/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9948930
Then list what you think those things are.

>>9948930
>Going beyond the usual "less detail meant more space to fill in your imagination" argument, because I suspect there's a lot more to it than that.
i dont think there is anything other than that. there is nothing creepy or scary WHATSOEVER about modern realistic graphics, yet retro games can pull it off very well. same goes for music.

modern games are deathly afraid of darker hues and extreme lighting so everything looks like an amorphous color blob that can only invoke total apathy to whatever happens on screen

>>9948932
Perhaps the music for starters, because music plays a large role in atmosphere.
I feel like soundtracks used to be a lot more experimental and progressive, whereas in modern times there is a trend towards more cinematic movie style orchestra soundtracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB2_haBpn6I

>>9948930
>Why did older games have better atmosphere?
Because you were a kid back then and are nostalgic.

better designs, better sound design, better fitting music and the most important thing: GOOD LIGHTNING

>>9948930
Because they weren't realistic, either by mistake, hardware limitations or on purpose.
If they were to recreate that same screen today, it would look way too realistic and reality gets boring fast.

>>9948930
because smaller teams made more coherent projects.

Limitation spurs creative solutions.
That's it.

you had talented white guys making shit rather than diversity morons out of academia

>>9948930
This seems subjective, are we picking only a subset of modern AA games? What era of old games are we talking about exactly?

>>9948962
This.
When I played Deus Ex, I was surprised how many textures have straight #000000 black compared to a lot of modern games.

>>9949146
Let's be honest it was mostly asian men making the really good games

>>9948930
Best visual and sound designers than what we have these days

>>9949359
it was talented white guys, talented asian guys, and often one group was inspired by the works of the other group

>>9948930
Like in case of movies, it was probably lack of standarized effects, filters and shaders to cover up mediocre-to-bad visuals and music. More attention was put to props placement, camera work, hardware limits and other tricks.
Also major idea sources (stories, music, pictures, movies) were more inspiring than today money-driven clones of remakes of remasters of bland reboots.

Minimalism. It's better for nightmarish environment
It's why those non-euclidean spaces games are so popular now even though it's just walls

>>9949359
outside of Nintendo, no, not really.

Paintings are generally more atmospheric than photographs.

>>9948930
They didn't hold your hand and treated you with respect

>>9950140

>>9950163
the other asian men were making complete dogshit like 7 IQ ripoffs of Wizardy and jank sidescrollers. meanwhile whites perfected basically every genre they dabbled in from shooters to RTS and created gold standard games like DOOM and StarCraft that are still revered to this day. it's not even a comparison. sorry, but there's a reason we conquered you. stay mad you beardless manlet.

>>9950180
>jank sidescrollers
skill issue detected

>>9950189
>beardless manlet
genetic issue detected

>>9950180
> Omitting shmups, rail shooters, beatem'ups, turn based tactics, rhythm games, stealth sims that predate NES
> Muh FPS and RTS top jRPGs and Mario clones
2 braincells IQ post, ladies and gentelmen.

>>9948930
Because of the way modern games are made. A huge amount of area you travel on is just procedureally generated so you end up with huge landscapes but it feels like you don't really see much and its boring. Compare that to exploring mario 64, every polygon was placed there using simple tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djeP9NF5BAQ

>>9949483
Every new game seems to have the revolting look where everything is made out of shiny plastic, even the dirt. Every unreal game at least looks almost exactly the same.

Especially in the dos era you really didn't know what type of rendering you would get, you could go from wolf 3d to untima underworld to apache.

>>9950180
When did whites make a good shmup.

>>9950701
>console faggot knows nothing about PC games
news at 11

>>9950189
small penisu detected

>>9950716
>When did whites make a good shmup.
>Pic related

>>9948930
No that's pretty much it to a t.

>>9950721
Most 80'-90's HC / PC games are either ports or inspiration yoinks from arcade / tabletop / bootleg games. Stop embarrasing yourself.

>>9948930
Somewhere around the early/mid 2000s, what everybody as a culture in the west thought was the next evolution in music, movies, art, etc... Never happened. Instead the mass media conglomerates who at this point had a strangle hold on information for that average citizen, plus 200% patriotism from 9/11. lulled Americans into a weird place where reality tv shows became king, top music hits stopped having introspective or intelligent lyrics and complex rhythms, movies became 1980 sitcom tier, high art started to become feminist propaganda, cartoons became calarts, etc... We are just now pulling that veil away from our faces as a society, slowly, but it's happening. I have hope for all forms of art and entertainment in the near future. I have hope for videogames when starfield flops from sandbox fatigue.

>>9950721
PC gaming was literally dying when Valve came rolling around which is why Steam got so huge

>>9948930
Its less detailed so your mind fills in the gaps

>>9950858
tf are you talking about, people fucking hated steam when HL2 came out and forced you to make an account and install that garbage DRM.

>Valve came rolling around

Emphasis on rolling because of gabes fat ass

>>9948930
less detail is easier for the brain to digest (easier to know where to go, easier to find a useful item, etc) modern games are full of shit that unnecessarily distracts you from its gameplay.

I played Doom Eternal recently and while the gameplay was cool, the graphics were too detailed it was annoying. I don't know, maybe it's taste, maybe I'm retarded.

>>9950858
>le pc gaming dieng
get gabes cock out of your mouth

>>9950858
Steam got huge the same way Netflix got huge: undercutting everyone. Steam would have constant sales where games would be sold for $5 or less. Actual games, not indie trash either. This got them loads and loads of users. But then when Steam became impossible to avoid, when it became the PC games market monopoly, that's when publishers said "no more $5 sales." Now everything on Steam is $70-80 and for the first 2 years you're lucky to have a "discount" down to a reasonable retail price let alone a sale price. Even indie trash is $12 and up on sale. Bait and Switch.

>>9951331
>that's when publishers said "no more $5 sales."
That's not Gaybe's fault though, Valve never forced them to put games on sale in the first place either
Also, show me those games that had $5 sales back then but not anymore

>>9948930
They had to actually make the lighting themselves instead of pressing the "apply lighting" button in unreal engine or whatever the fuck they do these days

>>9950180
These people infesting every board whi base their entire personality around being white to mask their own complete lack of accomplishments and value to society have become so fucking boring. They're not offensive, witty, outrageous, funny, insightful or anything. They're just dull as dishwater.

>>9951701
>You can't have any solidarity with your own race and must view your life solely as an atomized individual in competition with other unrelated atomized individuals*
>*Rule only applies if you are white
People are capable of seeing through this kind of bullshit now, fortunately.

Because the developers were mostly really into what they’re doing. It wasn’t a job they’re gonna take for prestige and money.
Also, it was more difficult to recognize that video games are a good resource for the general population, so smarter ones used to work in the industry.

>>9951732
Same scripted shit. End of discussion. No point in shitting up the thread with such a fucking milquetoast and inconsequential pile of nothing.
Good day.

>>9951760
>Make boilerplate anti-white statement
>Anyone responds
>End of discussion goodbye

>>9948930
If you ever worked in tech industry its because of profits. The amount of time teams get per sprint to do the amount of work they get is ridiculous so of course there is less time to actually put some soul into the work you are creating. Its all about pushing out code as fast as possible to meet ridiculous deadlines to please the business heads that made high expectation promises

>>9950871
this. i boycotted steam for 15 year.
windows used to be the fucking launcher ffs

>>9950943
you have sensorial overload i guess you probably have assburgers

>>9951732
You're not making the white race better, you're just making 4chan worse.

>>9948930
>I suspect there's a lot more to it than that
I don't think so aside from modern AAA games handholding you through the whole experience making sure that you don't miss a single thing. Old games at least used to let you get lost and absorbed in the experience rather than just follow one intended path

I can't imagine how back in the day you'd find good artists.

Nowadays you get to see every thing an artist does because of social media.
Back in the day there was none of that.

from 60s to 2000s the world had a better atmosphere from now as well for sure, in many areas.

>"less detail meant more space to fill in your imagination"
This is correct, but its not the players imagination but the developers imagination.
Less detail meant the devs had far fewer restraints from working in less believable environments and thus didnt have to pull any punches when it came to filling their levels with wacky, spooky fun shit that wasnt necessarily appropriate for the setting. Its not just old games but new games inspired by old games. DUSK has incredible atmosphere, not because of my imagination but because of the developers imagination running wild with the low poly setting.

>>9951760
>milquetoast
lmao what a faggot

>>9950727
Kindly stop reminding me that Epic used to be cool
>>9950871
It's almost exclusively zoomers and very young millennials that parrot that shit. Yes, thank you Valve for saving us from our property rights, and thank you for pretending to be cool for six whole years before you pulled the rug and locked all of our games behind a fucking subscriber agreement.
>>9953451
He's just burned out on gaming. That's what happens when you play non-stop from five years old to however the fuck old he is now.

>>9948930
style over realism

>>9948930
the whole world has changed since

https://vimeo.com/549715999

the guys who came out of schools those days were instructed and inspired by a different kind and generation of people

>>9951701
>These people
Brown skin manlet detected

>>9948930
https://youtu.be/VsjjLa17xWs

What happened to architecture since the 60 is what happened to game graphics and art direction since the PS3 era.

>>9948930
The lack of technical ability to reproduce reality meant that the art necessarily had to have some kind of vision that incorporated a "style." What that style meant varied from game to game, artist to artist, and asset to asset, but there was a built-in necessity to it. Even games that attempted photorealism were held back by the limits of their day. The number of polygons available, the resolution of the textures, it all fell short which meant everything had a "style." Now that we've crossed a threshold into graphics reflecting the world outside, each asset is individual well made but wholly uninspiring because there's no inherent style anymore.

Plus there's the issue of convergence. Games all rely on the same middleware nowadays and so much has been standardized that there's way less variation game to game. And consistency necessarily results in boredom.

>>9953695
>>9953451
not sure why you guys are gaslighting that guy. right looks way worse. game visuals need to communicate a different kind of information than movies. i understand what that guy is complaining about. you notice it in many modern games

>>9953796
Yup, it's about focus. If you look at old games the visuals have a sort of prioritization that draws attention to the things that really matter. Now that everything "pops" nothing does.

>>9953802
And for what it's worth, this is also a problem with modern movies. The CGI in the new Jurassic Worlds look way worse than the CGI in the original Jurassic Park. Not because the tech is literally worse, because it isn't, but because the film exposes you to it so much and with such casual insignificance that you become desensitized to it. Suddenly a CGI raptor doesn't look like a danger anymore even though the movie wants you to feel like it is. It comes off like a Saturday morning cartoon baddie rather than any genuine menace.

>>9953672
>AAAAAAAAHHHHH BIG WORDS!! SAVE ME LAND OF THE FREE!!!

>>9953660
>I can't imagine how back in the day you'd find good artists.
kinda weird when i think about it,pretty much all the music i listen to i found because of the internet and most of the stuff would have been impossible for me to just stumble upon.

>>9953802
>>9953808
It's interesting that nobody would think to say a live-action movie looks less evocative than an animated one. The difference between presentation of vidya and movies is that movies have editing and cinematography, you're limited to what the filmmakers decide to show you so there's still an imaginative component even with live action. With modern vidya with camera control it's basically like real life, you need to survey the scene and your brain filters it down to the relevant objects, but because there's no "authorship" to it it doesn't feel emotionally evocative. It's an interesting irony that in finally achieving movie-style photorealism games lost the actual thing that made them emotionally involving like movies.

>>9953879
>big words
the fact that you intentionally use what you consider to be "big words" to give the impression of being more intelligent than you are is what makes this laughable. we're on 4chan bud, not reddit. nobody is impressed. also
>muh ameriburgers
rent free, mohammed

>>9948937
Honestly i think its this. The graphical limitations let your mind fill in the gap.

>>9953938
NTA but to be fair, anon. Words like that or 'elegant' or "compartmentalised" are basically an alien language to the majority of burgers. An actual majority of your populace can't read above a 6th grade level so a word like "happenstamce" is almost like speaking in tongues to you guys over the pond. Milquetoast is still a hilariously shit word to use but anon isn't wrong.

>>9953927
I think people do say that about live-action movies, just with different language. People regularly complain that the Disney live action remakes are kind of visually boring compared to their animated counterparts. The Disney remakes are a good parallel to vidya because they're hitting the same notes: you get something that is technically masterful but has very little emotional weight.

Another parallel might be retro games that are all sorts of programming wizardry but have shitty level design and mechanics. Sure, you can marvel at what kinds of things they manage to get the console to do but it's not a game you're really eager to play. Toy Story on the SNES/Genesis is like that. We call it "feels" and "soul" as shorthand but it's really about making those intuitive connections that draw you into a product.

>>9953969
The soul vs soulless meme is trite and completely overplayed but it absolutely applies to your pic related.

>>9953958
the people you're describing are mystery meat mulattoes that live on Great Value food and watch tik tok 6 hours per day. they're called goyim, and they exist everywhere -- including whatever shit hole you live in that you mistakenly think is insulated against similar jewish golemization (it isn't). i'm not going to hold myself to their standard and neither should you. nobody uses words like "milquetoast" who isn't an armchair intellectual redditor that gets high on their own anal gas, end of story.

>>9953973
It's overused for sure and mostly got watered down because people started treating it like generic lingo for "good/bad" but when used in proper context it conveys the issue people have with things that feel emotionally neutered. A cynic would argue nostalgia goggles but even things in the past can have that effect. The Chuck Jones era of Tom and Jerry, for example. That's older than most of us but we can recognize why there'd have been beef. Same with everything Hanna Barbera, in fact. There was a lot of frustration in the animation community when all these hyper streamlined, penny pinching cartoons started moving in. A bunch of old WB and Disney animators referred to it as "animated radio" because it was devoid of all the things that they believed made animation worthwhile. Today we have Cal Arts as the modern analogue.

>>9953910
Think of it like this: back in the day radio DJs had more freedom to play music. Up-and-coming bands and musicians had a greater chance at exposure. Radio is a bottlenecked communication medium though. The internet is not (yet). The internet opens up magnitudes more channels for any band or musician to be heard.

>>9948930
They were more artistic back then instead of just being goyslop

>>9948937
>i dont think there is anything other than that.
Actual retard

>>9948962
>>9949350
In that case it's because of shitty ass LCDs and their shitty black levels

>>9950140
>>9950180
Stupid nigger never played Arcade games

>>9948930
>less detail meant more space to fill in your imagination
It's not just more space to fill in your imagination, it's less junk to fracture your attention. Fiction benefits from focus. If you're reading a book where the protagonist is walking down the street, you don't benefit from a description of every single noise, smell or snippet of conversation he hears - unless it's specifically written that way for artistic reasons. That's the sort of shit we block out in real life.
The simple geometry and lighting of older games is often much more 'readable' and better at creating contrast and atmosphere.

>>9949001
I see this 'argument' all the time and it's extremely reductive. Nostalgia is only one element. There are games I have no nostalgia for that are extremely evocative even now, and there are games I do or should have nostalgia for which aren't good at creating atmosphere at all.

>>9949002
Lighting is extremely important. Good lighting can take a game from 5/10 atmosphere to 10/10. And 'good' lighting doesn't necessarily mean more advanced, it's about how it's used. PS1 lighting, used correctly, absolutely drips with atmosphere.

>>9954026
exactly, i still don't undestand the retard trend of today to omit really dark blacks and make everything look like the sun is falling down on the earth

>>9950751
This explains the western side at least

>>9948930
Less details meant there's more time to be spent on adjusting the overall visual instead of a tiny pieces of details like pebbles, or tree barks.
Not to mention once you adjust the overall visual, you have to readjust all the finder details.

>>9954034
We are in an era of mediocre lighting and pathetic contrast, but at least we're through the 'everything has a bloom effect' era

>>9954034
Video games have always mimicked whatever was happening in Hollywood films at the time. And now we're in an era of making everything orange or blue.

>>9953982
I can't tell if you're a plant or genuinely this fucking stupid.

I was going to to a rebuttal of this by posting these
https://youtu.be/xDVS1wGDT-o
https://youtu.be/FUyDajm_m9I
https://youtu.be/KKecAh7HTEI
But then I realised I can hardly think of any games outside of these and some indies like papers please that the last few years have had a special atmosphere to them

>>9954552
is golem angry? did golem not get enough corn syrup today? who's a good golem?

>>9949001
No. If that was true we would love everything from back then. Yet we only like what was the best and we recognize what was shit or soulless. That's my case anyway and I played a lot in the 90s and I was very young

>>9954023
>I see this 'argument' all the time and it's extremely reductive.
No, it's flat out wrong and he knows that. Both old fags who missed the old games back in the day, and kids who aren't completely braindead and/or devoid of taste, on occasion mention that they've played some old game just recently and it was good.

>>9950716
>When did whites make a good shmup.

Project X and X2

>>9954773
>papers please
>last few years
Anon it is 10 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFHHGETsxkE

Mass standardisation in asset making and games using mostly the same engines, PBR certainly didn't help.

Games that try to be visually distinct but cohesive were not the majority of games even back then but still a sizable amount, doesn't help that now creativity is in an all time low now (on both sides of the pacific, moe is pretty much Japanese calarts), i fully expected more 2d games like Ori but people are still using "le pixel art with non consistent pixel sizes that wouldn't fly in any 8/16 bit system".