Scenery Porn/Quotes

Somewhere deep inside my brain my little reviewer voice was gabbing off about the level design being unintuitive and confusing, but I hushed him because it just looked so damn nice it didn't bother me.

—Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw on Crysis, Zero Punctuation

Lila Tournay: This isn't art. This is cottage porn.

—Dexter, The Dark Defender

You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an
active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging
out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the
farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving every-
thing an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering
sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone. The walls are hot to
the touch, and the thundering of the volcano drowns out all other
sounds. Embedded in the jagged roof far overhead are myriad twisted
formations composed of pure white alabaster, which scatter the murky
light into sinister apparitions upon the walls. To one side is a deep
gorge, filled with a bizarre chaos of tortured rock which seems to
have been crafted by the devil himself. An immense river of fire
crashes out from the depths of the volcano, burns its way through the
gorge, and plummets into a bottomless pit far off to your left. To
the right, an immense geyser of blistering steam erupts continuously
from a barren island in the center of a sulfurous lake, which bubbles
ominously. The far right wall is aflame with an incandescence of its
own, which lends an additional infernal splendor to the already

hellish scene. A dark, foreboding passage exits to the south.

—ADVENT, for room 126.

On the other hand, movies like Avatar were actually shot with a 3D camera, and though people may bicker about how shitty the story was, they have nothing but praise for the 3D and the visuals. Even people who thought it was a piece of shit thought it was a beautiful piece of shit. Like Treasure Planet. Seriously, get that movie and watch it with the sound off.

—Cracked, 4 Reasons 3-D Movies Don't Have to Suck.

Tycho: It's a pretty striking piece of technology. It's like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting.

Gabe: Yeah! And then killing all the beautiful people inside it.

—Penny Arcade, on Mafia II

Neat! *click!*

—Bender, Futurama

I tend to find backgrounds can really be the difference between setting the mood and missing the mark completely. With color this adds a whole different level of perspective. Not only do you have the colors themselves to consider but the saturation and tone. The blend and contrast. How the colors relate to each other in the entire composition.

—Naarie Kermie (creator of Ears for Elves) commenting on a filler strip