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:
Edit: I forgot Captain Novolin. Really, how could I? I mean, this.
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.
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.
You’re telling me that the likes of Pit Fighter…
…And Revolution X…
…Or Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt…
…Or Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball…
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:
Edit: I forgot Captain Novolin. Really, how could I? I mean, this.
Come on.
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.
Yep.