5 ms·

>I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of

>I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3. The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.

agumonkey 11y ago
For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
- Scuds 11y ago
  > The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      One interesting bit about early Nintendo was that the recently departed CEO was a self taught programmer on the Commodore 64. At the time Nintendo made card games and such, and he basically brought the C64 over, and demoed various stuff. Give it a few years and the guy is running the company that may well have rebooted the gaming console market. Thing about those early consoles was that there was basically no firmware or OS. Every game had full run of the hardware, much like any software had on the early microcomputers.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Even funnier, the 'games' were as much software than hardware extension. The main system was often designed to have an external loop to hook in optional chips in the cartridge.
        digi_owl 11y ago
tluyben2 11y ago
I know a lot of people have this and I am happy I do not. When I played games in 70s and 80s I made up everything in my head. Even complete 3D; playing the first Metal Gear it felt like the 3d version that would come many years later. I even told people how I saw the enemies and how I felt the betrayel of big boss and drew the different buildings in 3d for them as my mind made them. When I play modern games I do not have to do that anymore and it feels like a loss. So I play both old and new when I have time to play. But better graphics do not do much for me. In films either: I am thinking stories around the story while watching and add things that I think should have been there. I (and luckily my wife has that too) do not mind watching a very low quality version of series and movies as long as the sound is clear. I find it far more disturbing that storylines are so uninspired more often than not and that for instance 'people' seem to enjoy garbage that is just a soap opera with aliens vs hardcore scifi or horror. That beats bad cgi any day for me. But yes to recognize it even is bad cgi I need to switch off my internal augmented reality show. Edit: that is something I noticed: those 4k+ bigscreen TVs make material not specially made for it (which is most for now) look far worse than on my crap TV. It is far too detailed so I have a continues uncanny valley feeling even with the latest productions.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  I'm very much passionated about all this. I remember when technology wasn't really at the center. I would never bother with the quality of VHS tapes. Watching Star Wars on a bad CRT TV didn't really matter. The run for tech and visual is natural. I'm sure all generations had this. When it's gone you're left with timeless principles. What I'd call the 'classics'. Good thins have a good deal of it. And this classical features are related to the tech used to implement. More to how our minds find joy. When I watch old movies I see them without the glow of the era they were born in. I see the framework behind, and how theatrical they were. How they faked most of things, with moving pictures instead of actors on a scene. But the rules are still there. Surprise, tension, suspense, exageration, timing, aesthetic, oddity, rhythm.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    I still find Blake's 7 one of the best shows ever made while a lot of people cannot watch the styrofoam and other crap effects. I never saw those then and I still do not (we do some marathons of the old with friends, some are 20something), the storytelling and less than actionpactness is part of the dystopian and lost feeling. The absense of 16 year old (looking) unrealistic starry-eyed teens helps as well giving this brutal Federation world it's atmosphere. I find it a crying shame a lot of people cannot appreciate these shows, movies or games. They are not that different...
rpgmaker 11y ago
> The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I have noticed that people don't care for CGI that much anymore. We see so much of it that we have become inured to it while it used to be a movie "feature". So inured that most of the CGI is actually pretty mediocre but people don't seem to care. It has made me appreciate the old (and more "mechanical") special effects much more.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  What I appreciate about the old were from constraints imposed by the lack of CGI. Effects costed a lot and were used only when the ROI was huge. People used a patchwork of techniques to convey the idea. Famously, lots of Terminator 2 shots weren't CGI but giant puppet that looked like humanoid shredded metal. The other part is 'live set'. Nowadays cameras are removed from the action, and are often on a plane, not moving through, near, close to actors. The first minute of Alien is telling, it walks through the ship, the steam, the wires. I felt more immersed than in Avatar with 3D glasses. Actors were framed closer, and felt a bit more connected too.
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    Alien is a perfect example of this. I watched it again recently and I was surprised at how well the special effects have aged.

agumonkey 11y ago

For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.

Scuds 11y ago
> The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    One interesting bit about early Nintendo was that the recently departed CEO was a self taught programmer on the Commodore 64. At the time Nintendo made card games and such, and he basically brought the C64 over, and demoed various stuff. Give it a few years and the guy is running the company that may well have rebooted the gaming console market. Thing about those early consoles was that there was basically no firmware or OS. Every game had full run of the hardware, much like any software had on the early microcomputers.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      Even funnier, the 'games' were as much software than hardware extension. The main system was often designed to have an external loop to hook in optional chips in the cartridge.
      - digi_owl 11y ago

tluyben2 11y ago

I know a lot of people have this and I am happy I do not. When I played games in 70s and 80s I made up everything in my head. Even complete 3D; playing the first Metal Gear it felt like the 3d version that would come many years later. I even told people how I saw the enemies and how I felt the betrayel of big boss and drew the different buildings in 3d for them as my mind made them. When I play modern games I do not have to do that anymore and it feels like a loss. So I play both old and new when I have time to play. But better graphics do not do much for me. In films either: I am thinking stories around the story while watching and add things that I think should have been there. I (and luckily my wife has that too) do not mind watching a very low quality version of series and movies as long as the sound is clear. I find it far more disturbing that storylines are so uninspired more often than not and that for instance 'people' seem to enjoy garbage that is just a soap opera with aliens vs hardcore scifi or horror. That beats bad cgi any day for me. But yes to recognize it even is bad cgi I need to switch off my internal augmented reality show. Edit: that is something I noticed: those 4k+ bigscreen TVs make material not specially made for it (which is most for now) look far worse than on my crap TV. It is far too detailed so I have a continues uncanny valley feeling even with the latest productions.

agumonkey 11y ago
I'm very much passionated about all this. I remember when technology wasn't really at the center. I would never bother with the quality of VHS tapes. Watching Star Wars on a bad CRT TV didn't really matter. The run for tech and visual is natural. I'm sure all generations had this. When it's gone you're left with timeless principles. What I'd call the 'classics'. Good thins have a good deal of it. And this classical features are related to the tech used to implement. More to how our minds find joy. When I watch old movies I see them without the glow of the era they were born in. I see the framework behind, and how theatrical they were. How they faked most of things, with moving pictures instead of actors on a scene. But the rules are still there. Surprise, tension, suspense, exageration, timing, aesthetic, oddity, rhythm.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  I still find Blake's 7 one of the best shows ever made while a lot of people cannot watch the styrofoam and other crap effects. I never saw those then and I still do not (we do some marathons of the old with friends, some are 20something), the storytelling and less than actionpactness is part of the dystopian and lost feeling. The absense of 16 year old (looking) unrealistic starry-eyed teens helps as well giving this brutal Federation world it's atmosphere. I find it a crying shame a lot of people cannot appreciate these shows, movies or games. They are not that different...

rpgmaker 11y ago

> The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I have noticed that people don't care for CGI that much anymore. We see so much of it that we have become inured to it while it used to be a movie "feature". So inured that most of the CGI is actually pretty mediocre but people don't seem to care. It has made me appreciate the old (and more "mechanical") special effects much more.

agumonkey 11y ago
What I appreciate about the old were from constraints imposed by the lack of CGI. Effects costed a lot and were used only when the ROI was huge. People used a patchwork of techniques to convey the idea. Famously, lots of Terminator 2 shots weren't CGI but giant puppet that looked like humanoid shredded metal. The other part is 'live set'. Nowadays cameras are removed from the action, and are often on a plane, not moving through, near, close to actors. The first minute of Alien is telling, it walks through the ship, the steam, the wires. I felt more immersed than in Avatar with 3D glasses. Actors were framed closer, and felt a bit more connected too.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  Alien is a perfect example of this. I watched it again recently and I was surprised at how well the special effects have aged.