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[DarkPonzu]

Have you ever played older PC games just to look at the 2D pixel art? I find there was a visual style and imagery to the older games that got lost when 3D became the norm. It's nice to go back and see the older stuff, even if I'm not good at the games.

I liked the art in Dune 1, Dune 2, Pizza Tycoon and Wing Commander 1&2, Alien Legacy, Doom 1&2, Heroes of Might & Magic series, Baldur's Gate 2, you?

[Panthro]

I wouldn't say specifically for the art, but it's a part of it.

There are loads of great 2D games that I've played many times over the years, where I love the art style.

Games like Quest for Glory, Monkey Island, some of the Ultima games and many more.

Baldur's Gate 2 is a beautiful game, and if anything it's better now that you can make it a higher resolution.

[RRS]

Yes. I do like pixel art & animation, limited as it may be. When I started playing for real, PC games were entering CD-ROM era, with rendered 3D graphics (something I wanted to do for a living).

I'm particularly fond of pixel-perfect isometric stuff, like this:



Notice that such graphics are called "pixel-perfect" for a reason: they hate scaling, often even anti-aliasing. Not very practical today.

[Eagle of Fire]

No. Graphics are very secondary for me, even maybe tertiary. The main focus point is the gameplay. As long as the graphics are efficient and do the job then I'm alright... It really take very ugly graphics to put me away.

Note that I do find 3D ugly... Most recent 3D begin to be better on this aspect but then again you need a computer able to run a spaceship to be able to play those games too...

[TotalAnarchy]

Nope, not really. I may choose to play a game based on first visual impressions, but when I do play it, it's not only for the art's sake.

Generally I have favourite scenes in both old and new games, for example this or this if we're talking about older games.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Originally Posted by Eagle of Fire

Note that I do find 3D ugly... Most recent 3D begin to be better on this aspect but then again you need a computer able to run a spaceship spacefleet to be able to play those games too...

FTFY. Space shuttles used to be ran by machines that qualified as stone age computing... by standards of a decade ago.

[Tracker]

Originally Posted by The Fifth Horseman

FTFY. Space shuttles used to be ran by machines that qualified as stone age computing... by standards of a decade ago.

Seconded. There are reasons for that, IIRC new hardware is prone to several vulnerabilities not limited to heat, cosmic radiation, and what not. It is interesting that the ISS runs on 486DX level computers.

Well, about the graphics, 3D solely is not a reason for terrible art, not even low polygon models are. It's just 3D artists nowadays, or rather, back in the 2000s were people of poor imagination. Just look at Grim Fandango, it's great even though it's from 1998, and then there's the Book of Unwritten Tales, it's something I look forward to because of the graphics. What bothers me the most that camera use is terrible even in newer games. If they claim their game is as good as an interactive movie, then, damn, make it look like one, leave the scenes to real directors.



There's actual science behind great films, even nowadays, you can see patterns in the way the characters are aligned in the set. You can emphasize small details this way. Unfortunately 3D artists and animators do not even know about this field, that's why we get poor scenes that look terrible and unnatural.

Honestly, I mostly play old games for their amazing pixel art, even in Quake II my favourite part was looking out a window at the skybox showing a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk ruin of a hi-tech society, and I was wondering if I could go there to see what is left of a civilization. Legend of Kyrandia games used to have great artwork, along with LucasArt games, and Legend Entertainment point-and-click adventure "interactive fictions".

[Eagle of Fire]

Yeah I know. Of course you are right, IRL space shuttles have very low grade computers. But I wasn't really thinking about those when I mentioned spaceships... I was more thinking about sci-fiction ships like for example the Enterprise-D.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Those are more in the realm of Sufficiently Advanced Technology than anything that could be compared with real technology. Their performance is not usually expressed in real world units - even when it is, it makes no bloody sense - and it usually amounts to "capable of doing whatever the writer wants them to do and utterly incapable of doing anything he doesn't want them to do, even if they damn well should" anyhow.

[Eagle of Fire]

Yup. Isn't it exactly the best term to describe modern gaming? I mean, even back in the days those game designers always built games which normal machines of the time would have had problems running even at medium quality...