I mean that ss looks great. Tbh I don’t see the point in pushing graphical fidelity much farther than that unless you’re really going for a specific aesthetic (most games aren’t they just want “good graphics”)
It is kind of silly, in retrospect.
The skeletons that follow me around IRL don’t carry oversized buckler shields.
They just quote former failed relationships and keep just out of arms reach.
Bro…
This is the END for you, s’wit!
If your real life every included cliff racers, you’re beyond cursed.
Gimme games like that and I’m all in.
Any recommendations for oldish good “RPG” games that runs on a modern PC (Linux friendly)?
You could try lunacid, it’s not old but definitely old style.
KOTOR I and especially II (with lost levels restoration mod) and Fallout NV.
Well, there’s Morrowind :D (openMW)
You could give an emu of Kingsfield a try.
Planscape Torment got an enhanced edition a few years ago, and the spiritual successor Torment: Tides of Numenera Is fun as well
I’ve heard arx fatalis is fun and it was released around the same time, you might look into that
Coming from a Sega Genesis, that shit truly did boggle the mind at the time.
Mind = boggled
My mind has remained boggled to this day.
There is no effect that can be generated that could unboggle it
To be fair, that iconic PS1 texture twitch was Ming-boggling to see in action!
While it wasn’t an “indistinguishable from real life” experience, my first really mind blowing experience with graphics was installing my new 3dfx Voodoo and turning on GL
For me it was the face detail and animation in Halo 4. The way the pores and lines on Halsey’s face were visible.
Halo 4 is a nice skin simulator.
Not sure if you played on a CRT in the past, but nonetheless it’s interesting how different things looked. Here is my favorite example.
you would also see subpixels on LCD at this level of zoom. this is misleading.
No such claim was made. I highly doubt anybody casually has a LCD TV with a low enough resolution, and even if we play under a magnifying glass, LCD sub pixels will result in a drastically different image. It’s only “misleading” if you ignore the context, which is playing old games stretched over a fundamentally different (90% of the time FullHD) screen without any adjustments taking place.
Yeah, but that window would be a few mm in todays resolutions. Stretch it to playable size and add some filters and it’s fine.
Btw. left image has less pixels, that’s cheating.
I don’t think it does, look lower in the thread, I posted a pic I took myself of my CRT. There is a similar “how do so few pixels have this much definition” effect on the trees and grass.
Yup! Not many people know the impact of those filters tho. When I was emulating as a kid I hated CRT filters because I just saw them as noise (which many arguably are, it’s not trivial making a good CRT filter). Also if you used one of those pixel edge smoothing filters (like I used to) it would be even further from the intended look.
Of course I’m not the fun police, I believe everyone should be free to run their games as they please. I just find it fascinating that there even is such a big difference!
How tf does one red pixel get blurred into like 20 wide, but only like 4 tall? That seems sus
The scan lines are horizontal
I’m pretty sure there’s some fuckery going on here. The image on the right has more pixels, and while there is a lot of blur between columns, there’s clearly more rows on the right.
Maybe, but not much. This is 256x224
I’m with you. This doesn’t seem right. I know CRTs have an anti-aliasing effect, but this seems to have increased detail. Look at his ascot, for example. It seems to have more detail than the image on the left.
I don’t see any detail I can’t find in the sharp image. Except for the off screen stuff at the very top and bottom, since CRT pixels aren’t perfectly square and who ever made this image decided to fit by width. Nonetheless there are countless more example online and videos dedicated to this on youtube. Highly recommend :)
Yeah, I think you’re right. The one on the left is stretched and has fewer pixels vertically than the right one, so it isn’t showing quite the same thing.
You still see it on a LCD so I guess it’s a sort of “artists rendering if what it looked like” and not what it really looked like. CRTs also blurred like everything especially left-right sort of, so you were used to blurry images for starters.
Source: am old.
The blur created an optical anti-aliasing effect which designers regulator to advantage of when making graphics and games for crt screens, which was pretty much all there was at the time, unless your family was rich and had a big projector tv.
Not only blur but also light bleeding, and I bet a couple of other tricks.
I actually worked with a bunch of talented pixel artists back in the day.
Here for example you can see the “tram” in the background, alternating 2 colors to make a sort of gradient, on a CRT or a LCD from back in the day it’d smooth out:
If you look closely you can see it really does only bleed to the 2 pixels right next to it (horizontally, because that’s how the scan line travels). The dots you see don’t represent a single pixel. For example the hair, on the right in the sharp image you can see a single lone bright pixel for the hair, but on the CRT it’s 4 dots. I’m assuming 3 are probably the original pixel and the 4th is a bleed, but that’s just me guessing :P
There are countless more examples online and youtube videos about it, highly recommend ^^
That makes me wonder if there’s a kind of upscaling for old games that simulates how an old CRT image on large modern screens.
Edit* Here’s a high end solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku9QNyWAL_Y https://www.retrotink.com/category/all-products
you only got this if it wasn’t calibrated correctly tho
Frankly, it does look exactly like every sword-wielding, walking skeleton I’ve seen IRL. No notes.
For me, the first game I was truly like “HOOOOOLY SHIT” was the very opening scene of Final Fantasy 8… the waves crashing on the beach blew my (16 yo?) mind.
To be fair those cut scenes were unbelievable.
I just watched it for the first time and I could totally see that intro being mind blowing in 1999. I remember my friend showed me Final Fantasy X when that came out and that was how I responded to it as well.
Yes! It was a huge deal. It was mind bogglingly cool at the time.
I thought Final Fantasy: Spirits Within looked almost photorealistic when it came out, and now it looks like Toy Story or Shrek compared to modern 3D animation.
Final Fantasy: Spirits Within
Oh, I remember watching that one as a kid, being annoyed that it had nothing to do with the games I knew and it having a weird plot I could barely follow.
To give full credit to this movie, Final Fantasy games are just as convoluted. You try to condense the plot of the amnesia child soldiers who fight demons from the moon summoned by their teacher/mother in hopes they’ll defeat the reincarnated witch who’s destined to take over her body (FF8) in an hour and a half with Steve Buscemi, Alec Baldwin, and tell me if it’s Oscar worthy. (I have no clue whether the original Japanese cast was as star studded)
I hated that movie as a kid, but I think I hated it more because it didn’t follow any of the other convoluted stories I forced myself to understand already.
The best Final Fantasy movie is Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
I really believe Laputa to be the most Ghibli movie of them all, while Nausicaa’s story resembles the most Final Fantasy.
The first few Final Fantasy games have a hell of a lot in common with Castle in the Sky. The heavy emphasis on airships, the ancient, powerful civilization of which the female lead is the last descendent, the mid-story villain switch, etc.
I haven’t seen that in ages. The main thing I remember being wowed at was her hair.
Brave probably still wears that crown now, though.
Me playing Rome:Total War for the first time as a child in an internet cafe. I thought “wow this is so realistic! I feel like I am in the Roman era fighting epic battles!”
That game looked so good for its time they made a whole-ass TV show called Decisive Battles where they used it to recreate famous historical battles. Even my dad who hated video games loved that show. It was one of the only things we ever bonded over.
Got eyes fixed after optometrist diagnosed the x-ray vision
Still seems pretty solid. The background and UI could be more interesting, but the skeletons don’t need improving still.
Maybe in a still shot, but I imagine they look worse in motion.
Fun fact, on release, the UI for Morrowind did not even have health bars for enemies, this was patched in later.
I think this is the most uninteresting part of Morrowind, it’s a DLC that is basically “go to this island and kill a metric fuckton of skeletons”.
I think these are more representative of the game. It’s a bit dated, but insanely atmospheric and modders are still keeping it alive.
Back in the day we called them “expansion packs” instead of DLC because you went to the store and bought them on CD-ROM discs (or DVD-ROM if you had rich parents) because nobody’s Internet was fast enough to download a whole photoshopped nude of Cindy Crawford in less than 20 seconds, let alone a whole game expansion.
ah that is a word that I haven’t heard in a long while
Funnily enough this particular island was available via download and later as part of the GOTY pack, so technically speaking it was downloadable content before it became common. It was also free though.
It all started with that shitty horse armour
I laughed when they brought it out. They warned us and we shrugged them off. Its just fun. Its not going to get out of hand.
How wrong we were.
And then they sold us Skyrim. And then they sold us Skyrim. And then they sold us Fallout. And then they sold us Skyrim. And then
And then they tried to monetize modding and partially succeeded.
There’s also horse armor dlc for skyrim lol
