ALttP and Chrono Trigger are some of the best designed, highly polished titles on the system, though. We have to remember that while everyone harps on FF4 and FF6, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, A Link To the Past, Bahumut Lagoon, Donkey Kong Country, etc. as if they defined the quality of the SNES library, we’re looking back through nostalgia tinted goggles and those games in fact… didn’t. They were the exceptional outliers in, as ever, a wide field of mediocrity.
What I’m saying is, there are a lot of gonk-ass games on the SNES. A lot. We just selectively don’t remember them anymore because they were crap.
For every one of the gems above there were ten or twenty of the likes of Pugley’s Scavenger Hunt, Cliffhanger, Pit Fighter, Mario is Missing, Revolution X, Bebe’s Kids, Rise of the Robots, Captain Novolin, Double Dragon 5, Ren and Stimpy, Chester Cheetah… Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball… etc., etc. And that’s just the North American titles. There was some wonky niche shit released in Japan that could have just as well been on the original NES.
No one is talking about how good the games are, here. Just how they looked. Mario is Missing was a shit game, but the graphics and art style still look absolutely fine and dandy to play. Same for Ren & Stimpy and any of the other games on your list I recognize. The games were bad, but not the looks. Hence why people absolutely love a pixel art fame like Stardew Valley or Terraria but no one is playing games that look like WWF Smackdown! For PS1.
Deserve to be held up visually and remembered fondly next to the likes of Chrono Trigger? They really aged better than the best of the early PS1? Yeah. No. These games not only played like ass, they looked like ass, too. Even for their time. That’s my point. The ones that weren’t outright offensive were just plain old bland.
The operative word in pixel art is “art.” Just because something is 2D does not mean it automatically needs to be revered to the exclusion of earlier or later titles or visual styles. What we got out of these games visually is a direct result of what was put in by the designers, and in the majority of cases what was put in was not very much.
Mario Is Missing is an exceptional case because it manages to have worse spritework than Mario World, a game which it directly ripped off for its sprites. And any sprites did did not directly copy (minus a couple of pallete colors, for some reason) wound up looking like these chumps:
They’re saying that a lot of the contemporary cutting edge 3D graphics of the PS1 era looked ugly. But they did it to be cutting edge.
However, if they’d stuck to more traditional art styles (e.g, as could be seen in games like Chrono Trigger), then the games could’ve still looked good today.
They’re not saying all SNES games look better than all PS1 games. They’re saying that we had the capability to make games that still look good today, and we had that capability for years before the PS1 came out. They chose not to use that capability to be cutting edge. And the other commenters are lamenting that.
Of course, I can’t blame them for pushing 3D graphics back then. Especially because they would’ve needed to practice with them before they could get better. Late PS1 games had some decent looking 3D, IIRC.
Even without the hardware limitations, there was so much jank to PS1 games. Like we had an idea of what a 3D game could be, but we were no where near where we are today. Controls are all over the place. It was the wild west. Alien Resurrection was the first time we had left stick to move and right stick to look, and it felt bizarre at the time. It’s probably the only FPS from the era that’s still playable.
Not sure why “stop shooting me” is where it is. I only played like 10-15 hours of Lethal Company, but I never once saw a gun in the game. In DRG, on the other hand, every dwarf has multiple voice lines about being shot by their teammate
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven’t seen my steel case editions recently.
It’s a tough one. You’re not wrong by any means, but equally the environmentally unfriendly bit is why people buy physical media. The memory card holding the game is mostly superfluous because of day 1 DLC or patches, but it’s the box; art; manual; and physical tangibility that matter to a collector of the media.
Ideally there would be a middle ground - sack-off the normal physical edition and purchase the memory cards themselves - and push up the price and pay for a premium edition of the copy made from better materials.
I suspect we’d only get the worst of both worlds though, the cynic in me thinks.
Ah yes, there is that. Is that still a thing these days? I remember EA’s Project Ten Dollar a few years back gating a lot of extra features or multiplayer behind a single use code being fairly widely adopted.
I’ll admit to being a bit behind the curve now, I still predominantly use my Xbox Series S, One, and 360 just to play Doom in different rooms so maybe I’m not on the cutting edge of news!
edit: it wasn’t five dollars at all, more like ten!
I had to look up that ten-dollar thing. Thankfully I don’t think that’s a thing yet in the Nintendo world, aside from preorder bonuses.
There have been physical releases that are just a download code in a box, or a game card that contains only one of the two included games, with the second being provided as a paper download code. In those cases the redemption is tied to an individual’s Nintendo account. I wouldn’t buy any of those, though I’ll admit to buying another release (BioShock Trilogy) that was a physical game card with no games stored on it, just launchers for downloading the three games from Nintendo. But at least in that case nothing is account-locked and lending/resale is possible: pop the card in, download the games and play them for as long as the card is in your system.
I haven’t thrown away a game case since Playstation 1. My Super Nintendo ones were cardboard and got destroyed, so I did throw them away because that is what we did in the 90s.
Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90’s!
In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material… just because.
Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
PC games in he 90s were like cereal boxes filled with a few CDs and a the barest of a manual. In the 80s it was the same except it was floppy disks and the manual was needed to get through the copy protection. Sometimes you’d even get a decoder ring of some sorts to decode something for the copy protection.
Yeah but it wasn’t as fun as in the 80s and 90s when they’d be sending you on a treasure hunt through the manual to find specific words and letters like you were in the DaVinci Code.
PC game cases from 90s were amazing. I wish console games would do something cool like that. They were made of cardboard, typically had boxart with a bunch of high quality engraving, had manuals inside. They felt like collectibles and you didn’t have to pay extra for any of it. It was just part of the base game price.
The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It’s the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
Great resource and explains so much with pretty solid examples. Thanks for sharing! I used to PC game on my Dell (Sony), flat CRT for years, and then an IBM Trinitron too until I moved to a pure laptop for a bit (17" Vostro) and eventually on to LCD.
Until 2013 I used to play Wii on a 36" Philips CRT, even though the other room had a larger plasma.
One thing they show but don’t mention is image persistence for transparency. If you toggle a sprite on and off every frame, the persistence between frames on CRTs and LCDs means it looks partially transparent. That effect was commonly used for character shadows.
Now that we have 4k HDR displays, tools are starting to popup to accurately emulate the CRT look and feel. 1080p wasn’t enough to catch all the subtle details, but we are finally there. Kinda cool to see the age of CRT never fully died.
I wonder if there’s a way to emulate the old CRT displays. My brother built an arcade cabinet, but it’s got a modern monitor in it so the graphics don’t quite look right.
There are some hardware scalers that work really well. But most that offer good compatibility with a wide range of older consoles cost about as much as a complete high end pc to run an emulator on.
There are some very convincing shaders that work really well to emulate the look. I sold my consoles long ago and may have a faulty memory but the right shader looks just like I remember.
It’s a fan mod released this year, for a game that was released in 1998. It was a labor of love that took 7 years to complete and is the most stunning mod I have ever seen for any game period.
They push the engine to its limits, the scale, creativity, level design and story are near perfection. The story and playtime are so good it feels like an official game. You forget it’s not canon.
I can’t believe this came along, it was truly refreshing. It won the 2023 ModDB mod of the year.
lemmy.world
Aktywne