Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Vested Id"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Vector games were and are legitimately unique and beautiful, yes. 8-bit Nintendo games were not. Nintendo games looked like shit even back in the day. I remember reading an article in Nintendo Power where someone was asking why TMNT the arcade game looked like shit on his Nintendo compared to the arcades, and the Nintendo flunky had the balls to say it was because the kid was connecting the game to his TV using an RF adapter instead of a direct digital connection. STOP INTENTIONALLY MAKING UGLY GAMES TO "PAY HOMAGE!!!"[/quote] First, NES games looked incredible compared to proceeding home systems. Second, the NES was on the cusp of graphical representation in videogames (on home systems in any case) that could be interpreted directly without requiring the context of a story or other external factors, which puts it in a very special place artistically. Instead of this square representing a man and this duck representing a dragon, you could build a little man and a world for him to go running around in and it was unambiguous for the most part what you were looking at, even if it still took a lot of ingenuity on the part of the designer – coveralls, moustache, cap, painting the clouds green and reusing them as bushes – to make it apparent. Games on the NES had what feels now like the perfect balance of abilities and constraints for a graphical designer; everything you are looking at is an abstraction but it adds up to a concrete universe. It's sort of like a piano - not the most incredible sounding instrument of all time but you can play just about anything on it and it has wonderful harmonics. I'm personally a lot less enthusiastic about faux 8bit design of things like Habbo Hotel, which have a clean pixel look that is just lies.[/quote]