Chad Retrogamer
(media.scored.co)
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They're only bad if you're looking at games that pushed the envelope too hard and aimed for realism over stylization. All the best looking games of the past still look great, because they aimed to be appealing over being realistic.
And even then, why is everyone so hung up on graphics anyway? Shouldn't we care more about the games being fun to play, first and foremost?
No kidding - the ORIGINAL super bomberman on the SNES with the 4 tap expansion is still the ultimate frenzy game with a group of friends.
Modern graphics and styles have only worsened the playability - never made it better
I'm completely honest. I hate realistic graphics. Retro style graphics look infinitely better to me most of the time. To me they have more soul. Can't really explain why but I'm going to pick stuff like Gothic over Witcher 3 any day of the week. Perhaps it's similar to novels. The more the author wastes on describing every little detail the worse the reading experience gets.
If I had to venture a guess, it's probably verisimilitude. Having retro-style graphics means that your brain fills in alot of gaps and sets low expectations, while a more 'modern' game with it's hyper-realistic fashion allows you to see the invisible walls much more easily.
Simply put, if a game mirrors reality in extreme detail yet doesn't allow you to do everything reality allows, you start to see the pixels wether you want to or no.
To use an odd example, it's probably one of the reasons The Long Dark, a walking survival simulator, has remained popular to this day despite being over ten years old - it's odd water-color graphic design allows for alot of forgiveness for something that tends to be very 'hard' in terms of realism in alot of ways while failing horribly in others.
That's it. You hit the nail on the head.
It's part of why I've been getting back into audio dramas lately. The imagination doing all the heavy lifting is really underrated tool for entertainment media.
I remember hearing something about how the really old games were designed for and worked with crt tech too, so they looked better. Or at least better than current emulation or when you just cruedely shove it into an lcd/plasma.
Honestly, that's true for many old games, but the problem with early 3D is that it actually doesn't look good on anything.
The issue is that it was such a major technological achievement for home consoles that everyone just assumed that it was a universal good, because it looked more advanced.
But it aged very, very, badly.
Final Fantasy 7 is unfortunately one of those games stuck in that transition period in the 90's where it really is unplayable to any modern pallet for graphics. It really would have been better in 2D, otherwise it had to get a remake.
This is because technology kept improving at an exponential rate, so 10 polygons to 100 was a feat. 100 to 1000 was amazing. 1000 to 1000 was a major improvement... so on and so forth. But not it's really getting to a point that 100,000,000 polygons isn't much different 1,000,000,000 polygons for the purposes of gameplay. And games can just look good. For 2 decades or so, technology was more important than art, and it shows how fleeting that mindset is when I still think Fable 1 looks good, and most of the other games of it's era look very dated.
I still remember someone telling me that Halo CE looked fucking horrible to the point of being unplayable while I was playing the MCC edition.
Best Art Design > Best Graphics > Most Graphics
...honestly, I remember ff7 coming out and everybody raving about how fantastic it looked...I also remember looking at ff4 on the SNES (2 at the time in the us) and wondering if I was the crazy one...
You weren't. People bought into the hype of the technology being inherently better for years while the graphics slowly improved. PS1 games are not as popular as PS2 games for a reason.
One of the best games of that era really was just Mario 64, and that was (again) from art direction.
agreed. the simplicity of the art made it look a lot better. it worked within the constraints of what it was capable of, instead of cramming as many pixels onto a polygon as possible...
Don't get me wrong some good games came out in that 3d era, resident evil, silent hill (don't ever play that game at night, alone in a house in the middle of nowhere, lmao. I did that for an hour, on a PSP for crying out loud, and I was paranoid the rest of the night), etc. but it wasn't the graphics that made them good, it was the gameplay and the story (and the sound design in the case of silent hill, lol).
That age where you go from "I need an adult" to "I need a gun because I'm the only adult left".
oh dude. I was in my late twenties/early thirties, and You couldn't have gotten me to look out a window that time night, because some creepy monster was gonna be looking back at me. it was surreal.🤣
...that being said, fuck the camera in that game. one of the reasons it took so long to play the game was because I kept getting lost in that one alleyway. I can ride in a car all day long without an issue, but the camera swinging back and forth and up and down when you go back and forth made me wanna upchuck...
ff7's appeal was never the graphics for me. Its strength is better exemplified by the scene where you find the Turks vacationing in Wutai. It was simply a compelling adventure to experience with a customizable combat system.
yeah, but that was pretty much par for the course with Final Fantasy at that point.
Don't get me wrong, if you liked VII, I wont hold it against you, but yeah... the hype about the graphics was strong when it came out...
Yeah, and I identified that hype as misplaced back then same as I do now.
The masses are easily impressed by shiny baubles and incapable of recognizing anything of substance without an authority figure telling them.
hope I didn't come off as antagonistic, i didn't hate ff7, I just wasn't particularly impressed by it, either.
...I really gotta go back and play ffiv the after years one of these days, though... the og was hard, but it was fun, and the story was epic...
It did wonders for pixelart because CRT had a natural smoothing effect.
It seems like storyline and gameplay were just so standardized that graphics comparisons were the best metric for a new game being "better." It's also much easier to point at graphics right in front of your face vs. trying to argue about whether Final Fantasy 10 or Halo had a better storyline since reasoning and arguing is actually difficult compared to counting polygons and godrays.
...I can say as someone who played the hell out of ffx and barely remembers halo that halo's story was probably better...
...honestly, final fantasy is sort of one of those franchises that should have stayed 2d... the 3d games were meh at best...
I just got done playing RDR1 after RDR2, and honestly this is a hot take but I enjoyed RDR1 more than the second despite the huge leap in quality. Not to mention the graphics actually look just as good if not better than garbage Ubislop like Outlaws.
Give me a good story, good controls, and decent gameplay loops and I’m more than satisfied. It’s really not that much to ask for a now $70 product
I just take my glasses off and the graphics look fine.
I miss Lara’s C
cupscones ☹️Pre-Disney Star Wars fans should torrent or download Star Wars: Republic Commando and use QOL mods, there's still an active-ish mod community for it. Even with dated 2005 graphics it's fun as hell to play on PC (and still looks pretty to me).
I just replayed that not too long ago and it still holds up. Phenomenal game
Why yes I am spending my Sunday evening trying to build a tiny mod for a 25 year old game that I'm still playing.
Why do you ask?
Care to share which game?
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn.
I'm just doing some simple item mods, but even that has been an odyssey given how old and obtuse the engine and the mod tooling is. It's all built by Unix nerds and optimized to run on a potato so it's been tough to decipher even as someone with a programming background.
What amazes me is people who still mod old games. I recently found a group of people modding an old 20+ year old console game I used to play. I was happy just to get the original game working in an emulator, but having a community texture remaster on top makes it feel like a new game.
Modded is the definitive way to play Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that's 27 years old. It's a fantastic game but it has some major flaws that are easy to fix with a quick patch.
A2 was my fav iteration
Man miss the DS
You don't like the first FFTA, where you play as the villain?
I'M GOING TO DESTROY THIS PERFECT FANTASY WORLD AND FORCE EVERYONE BACK INTO THEIR SHITTY LIVES
"Why?"
...>:(
All those games blur together with tactics ogre and disgaea, I just remember like the flexibility of the A2 jobs system and their "calendar" which was basically an endless mode
3D ages poorly but 2D is timeless
What I'm annoyed about is no modern console has a paddle controller. We are due for an Arkanoid remake.
Some 2D is still bad when you start going back too far. Once you start getting back to the mid to early 80's, the games are nearly unplayable by even pre-modern standards.
Until you go back REALLY far, for the original wave of video games, with treasures like The Monuments of Mars, Centipede or Round 42. Back then graphics were so basic they succeeded on gameplay alone.
Fair enough, if you can't look pretty, you're game play loop better be squared away.
The big developer stuff still holds up. There are some game mechanics that can be seem "unfair" like mob respawn triggers with no cooldowns, losing control during post-damage animation along with movement stall, and of course limited lives then game resets.
But the Nintendo, Capcom, Konami stuff is all still perfectly playable. Sega seems to have fewer "timeless" games but still a few gems.
Maybe it's my age, but I don't have a problem limited lives and game resets. At a certain point, there has to be a "get good scrub" mechanism that punishes players for failure.
I would just pair that with a difficulty slider and competent enemy design so there never feels like any "cheap" deaths.
It was probably fine back then where your only options were like 4 games and beating battletoads was at the top of your to-do list, but as someone who grew up playing my dad’s old NES/SNES/Atari games…simply throwing myself at the wall of bullets for hours on end got boring pretty quick. Some are better than others (I loved Megaman) but I specifically remember I hated playing through battletoads specifically
Well, to be honest. Battletoads and TNMT were horrifically designed games for difficulty curve. I think they may have originally been meant as Arcade games, but that monetization strategy doesn't work for a home console.
Modding is the only thing booming modern day. From playing any retro game to making challenging Mario 64 levels, it’s the only true freedom some people have now in playing video games.
Red Faction vibes.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six for me.
Graphics are a low, low, low priority for what makes a game great.
2008 was one of the last years before woke started creeping in, and the graphics then are still quite excellent.
Why would the modern graphics be better?
People who enjoy Minecraft too