City of Heroes.
Such a great example of what an MMO should be. Old, and not without it’s flaws, but it did so many things right that even contemporary attempts at the genre miss entirely.
Lately I’ve been replaying the campaign in Railroad Tycoon 2 (available for a just few bucks on GOG) and I’ve had just as much enjoyment as playing a full priced modern title. Granted it’s got pretty timeless 2d(ish) graphics and a studio recorded bluegrass soundtrack at a time when most games just opted for midi soundtracks. It’s even got a complete stock market simulation where every action you take affects your company’s stock value, and you as an individual can manipulate the market to benefit your company and vice versa. I’ve had particular enjoyment by personally selling a bunch of stocks to artificially depress the value of another company right before attempting a merger. That and trying to survive margin calls without being forced to sell my 90% stake in every single railroad company that inevitably tanks the value of every single railroad in the game
Pretty dang good for a nearly 30 year old game!
New games look like realistic pencil drawings that were smudged to shit.
I literally have Elden Ring screenshots on my PS4 that look worse than Super Mario 64 screenshots.
It’s like modern games all have a screen shader at the end specifically to fuck up the graphics and blur details. I know it’s TAA and friends but damn. It feels weird that so many games have broken graphics that only look good when taking promotional screenshots. And people call them good looking games lol
… so many games have broken graphics that only look good when taking promotional screenshots.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when looking at the screenshots or even videos of a game.
You’ll be looking at the store page for like a top-down strategy game, and all they show are a bunch of cinematic closeups of character’s faces with FXAA 99999 and 0 screenshots showing the UI. Bro, that is NOT what playing the game looks like.
I want to see the UI. I Like The UI. I like the strategic camera angle. I am an ACTUAL FAN of this genre and have willingly put myself in your sales funnel - show me the features of the actual game that I want to purchase and play, please.
Bad???
The weird thing is that they’re usually only bad in comparison to all the newer games you’ve played after that.
The thing that really stops me from enjoying a lot of old games I liked back in the day is the abysmal controls. Years of having good controls has ruined my ability to go back to when devs were still trying to figure out the whole 3D thing.
Years of having good controls has ruined my ability
Where my WAXD gamers at? The Chaos Engine was a fun game, but the controls were a bit weird.
Damn, there’s a blast from the past.
Yeah I tried going back to play the witcher 1 and 2 after finishing 3. I just could not get into 1 at all and 2 had some wack as well with where you could go. I could not even beat the first boss.
That’s understandable.
They were not very good on a technical level at launch, either. I never beat 1 back in the day because I got to a point where it would just crash consistently at the same spot, every time.
It’s better if you look at games that are not 3d.
Been playing a lot of Beamrider lately. Am I chad now?
No. You know why. You know what you did.
…Reminds me of Max Payne.
Wasn’t born in the PS1 era, sorry…Fact: PS1 games in an emulator with increased resolution looks super cool
not only based, but also gay.
because gay is good, therefore the original point is good.
edit: lemmy does not respect formatting 100%. I wanted larger gaps between sections.
What do you mean by “Bad Graphics” ?
Bubsy 3D, or Super Mario 64
Bubsy 3D
Old Graphics =/= Bad Graphics
edit: furthermore old =/= bad. Old is a quantitative measure and bad is qualitative. Trying to use one measure as the litmus for the other is like saying “there are five apples on that tree, they must taste terrible.”
inb4: i dont care if it isnt a perfect analogy and there’s actually some study somewhere that showed that apple trees that retain prime number multiples of fruit on their branches statistically taste worse when rated on a blind taste test.
≤≥
))<>((
Back and forth, forever.
i’ve got an old version of FCEUX that I boot up all the time to run The Guardian Legend. One day, I’ll do a full run in one sitting. Then, maybe I’ll speedrun. I can dream.
It’s almost like mechanics trumps graphics.
See Dwarf Fortress.
Not really? I would love to play complex game like df or cataclysm with good 3d graphics.
Check out Going Medieval. Doesn’t have everything DF has, but it’s something.
It’s low-poly so it’s not that big of a jump, but the 3d camera alone makes it so much easier to play than dwarf fortress.
DW has good graphics now compared to what it use to have.
Are you trying to tell me that this doesn’t look amazing? Look at those lovely hills and fjords! I think I even see a fox poking it’s head out
I can hear the guitar melody
Shitty visual aesthetics has kept me from playing so many games from small devs, i don’t want their crappy pixel-graphics bullshit, I played those when I was a kid I don’t need that anymore now that we have the ability to do better…I don’t want one or the other, I want both. I would rather play a game with mediocre mechanics and great graphics than one with great mechanics and mediocre graphics.
I think this kind of attitude means you’re going to miss a lot of fantastic games, honestly. Games offer a lot more than just visuals, and many very pretty games are extremely bad games.
everyone is free to play whatever they want, but everyone is also free to call your opinion dumb. which it is.
To each their own, but when I play games I want games that are fun to play. When I want realistic graphics I just go for a walk.
by that logic xkcd is bad
They’re not bad graphics, they’re good graphics… for their time
Nahhh, some of them really were bad graphics. Morrowind and Mario Sunshine came out in the same year.
Morrowind is beautiful :(
I also frequently lie to myself.
The world of Morrowind, in aggregate, is beautiful and sometimes genuinely breathtaking.
Individual models may look like deep fried asshole, but they come together to form an aesthetic that I personally like quite a lot.
so I totally forgot that I commented on this, and was coming in to make a comment about how aesthetic is so much more important than graphical fidelity, then saw that I had already made a quippy comment.
oops.
The scope of each of those games is so vastly different that I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. The art styles are wildly different too.
Different styles. All Morrowind’s missing is ragdolls and physics.
Though Oblivion Rosacea is hard to look past…
There’s a charm to early 3D. Late 2D is a timeless look, but early 3D is unmistakably mid 90s to early 2000s stuff.
I’ve been running the original Resident Evil trilogy. The graphics age it, of course, but the games are just awesome. Resources are limited. You have to consider what’s worth wasting ammo on. You have to consider if you’ve done enough to justify a save. The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult, but they’re satisfying. And I love a good old fashioned jump scare.
