As Yahtzee has suggested, people aren't nostalgic for old games, but for how they felt playing old games. Much harder to capture that, and beautiful pixel art alone isn't enough.
Because as a child, everything is novel and new for you so you get that sense of high and awe seeing something new. But now as adults, recreating that feeling is almost impossible because you have already experienced it before.
Nothing hammers this home like raising a kid.
The sense of joy and wonder they feel about something as simple as learning how to turn on a faucet. Suddenly, they're magical and can summon water.
It makes you feel jaded.
You can get that feeling when learning something new as an adult, too. Your first python program is running? You renovated something in your home that your haven't done before? Planted a tree and it's having fruits for the first time? Changed the tires on your car? It's awesome!
This is why I started hiking and summiting mountains. I mean, not literally why, but it’s chasing that new and novel high.
You're also literally chasing new highs though. Sounds like the whole package..
that's why you should seek out new things to see wonder and novel in. as a person with hyperfixation/-focus, that is very easy for me.
This is why shovel knight looks and feels like the old classics it’s imitating. They artificially limited themselves to color pallets and some technical limits that old systems had. I think they ended up using 18 colors instead of 16, and double the sprites on screen, among some of them. Indie games usually just go with what looks good and use modern limits because they can. Most the time it’s not a choice, they just do what works and that’s ok too.
I love limited pallettes. I love how in the original Legend of Zelda, Link changes colors a little every time the pallette swaps. I think getting creative with limited colors looks so much cooler than just having every color possible.
Restrictions breed creativity.
Eh I don't think shovel knight looks like the old classics. It looks way too refined to me when compared to a nes title.
There’s a more comprehensive breakdown from yachtclub themselves here I was off a bit in my specific examples but overall they do a good job breaking down why their game fits and breaks the mold with lots of examples. The game is a lot more faithful to NES than the vast majority of indie pixel art games. There were a few late-gen NES titles that are relatively unknown but look way more detailed and complex than the typical NES game too.
Check out Retro City Rampage. The creator made a version that works on original NES hardware: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/retro-city-rampage-creator-makes-a-real-playable-nes-port/
It looks more like a Genesis/SNES title than NES.
Anon is old, anon can see through the matrix.
When you were young you didn't see the game, you just experienced the world.
you need a good scanline filter if you want modern pixels to look like classic ones
Incorrect, you need a good NTSC filter. Scanlines on their own are hotdog water.
And then your European players wonder why the color artifacts are all wrong. PAL and NTSC had different distinct looks (and presumably so did SECAM).
you can never go home
no indie rpg will ever make me feel like playing Golden Sun as a kid did
Yeah, they would need to be able to turn you back into your kid self, experiences and all. A lot of that magic is from you being a child.
That main menu music was so great
I love the entire OST. the Saturos theme is one of my favourite ones
Playing Chrono Trigger as an adult will ever make me feel like playing Chrono Trigger as a kid did.
Because these characters aren't built the same as old games. That was part of the magic of older games, using as few resources as possible but cleverly cutting the spirit into easily manipulated bit maps that can be flipped and rotated as necessary to animate the character.
These are overly detailed and missing the CRT effect.
I also think gaming now a days just feels different and not in a childhood wonder sort of way but a walking into an obscure bookstore kind of way. Social media makes learning about a video game way too easy. Spoilers are hard to avoid and the more people talk about a game the less novel it feels. I didn't spend much time on forums as a kid so most games i learned about was via word of mouth or from demo disks. I'll never forget my first play through of Halo 1 on the OG xbox. Played it coop with my bro. Was completely scared shitless when the flood was introduced. No one told me there were zombies in my shoot man game. Like no one talked about it. Good times.
I would also make an argument that the limited technology at the time led to different kinds of games versus what we see now. Sure there's the obvious things like internet enabled games and being able to get updates but I think even the less thought about things like restrictions on RAM and the power of computers led to restrictions on what you could do which led to specific types of games which aren't made that way anymore because they don't have to work around those restrictions. And while in a lot of cases those restrictions going away has allowed for better mechanics and gameplay it also still makes the games different which to people who were used to and liked those games will feel not as good anymore.
We know what is possible today. When these old games were new they were quite frankly cutting edge and pioneering what was possible.
You don't achieve that today even with the most dedicated adherence to retro limitations.
One could argue that the dynamic shadows of the day and night cycle in Sea of Stars were actually kind of breaking new ground in pixel art.
I will take this moment to recommend Crosscode, one of the all time greats
It was the television or crappiness of it that made them look better than it was...
https://www.gamerevolution.com/originals/378895-heres-retro-games-look-awful-compared-remember
Can't believe that guy left out this:
The pixels and shading on them were designed to look better with a different display pixel layout
Ive found that a cheap 1080p projector onto an unprepped painted white wall does a great job of making old crt stuff look correct.
I like how they specified the xo-1 lcd. Everyone knows the one laptop per child computer from like 2010 is the most relatable device in 2025….. 15 years later… fuck. I wasn’t even 15 when that came out.
yea funny enough I got that high when recently playing Planescape torment but not Baldurs Gate I, dont know why. Still a good game though.
Baldurs gate is good but it really shows how much they were trying to capitalise on 5e actually gaining mainstream attention (not that I blame em, folks gotta eat) Divinity Original Sin 2 is a previous title by the same company and IMO feels a lot better to play both mechanically and in terms of actually having a unique feeling universe.
OP is talking about the first Baldur's Gate game. Not Baldur's Gate 3 which you are talking about. Also Baldur's Gate 3 was in production in 2017. While it may have been in response to Stranger Things season 1 coming out, I honestly doubt it was that. BG3 is a huge labor of love and that dev team was much more intent on making a good game than cashing in on popularity of any particular ttrpg system. There are no dlc or micro transactions and marketing was sparse. I pretty much only heard about it through word of mouth. If the goal was to capitalize, they failed that. You don't capitalize by making a game that people can buy once and have nearly limitless experiences in without spending a dime more.
huh? BG I is 2nd edition DnD? Played both Divinity I and II, liked I better
a lot of what makes old game have that charm isn't just having the good pixel art but also matching the system sprite design, color pallet and replicating the imperfect displays of the time. Which the last is the one i think tends to be forgotten about a lot. Of course not all games are trying to replicate a style but more like a general vibe.
More than that, not being aware of genocide and looming climate collapse and student loans made those old games a lot more fun :)
It's not just the pixel art but the rest of the game as well.
OOP should try the Mega Drive (Genesis) ROM of Pier Solar, then. Couldn't "look fake" even if it tried
Its because they all use Unity, Unreal, or Godot, anon. Its the game engines.
By punching nazis u mean posting memes in lemmy?
You lost?
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