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?
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.