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Baba Is You and Downwell are a totally different kind of retro. They're trying to look like NES games. John's games are retro as well, but they channel the ve
by udp 7y ago
Baba Is You and Downwell are a totally different kind of retro. They're trying to look like NES games. John's games are retro as well, but they channel the very different style of 90s Windows games, which had so many colors (256) they didn't know what to do with them all.
- bscphil 7y agoI was going to say exactly this, but you nailed it. The 90s game style saw more powerful chips and higher color depths as a chance to do realistic art and skeuomorphic interfaces.[1] I'm sure they looked good to people then, but the reason they look so dated now is that realism as a design goal is better accomplished with modern graphics technologies than anything they had available then. Anything that still looks "good" does so because it was able to carve out a stylistic niche that didn't depend on having a more realistic interface as the end goal. Pixel art games look timeless (to me) precisely because their limitations meant that designers had to find a style that worked for the particular game. To be sure, there are 80s games with bad art, but I think on the whole the older art was better (and is now more iconic) because the limitations pushed creativity. I still love to play low-res games (including new ones like VVVVVV[2]), but most of them are in an older art style than John's games, which (if I'm being honest) look (visually) kind of crappy to me. [1] The poor font rendering in most 90s games doesn't help matters either. [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/VVVVVV_-_The_Tomb_of_Mad_Carew.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/VVVVVV_-...