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Post by wyrdwad on Nov 13, 2017 19:22:26 GMT -5
The only visual style I ever had a problem with was ASCII, simply because I don't find it readable at a glance. I'm not really in the mood to guess whether I am looking at a knoll, kobold, kenku, kuo-toa, kelpie, khaasta, kopru, kraken, kigrid, krenshar or kuldurath. Sounds to me like you've been playing the wrong ASCII games.  Good ASCII games will be almost as nice-looking as 8-bit graphical games. -Tom |
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Post by condroid on Nov 13, 2017 22:40:04 GMT -5
While I do love NES-style indie games, I totally get where you're coming from, as there's something conceptually similar I simply don't like, and that's indie games for the ZX Spectrum or in the style of ZX Spectrum games. A lot of people (primarily British) have a whole lot of nostalgia for that old computer, but as someone who never even heard of it until he was an adult, I can honestly say: I don't get it. AT ALL. The ZX Spectrum just was NOT well-suited to gaming IN ANY WAY, and most Spectrum games are downright unplayable for me these days -- and even those rare few that ARE playable tend to look and sound absolutely AWFUL. Between the slow processor speed, the limited sound hardware, and the color clash (Dear Lord the color clash!), the ol' "Speccy" is just... bad! And it's not like I haven't tried to get into it. A lot of ZX Spectrum games were straight-ported to MSX on cassette tape, and I've played a fair number of them. I've even really liked a few ( Head Over Heels is DAMNED good!). But in every instance, I can only lament that the game was on the Spectrum, and not released for some other, better platform, as I feel the Speccy most likely held it back from its true potential. Anybody else spot the contradiction?  I never had a Spectrum, but I can easily acknowledge that there were a lot of awesome/groundbreaking titles on that platform. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2017 22:47:12 GMT -5
Tom tends to live in hyperbole land. More to the point, Americans didn't really grow up with the Speccy, so we're kind of biased against it.
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Post by wyrdwad on Nov 13, 2017 23:35:17 GMT -5
Also, that's not a contradiction. There are always exceptions to the rule, and Head Over Heels is one of the few -- but even then, while Head Over Heels is a great game, I feel it could've been a FAR BETTER game if it were developed for a different platform. It suffers due to the hardware it was developed for, with somewhat sluggish controls (though not as sluggish as Batman's), monochrome stage graphics, and no BGM save for little ditties when you enter each room.
If it were developed for any other 8-bit platform, at least one -- if not all -- of these flaws would've been addressed pretty much by default, and the game would've been better for it.
-Tom
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Post by akumajobelmont on Nov 14, 2017 2:38:11 GMT -5
I do like me some Speccy games. Most have not aged all that well, but there's a handful that are still as great as they were back in the day. JetPac is still amazing to me. All the new indie/homebrew games coming our for the system are arguably doing it better than what had gone before. It's easy to dismiss just how dominant micro-computers were in Europe. Some of them were pretty big in Australia too. Consoles like the SNES and MD, NES and MS get homebrew games, don't get me wrong. But The ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST and Amstrad get new games on almost a daily basis, and that's no exaggeration. I'm always checking in at www.indieretronews.com just to see what's new, and there's a lot! l'Abbaye des Morts on the Speccy has been mentioned - fantastic game. It's worth noting that it's getting a physical release on the MD/Gen too, with both 16-bit and 8-bit visuals included. I'm totally gonna jump on that one. The CastleVania homebrew is equally excellent. It's screen-by-screen, and not a scroller, but it's pretty fantastic with a wicked sense of humour. And I think my distaste for the NES is just a thing. I played a ton of it as a kid - my neighbours and I would swap our systems all the time. It was fun back then, but yeah, the neighbour with the Amiga and C64 were much more to my tastes than the NES swaps ever were. And apart from SMB3, all the NES games I actually cherish I discovered many years after the fact. Stuff like Shatterhand and NES Ducktales are games I never experienced until I discovered emulation in my last year of high school. At least, could have been a little after. Australia had SEGA everywhere, Nintendo too, but all my friends had SEGA consoles, at least up to the Mega Drive. And almost everybody I knew had a C64. Except me, I had to make do with my VIC-20. GORF and Frogger were my life for a while there  |
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Post by Bumpyroad on Nov 14, 2017 2:55:38 GMT -5
Stuff like Shatterhand and NES Ducktales are games I never experienced until I discovered emulation in my last year of high school. Kinda, me too! You could say, i already knew, which direction i'm gonna be heading next  |
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Post by akumajobelmont on Nov 14, 2017 2:58:02 GMT -5
Stuff like Shatterhand and NES Ducktales are games I never experienced until I discovered emulation in my last year of high school. Kinda, me too! You could say, i already knew, which direction i'm gonna be heading next Pretty much, haha! Retro before it was really, truly retro, haha! At least in the case of the 16-bit stuff. As an aside, I remember my new PC being able to handle the hq2x filters like a boss. My previous computer couldn't do it, and I thought I wanted it, but once I could apply those filters, I never used them |
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Post by dsparil on Nov 14, 2017 10:35:48 GMT -5
What did you have for a system that hq2x was a struggle? I remember being able to do hq3x, hq4x plus some texture filtering proof of concepts from the same guy on a midrange Pentium 4 with no issue.
Edit: I think I misread your post and thought you meant a computer you just got.
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Post by Woody Alien on Nov 14, 2017 16:44:31 GMT -5
I quite like the ultra-cutesy look of anime, I just feel that it's all gotten very "samey" in the last decade or so. Cute anime characters used to be very distinct, spanning a range of art styles and character types -- but nowadays, there have literally been memes created around the fact that in a lot of shows, all the characters literally have the EXACT SAME FACE, such that if you removed distinguishing features like hair and clothing, you would not be able to tell them apart. Love Live, anyone? Anyway, I already said it in a different topic, but I never liked the big amount of games with pre-rendered sprites that came after Donkey Kong Country. It makes everything look like cheap plastic puppets and works only when representing actual toys (like Clockwork Knight) or clearly fake/virtual stuff (like some elements in Game Tengoku). Everywhere else it looks just terrible. |
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Post by dsparil on Nov 14, 2017 17:06:45 GMT -5
Head over Heels has a good remake that I found pretty fun overall. Can't say I've ever played the original (or any Spectrum game), but it does come up as one of the best available for it. |
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Post by akumajobelmont on Nov 14, 2017 18:15:11 GMT -5
What did you have for a system that hq2x was a struggle? I remember being able to do hq3x, hq4x plus some texture filtering proof of concepts from the same guy on a midrange Pentium 4 with no issue. Edit: I think I misread your post and thought you meant a computer you just got. Yeah, this was back in the day. My Pentium 133 struggled. My Pentium 233 MMX could actually do those filters EDIT: And thanks for that link! I played this a fair while back, and it just reminded me I don't have the remake any more! There's a ton of cool looking games on that site too - I'll be busy today. CHEERS! |
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cacao
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Post by cacao on Nov 14, 2017 19:06:56 GMT -5
Don't know how to name it properly, but I'll say "jock" style of game design that was particularly popular in the 2000s - with lots of G-rated taunting/swearing, heavily sexualized in laziest way possible (by inserting a crapton of polygonal playboy-ish gals into the game and calling it a day), brown-and-yellow palettes and attempts at visual realism, "in your face" visual presentation full of explosions and guitar riffs, and heavy use of second-rate Nu Metal music. If you've played Final Fight: Streetwise, you know what I mean, it's pretty much a "quintessential 2000s game" when it comes to stuff above. Even good franchises suffered from it for a while - some of Burnout and Need For Speed games had a lot of it. I was going to say this and you've hit the nail in the head. I hate the way so many games from that era look because of this. Weirdly, I like Fallout 3 which people complain about for being so monochromatic and has those cheesy slow-motion gore shots but that's more the exception than the rule. Others: When games try to look like 90s/early 00s 3D games. Most of the time they don't look like the nicer games of the era, they look like a pastiche of all the worst aspects. When games try to use deliberately bad graphics to be "spooky". It doesn't come across as an uncanny valley thing to me, just lazy and poorly done. |
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Post by 1983parrothead on Nov 14, 2017 20:04:50 GMT -5
Styles I like are:
* Anime style
* Shmups / 2D Scrolling Shooters
Styles I dislike:
* Most contemporary FPSs
* Too much prominent FC/NES styles
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Post by wyrdwad on Nov 14, 2017 20:06:26 GMT -5
Head over Heels has a good remake that I found pretty fun overall. Can't say I've ever played the original (or any Spectrum game), but it does come up as one of the best available for it. Yeah, that remake is pretty outstanding. There's also a slightly less flashy update to the original released as a homebrew cartridge on MSX2, which more or less just colorizes the original game and adds save-states -- but even that alone makes it a considerably better game than the ZX Spectrum title or its MSX1 cassette port, IMHO. -Tom |
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Good ASCII games will be almost as nice-looking as 8-bit graphical games.
I never had a Spectrum, but I can easily acknowledge that there were a lot of awesome/groundbreaking titles on that platform. 
