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How hard is it to take a good screenshot?
I’m a reviewer, not that you’d know it around these parts, and when I review demos or games, what I try to do, is to record video of gameplay, and then I can go through that video to pick out the showpiece screenshots. I know something cool looking happened a couple of minutes in, and I can pick the frame where it looks coolest. It’s not always about things looking cool either, if you’re trying to show a specific glitch, or what have you, it’s much the same.
Hitting that screenshot key is always going to be missing the moment. Now I don’t have any swanky equipment that lets me get high definition video from consoles or any such thing, but fortunately the website just likes to include small or cropped screenshots in the review. No clicking a screenshot to look at the big version… so my ‘play the game in 640 x 480 while running FRAPS video capture’ approach to PC games works rather nicely.
Then, I turn over many more screenshots than needed for the review, and wait to see which ones my editor puts with it. It’s the same for when I’m reviewing a film too, but then obviously it’s easier to grab a specific frame of something that’s video to start with.
Games have more variables obviously but that can be a good thing. When I’m recording video for the purposes of getting screenshots, I’ll actually play the game differently. Trying to get good angles on environments so that I’m not just shooting up someone against a blank wall.
Obviously this takes a little effort, but here’s the fun part. It’s not my job to take pretty screenshots. I don’t get paid for my online journalism so my efforts to take nice looking screenshots are above and beyond the call of duty.
What bothers me, is when I get official screenshots linked to me in press releases and they’re just god awful. I don’t mean that the game looks bad, I mean that the screenshots make the game look bad.
Here’s an example or two of what I mean.
These screenshots have been released by Konami and it’s pretty apparent that there’s something very wrong with the shading in them. The game doesn’t look remotely as bad as this in other screenshots, and they have plenty of time to fix whatever’s causing such ugly effects, yet someone whose job it is to release screenshots, let that through. Heck, there’s probably a chain of people from the person that took the shot to the person that released it.
You’d think someone along the line would have gone ‘wait a minute… this makes our product look like crap’ or at the very least someone would have gone ‘wait a minute one of that nurses breasts is totally out of focus and the other is crystal clear’.
Its fun sometimes to compare the screenshots taken for a review to the ones released before the game came out. The Matrix: Path of Neil (don’t even think about telling me I spelt that wrong… you don’t want to open that can of worms) had some of the most ridiculous, unintentionally funny screenshots of any major title I can think of.
Take ‘preying mantis Trinity’ here for example, or ‘Comedy fake penis leg Neil’
or ‘Neil shoots the floor while trying to look cool’
There’s another category of screenshot that I like to call ‘what’s an aspect ratio again?’. These are becoming more and more common as more games support widescreen or have unusual aspect ratios like the DS. I downloaded a trailer off xbox.com once that was compressed into the wrong aspect ratio. Way to make your game look good. Sometimes though, there’s absolutely no reason for it. Like the latest monkey ball screenshots.
Nothing like a game that has you focusing on a sphere to clue you into the fact that you’ve screwed up… at least, so you’d think.
At least this final one, from NBA 2K6 says ‘work in progress’. You could argue that it should say ‘must try harder’.
If I see another close up shot of a bizarrely glowing athlete sweating buckets, I’m going to punch someone in the crotch. That shot will always make me smile though, for it’s ‘face in pants’ what the hell is going on charms.
So please, PR people… this may sound like a ridiculous thing to ask, but stop releasing screenshots that make your games look worse than they are. It’s kind of the opposite of what you’re meant to do.
If anyone else has any favourite officially released screenshots that are either just artistically bad, make the game look worse than it is, or are just flat out unintentionally funny, please share them with me.
28th January | Reply
I definitly agree with you about terrible screenshots. My larger concern is actually the way websites display screens. Gamespy has possible the worst screenshot browser i’ve seen. Every screen is either massive or tiny, and no matter what they totally bone up the layout of the page.
However, one thing to note on those Xbox 360 screens. It is getting increasinly harder to take good shots of games because of all the shaders and effects. Most all of Xbox 360 games have motion blur which is what you are seeing in those Rumble Roses screenshots. In motion that scene probably looks great I bet. Sometimes people take shots of the motion blur just to show that its in there (in case people don’t download a video). I know a ton of the DOA4 shots feature 1/2 blurred or unrecognizable blobs for characters.
The other effect being shown is depth of field which also only works well when the game is in motion. This results in things up close being terribly blurred or out of focus since you are supposed to be looking at something further back.
However, screenshoting (yes its a word now) should be better. Play around with the camera in Project Gotham 3 and you’ll see how screenshots should be taken (albeit PGR3 lets you add effects and change the shutter speed).
28th January | Reply
I can’t take a screenshot worth a damned. I’m a game reviewer too , and if it weren’t for the fact that my editors collect the offical screens from the publisher, i’d never be able to get a review finished as mucking with screens and graphics aren’t skills on my character sheet.
28th January | Reply
it’s not motion blur, not done properly anyway, unless her left breast is going much faster than her right breast. it’s out of control depth of field you’re seeing. supposedly the entirity of her left breast is too close to the ‘camera’ to focus on. the motion blur on the diving character is fine, but it’s not just the blur, it’s also the shading on the characters, and whether it’s depth of field of motion blur it’s being done terribly if half a character is blurred and the other half is completely in focus.
28th January | Reply
Yes I was implying both depth of field and motion blur were at fault for those screens looking wonky. Its not that the engine is having trouble rendering the character models or anything about the game itself being poor quality.
I am not saying the screenshot itself looks good. But I bet if you saw the video that the screen was taken from you would not think it ugly. When the techniques they use to accomplish motion blur and depth of field are paused they never look right. You are seeing 1/30th (sometimes 1/60th) of a second. I’ve played around with the ‘camera’ mode in DOA4 and I will get the same results sometimes.