Older games like Pacific General took care to depict the “Polynesian” standard configured in the mid-20 th century, to which our current image of the beach is beholden, contrasting its vibrant and relatively complex color palette to the duller and much simpler one used for European theaters of war in Panzer General.
We’re there to claim a territory, and the beach is the (beautiful) frontier which allows it. After all, we’re not there to enjoy the aesthetics, we’re there to burn forts to the ground and kill enemy fleets and soldiers. The wilderness of roaring seas and hostile weather do not exist: the relative agency of Nature is erased by sheer human will, and only other humans disrupt the pleasant scenery. And while it does consider different climate settings, the wintery versions of northern beaches still have clear-blue, calm and steady oceans. Panzer General (1994) Welcome to ParadiseĪge of Empires II: Definitive Edition made the otherwise rudimentary (but still nice to look at) beaches of the original into an isometric version of the global beach photograph.
#War of beach charector free
This eternal season lingers in our imagination as a time of leisure and a space of play, in which the border between land and sea becomes an equally timeless playground, away from the anxious tick-tock of the work schedule, our bodies free from many a social constraint (just try doing a cartwheel in a busy street of a major city at midday and notice the looks you get).īut what happens when that play is rigidly structured into a game where freedom is of a different kind? In strategy and tactics games, whether real-time or turn-based, the image of the beach has its utopian associations transformed, and is actively reconfigured as a site where pleasure is only to be had in death. It suggests that at the beach, it is always summer.
What unites all these images of the beach, apart from style, is the lighting.
If you do a quick Google image search for “beach,” it might strike you that most of the photographs, whether taken in Panama or Ireland, are crafted similarly: sun, sand, some trees, maybe a lone recliner looking outward into the ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
