Vintage gaming community.
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You miss half the fun then, the imagination in your head of transforming the graphics into whatever you want. And then gameplay is the most important
The one game I remember getting based on the cover alone was Solstice.
That game was hard as fuck. I don't think I ever saw the end.
Bangin' music tho. I still sometimes get ear worms from it.
Honestly graphics aren't really that important compared to the gameplay. Games such as those in the UFO 50 collection are a really good example of that. Also if you actually want a quality god vs satan game with old school graphics then I highly recommend Grimstone.
UFO 50 is so damn good
As someone who lived through that era, let me tell you, the gameplay graphics were never a disappointment. In your mind they looked as good as graphics today. The only thing I can remember being disappointed about was the Nintendo Powerglove. Man, what a collosal, non-working, over hyped advertising lies, piece of shit that thing was!
The Wizard lied to me for 2 hours about that useless piece of plastic.
Dude, the guy who introduced it in the movie straight up said "it's so bad!"
But if you would have saved it until today you could resell it foe a whole $25 more (of course accounting for inflation it’s actually $105 less)
…
Wait is that true? Did a rare Nintendo product depreciate in value????
I’m gonna press X to doubt on that one.
No, he’s right. The power glove was garbage from the get-go. Really cool cyberpunk thing on paper but … hell, we still aren’t there today!
but all the fun is taking the game graphics and transforming it in your head to resemble the cover art
I remember renting Phalanx just because of the box. like "why's this old man playing the banjo?" then you look at the back and it's a friggin space shooter. I had to rent it.
the back usually showed gameplay shots.
Yes, where they put the superior Amiga screenshots on the back of your ZX Spectrum game
Lol how was that allowed? It's a complete different version.
In today's gaming envoriment large companies can make promise after promise, deliver on none of them and walk away like nothing happened. The worst thing that can happen is some people calling you bad names online. What makes you think advertisement would be more ethical at a time no one gave a shit about gaming?
I had Bad Street Brawler for the NES and it's so bad, it's funny. Even back in the day.... fighting midgets, dogs, and circus strongmen, trying to get to the dumpster at the end of the level, and with 2-player coop to boot
I somehow missed Bad Street Brawler and went for Bad Dudes because I played that one at the arcade. Wasn't nearly as good as the arcade version though.
I was always so disappointed in the 90s to see 'realistic' looking graphics and then you play the game and realize it was just a point and click game
Everyone always praised Myst for its great graphics. I always thought it was cheating because it was pre-rendered.
Sure it was pre-rendered, but it was still impressive to see PCs do that at the time because of the sheer amount of storage it took. Myst basically required a CD-ROM drive because the game is basically made of pictures, PCM audio and video. There's an astonishing amount of video in that game from the early 90's. It was another symptom of CDs having an astonishing amount of capacity for their era. Myst couldn't exist on floppy disk.
It is pretty cool to see what they've recently done to Riven. They really brought it to life in Unreal Engine.
Lots of the best games were prerendered! Donkey Kong Country, Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2, Duke 3D, the Pro Pinball games, just to name a few.
I do have a soft spot for prerendered graphics.
BioForge was particularly impressive for the time, with mixed pre-rendered graphics.
I am not sure prerendered describes ja2 and fallout (some of the best games tbh). Aren't those just sprites?
The rest I have not played.
Prerendered sprites by taking screenshots of the models on their single expensive silicon graphics.
Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.
And it's not like they didn't have plenty of problems to solve.
Here's an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.
there were engineering competitions in the late nineties for realtime rendered games. they tended to look like vetrex games.
Speaking for myself but in 1995 or whatever I didn’t even know what the term rendered was. Game looked cool but I liked Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon for state of the art graphics lol
Looks like a swell game to me!
Final Fantasy. Flowing dramatic artwork. 18 pixels of character (hyperbole, idk the actual pixel number.)
To be fair, I’ve never seen anything come close to Amanos illustratative work.
The character sprites were 16x24 in combat, so a whole 384 pixels to work with!
A 386 could handle that easily and still have two pixels left.
Gonna make good use of those 33Mhz!
Sometimes I forget that CPU clock speeds were talked about in Mhz instead of Ghz.
The art vs. the game
Oh well...
It's the same with lots of indie games now. Oh, and mobile ones too
Back when XBLA got going there were so many games with anime character art that ended up being meh side-scrolling platformers with 8-bit pixel graphics. Looking at the Nintendo eShop... not much has changed. 😄
Bro, that stupid game with the guys that shoot barrels to get more fighters/better weapons looked fun. The actual game is a shitty base builder with timed progression, of course you can pay to get past the time locks. Fuck that company and every "influencer" that takes their dirty money.
Back in the day, deep down you knew what you were really getting. I'm a little annoyed these days when indie games use marketing visuals that look like they could be in-game for a modern title and then it's all pixel art style. I get that you don't make a pixel art poster, but in that case, go all-in on an art cover don't let it be mistaken for game graphics.
I can't research it at the moment, but I want to say that was a common thing in the pre-NES days, and I think Nintendo required actual gameplay graphics to be shown on the box because of that.
Could be off on the specifics, but I do vaguely recall those kinds of non-representative box art having some controversy.
