to maximize effectiveness. Montage, a technique in film editing in which a series of short static shots and dynamic shots into a sequence, is a very important method for current films. A fighting scene in slow motion in a martial arts or action movie probably help you to understand it. The normal-speed scene after slower speed one increases much more excitement, makes the sequence look faster than it is, and particularly emphasizes the slow-motion scene, which makes motions of the fighting scene much stronger.

Let's get back to the video games. Game developers also need to make an effort to show good directing to highlight the hit effects. Of course, I don't think that this is the only way and hit effects guarantee all the fun from playing the game. But one of the reason there are many hit-effects-lacking games among recently released ones might be developers' lack of efforts to present great directing for animated hit effects. South Korea already has world-class game-resource-related techniques. But I cannot help but think that we are still very far from looking at the whole process. I expect to play an action game which will give me a thrill with exciting and intense fighting scenes.


※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
   (http://www.khgames.co.kr)

    Translation by Kim Ki-hui

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