/vr/ - Retro Games

I fucking adore 3 solely because of the mountain levels

Kirby Super Star and Donkey Kong Country hold up even today with their pre-rendered graphics. Why? Because their developers went balls deep into the process. SNES' tile and palette limitations were very strict and they worked extremely hard to ensure the illusion doesn't break and the tiles not only match seamlessly, but actually fit into VRAM. I can't even imagine the algorithms they used when optimizing that shit. Even in the screenshot attached, it's not obvious that the far background is 2bpp unless you actually stop to think about it.

Enter the GBA - 3D modeling is affordable and any faggot with a devkit can cut costs by investing on some 3D modelers. Worry about space? Fuck that, there's plenty of room in VRAM. Careful with palettes? No need, it'll be fine. Unique sprites for 8 degrees? Scratch that, we can do mode7-ish rotation by default now.

The result was a bunch of mediocre cashgrabs with little thought behind them. Nintendo is partly to blame because they included that Yoshi's Story demo with the devkit, encouraging third parties to roll with pre-rendered shit instead of conscious design choices.