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.
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.
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