/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7932326]

I've always found pre-rendered graphics fascinating. They effectively mimic the look of true 3D using little more than typical sprite technology. The effect is simple: render a model in full 3D, take "snapshots" of the model, convert them into 2D sprites and then string them together into an animation, effectively giving the illusion of 3D animation on a 2D plane. This technique is what allowed games like Donkey Kong Country, Sonic 3D Blast and Yoshi's Story to look more advanced than conventional console graphics of the era would allow. The effect produces a distinct look that I find really appealing, and I can't call it anything other than pure soul.

[Anonymous No.7932335]

It's definitely neat, and kind of a brilliant work around for the limitations of the era. All of my friends refuse to play games that use this style, though, because they consider it to be uniformly ugly.

[Anonymous No.7932341]

>>7932335
Your friends are fucking faggots who can't appreciate true SOUL.

[Anonymous No.7932349]

>>7932335
>>7932341
Yoshi's Story in particular may not be everybody's cup of tea but I don't know how anybody could look at pre-rendered graphics in general and not think they looked cool as fuck. The stark shadowing alone makes everything so atmospheric.

[Anonymous No.7932430]

I really like how some RPGs like Fallout used it.

[Anonymous No.7932462]

>>7932335
It's sad that people think pre rendered 3D looks bad just because they don't use a CRT to view them.

[Anonymous No.7932470]

>>7932462
its not sad, they are not sad. stop feeling said by proxy.

[Anonymous No.7932484]

Yoshi's story is kino as fuck

[Anonymous No.7932509]

>>7932462
This is the real reason. Those games dont look good on modern shit and filters out a lot of false faggots.

[Anonymous No.7932568]

Yoshi's story has a great aesthetic but the physics are off and the level design is lacking compared to island. Still pretty good though especially if you're not rushing through it

[Anonymous No.7932683]

>>7932326
This style does WONDERS on clay models. check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxzu82-8tAw

[Anonymous No.7932708]

[Anonymous No.7932709]

[Anonymous No.7932712]

[Anonymous No.7932715]

and then there's 3D games that use this look, which I absolutely love.

[Anonymous No.7932716]

>>7932326
I like the ff games for ps1 for the pre rendered graphics. Very neat style. Incredibly nostalgic.

[Anonymous No.7932718]

[Anonymous No.7932721]

[Anonymous No.7932728]

>>7932326
>>7932335
Strangely enough, the only games with pre rendered graphics that i dislike are the classic MKs and its clones.

[Anonymous No.7932730]

>>7932326
god, just shut the fuck up

[Anonymous No.7932738]

>>7932730
no need to be a hater

[Anonymous No.7932778]

i always enjoyed how kirby super star mashed together prerendered tiles with hand drawn sprites.

the ds port removed all the soul

[Anonymous No.7932825]

>>7932326
I loved prerendered CGI graphics back in the day, specially DKC, Super Mario RPG and Toy Story ones. It felt like some sort of magic was animating those realistic characters inside the 16-bits consoles. It looked like they could have popped out of the screen anytime.

[Anonymous No.7932928]

>>7932326
In subtle ways it really improved animations like in the rotating tower in mikey mania. Genesis was criticized for not doing it well but gba proved even with thousands of colours that pre-rendered can still look terrible.

Even donkey kong land and killer instinct on gb used it very well.

[Anonymous No.7932932]

>>7932928
forgot pic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV9BqqU17DM

[Anonymous No.7933193]

>>7932709

Looks a lot better with crt filter. Why butcher it by using raw?

[Anonymous No.7933203]

>>7932721
you picked one of the ugliest ones you stupid fucking retard

[Anonymous No.7933204]

[Anonymous No.7933206]

>>7932683
Such genre doesn't benefit from clay. There are barely any objects or animation.

[Anonymous No.7933207]

>>7932708
youdon'twanttobeintheewaywhenmylasergoesoff
TAKETHAT

[Anonymous No.7933209]

Polygonal models on pre-rendered backgrounds is very surreal.

[Anonymous No.7933415]

>>7932326
Ruined the game boy advance.

[Anonymous No.7933615]

>>7933209
I quite like certain examples, see resident evil and final fantasy 7/8

[Anonymous No.7933692]

>>7932728
Classic MK didn't use prerendered 3d for its sprites, it used digitized stills of real actors.

[Anonymous No.7933694]

>>7933203
Imagine getting this angry over video games

[Anonymous No.7933748]

Pre-rendered is fine for cartoony style games like Mario or Donkey Kong, but real world settings and humans always looked terrible

[Anonymous No.7933780]

>>7933748
True but I always liked the weird look that Goldeneye had with its pre-rendered textures

[Anonymous No.7933792]

>>7932712
This is a stop-motion game, does it count as pre-rendered?

[Anonymous No.7933797]

>>7933748
It's called soul sweaty

[Anonymous No.7933915]

>>7933206
Seems fitting to me, when someone says clay, stopmotion comes to mind.

[Anonymous No.7935329]

[Anonymous No.7935373]

Its amazing how shitty pre-rendered backgrounds looked in GBA games. I'm not an expert on how the GBA renders stuff but even with a filter to tone down the brightness its still horrible. I don't blame people for using CRT filters for some GBA titles out there

[Anonymous No.7935470]

I hate this look. And it's basically the only way anyone did 2D on the N64 which aged it and made the 2D games look like shit

[Anonymous No.7935483]

>>7933203
looks good to me nigger

[Anonymous No.7935536]

Am I the only one who thinks pre-rendered graphics were cheating? They were used by lazy artists to compensate for their lack of ability to draw proper 2D sprites.

[Anonymous No.7935975]

>>7932778
I hate how the DS port got GBA-ified. GBA and DS was truly the worst Kirby era (outside of Canvas Curse)
And then there's the vomit inducing Revenge of the King one

[Anonymous No.7935980]

>>7932326
Clayfighter and Claymates on SNES aren’t great games but they do make great use of the style. I always liked the asthetics of those games, they’re both very charming.

[Anonymous No.7936110]

>>7935980
Claymates is a decent game with some decent mechanism, but as usual with these games is that the level design is a tad "ehh". A good rom hacker probably could make some fantastic levels out of it tho'
Also the damn Mouse runs faster than Sonic (unfortunately underused), so much that there's a Blast Processing parody on the game's boxart
The damn carnival and the lone bush blocking it has been bothering for ages, but I digress

[Anonymous No.7936132]

I like that DK64 still has some of the classic pre-rendered palmtrees in the backgrounds.

[Anonymous No.7936176]

I wish games these days used prerendered, for obvious reasons real time rendering will never be as good as something that was pre-rendered so we could have stuff that looks amazingly good now. The limitations are fine if we have a good gameplay experience, rather than say an empty open world that is rendered in real time.

Same with digitized actors, It's a shame that remake of MK1-3 with new digitized actors got shelfed.

[Anonymous No.7936582]

>>7935536
yes and no. I absolutely prefer beautiful hand drawn sprite work but it takes a lot of skill to make prerendered look good too. SMRPG and DKC are the only 2 that I really love the prerendered look on. Mortal Kombat is the opposite end of the spectrum for me, always hated the style and always will.

[Anonymous No.7936583]

>>7935536
You just weren't alive at the time to be impressed by it

[Anonymous No.7936594]

>>7935373
shrink that down to a gba screen and it looks fine. There's also a rom hack that fixes the colors

[Anonymous No.7937429]

>>7932326
this older boy that molested me told me their was a secret brown yoshi in this game and i spent forever trying to find it kek

[Anonymous No.7937475]

>>7937429
u wot

[Anonymous No.7937510]

>>7932326
I still find it funny that the era of pre-rendered game graphics started because a bunch of right cunts living in a barn decided Terminator 2 was such a cool movie that they just had to buy the gorillion dollar supercomputers that made the movie's special effects.
Just look these GRAFIX

[Anonymous No.7937557]

>>7932326
You talk all this and don't even mention prerendered backgrounds in psx RPGs like final fantasy vii and saga frontier which are the apex of kino. Shame on you.

Also FUCK saga frontier 2 and anybody that likes it

[Anonymous No.7937595]

>>7936583
I was, and everything in Donkey Kong looked to me like a bunch of spheres glued together. I very much preferred the cartoony look of SMW2, for example.
But, enough time has passed that now I appreciate the pre-rendered look. It became its own distinct artstyle, despite being a product of the limitations of the era.

[Anonymous No.7939575]

>>7932326
Pre-renders were a small part of my childhood growing up. At the time, I prefered both regular sprites and polygonal 3D to them, and to an extent they wiill always have an advantage. But my appreciation for the use of them has steadily grown all the same.

Mischief Makers was pre-rendered core plus. Many fond memories here.

[Anonymous No.7939581]

>>7933915
Did you make that Pingu yourself?

[Anonymous No.7939769]

>>7933193
it looks fine at native res like that.

>>7933203
and you just posted a bunch of cubes and checkerboard patterns, much better.

>>7933207
SOUL

>>7933792
of course, it's still pre rendered digitized sprites

>>7933204
would look better without that ugly filter and muh edgy filename

[Anonymous No.7940026]

pre-rendered sprites aged pretty poorly compared to hand drawn pixel art (compare any Cave game for example, all the hand drawn visuals are uniformly superior artistically compared to literally anything from the second half of their lifespan when they started pre-rendering everything) and IMO looks terribly, terribly ugly in most cases, but I do respect it because of its cost saving abilities and thus allowing developers to get away with an amount of content and animation that would simply be too big an endeavor otherwise.

I'm a gamedev and I've considered doing something like what Falcom IIRC did in some of their mid 2000's games which was hand draw the important player character sprites but pre-render giant boss monsters that would be too costly to animate otherwise.

[Anonymous No.7940525]

will this shit and wooly world get ported to the switch or is there not enough demand for yoshi titles?

[Anonymous No.7940580]

>>7932326
thanks for explaining what pre-rendered graphics are. i'm a zoomer and don't know how to open a new tab to google it.

[Anonymous No.7940861]

>>7932326
People who love Donkey Kong Country but hate Yoshi's Story make no sense to me

DKC is a great game but DAMN is it ugly.

[Anonymous No.7940894]

>>7940861
No it's not, I guarantee you won't think that if you play it on CRT in 240p, how it was designed to be played.