Topic: The Graphics and Sound of Retro Systems.

@koopa85
My real life graphics are pretty low quality, actually, but I'm hoping to have laser eye surgery over the summer to correct this. I still can't believe lasers are real. How crazy. I am going to refer to my eyes as HD eyes thereafter.

I love the graphics and sound of retro systems. I don't give a flying **** how realistic or how 3D a game is, how goddamn deep the storyline is, or any of that tripe.

The C64 had a great charm to it, the sound is always unmistakably C64, and all the games look amazing. If you were to try to modernize Tower Toppler for WiiWare, I guarantee it'd look ugly as **** like some flash game. However, on the C64 it looks absolutely surreal.

On the Saturn, so many games had cool anime intros, it was awesome. Games on the TG-16 had some pretty wicked anime cutscenes as well, like Ys and Rondo of Blood. Sonic was absolutely amazing on the Genesis, but now he talks and runs around with swords and all this other crap. Even the GBA and DS games, they don't look half as good, they lack the feel of those games. Even Sonic 3D Blast, as hated as it seems to be, managed to at least get the atmosphere of Sonic down well.

In games like Dynamite Headdy and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, where you have your character going up the side of a psuedo 3D tower, that effect always looks infinitely cooler than anything in real 3D. Also, the part in Dynamite Headdy with the platforms swaying around, that is just great. The Gear Boss of Castlevania Bloodlines and the box guy from the first level of Gunstar Heroes, as well as plenty of the other bosses like Melon Bread, were just trippy as all hell.

Snes games were full of rotating and Mode 7 effects. Going around the world in pseudo 3D in the Final Fantasy games was stellar. I remember when I first got to play Super Mario Kart, it was mind-blowing and one of the most impossible to put down games. Nintendo blew my mind once again with Super Mario 64. It's hard to believe the N64 is retro now, but as good as people might say Super Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess are, I felt they were soulless and completely failed to suck me in and fill me with awe the same way Super Mario 64 and the N64 Zelda's did. Wind Waker was great, I loved the way it looked, but it still had nothing on every aspect of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Before I even recognized Treasure and paid attention to them, I had played "Sega's" Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy, and "Enix's" Mischief Makers, later to find out that some of my favorite games ever were from the same company (and that explained why DH and MM reminded me of each other). Mischief Makers' sprites look a little weird in the same way that Azure Dreams' sprites did, but it was an absolutely fun and memorable game.

Do I need to mention the fact that they just can't make games like Monster Party anymore? Not to mention exploding Hitler's head in a freaking NES game. It's just like Looney Tunes, which they barely show any more (in fact, Cartoon Network doesn't show anything good very often at all. I pretty much tune in for King of the Hill, maybe stay tuned for Family Guy, and change the channel or turn it off). People have essentially become completely idiotic as of late, stupid and offended by everything, and you can't have a cartoon character hit another on the head with a hammer because SOMEBODY died that way.

Because of this, they still haven't made a platformer where you're "Drunken Ted" and go through various levels like The Exploding Forest (The trees explode, as well as bleed for no good reason. The animals also walk backwards), Psychedelic Lake (a completely ****ed up level where the lake is constantly changing color), Hydro Desert (A desert, but the sky is water and there are sea creatures.) and Unicorn Tower (a vertical level full of clouds like heaven, with clowns, unicorns, globs of mercury, and an octopus made of spaghetti fly around. As you get further to the top, things get more red and fiery, and you fight a demonic red unicorn, and when you defeat it, the background changes into space and your character turns into a multicolor beam of light and flies to the moon), all while riding a combine harvester with some mean hydraulics for jumping power, killing your enemies by horrifically doing what combine harvesters do best. The best games in the world make even less sense than that, but you'll never see this game because somebody would be offended by the stereotype of the main character, the fact that you kill enemies with a combine harvester, and the fact that the levels are more than likely the result of an extremely bad trip that marked the end of one game designers now obliterated sanity.

And these are just the most significant examples I could come up with. The fact is, my PS2 is "wasted" on almost every compilation disk and 2D fighting game under the sun. I freakin' love 2D, I have Sega Genesis Collection, both Capcom Classics and Taito Legends games, both Street Fighter collections, Activision and Atari Anthology, Metal Slug Anthology, Samurai Shodown Anthology, both Fatal Fury Battle Archives, Art of Fighting Anthology, World Heroes Anthology, King of Fighters '98:UM and KoF XI just on my PS2 alone.

Even anime was often better in the old days. My namesake is based on the antagonist from an old anime, who remains my favorite villain to this day. They just don't make ANYTHING like they used to. One day, our kids are going to be looking at their own past and saying the stuff of today is a helluva lot better than the uninspired mindrot of 2045. It's an endless cycle. :/

I love how N64 Graphics look these days retro and still great, you know its N64, the games have a look to them thats full of charm.

I have to agree about the N64 graphics. The N64 graphics are just downright charming. I wish they would still make games with retro graphics. Props to Capcom for releasing Mega Man 9 with my favorite graphics and my least favorite difficulty level.

Yeah, I love the N64 graphics to.

Are you really getting laser surgery, Weird Adam? That's expensive! I want to get it eventually, but I don't know if I'd ever be able to afford it. Also, I'm still afraid they will turn the wrong laser on and blow a hole through my head.

I love the graphics and sound of the NES, not to mention the 2-button controller. Simple controllers meant great gameplay design, 8-bit graphics meant a mosaic inspired design to the visuals, and the 8-bit music just sounds truly unique. and very enjoyable

Hoping to is the key phrase. I'm a bit anxious about it, too, but if between insurance and hopefully generous parents I can cover it, it'd be best to get it over with. They say the longer you wait, the worse a candidate for the procedure you become. Of course, that could be the doctor trying to pressure me into giving him money, so who knows.

Realism just isn't my thing either.

I could care less if they can now make realistic looking "sweat" in today's sports games. I preferreded the simpler times when video games were an escape from what you would normally see on TV, instead of now where they are just an extension of what you normally see on TV!

A few posts in this thread (you know who you are) contains perhaps some of the saddest old man posts I've seen on this site. I mean, yeah, you should appreciate old school games, but damn. From some of these posts I'm thinking that some members here are 68 years old with a walker and your pants pulled up around your armpits yelling at kids who step on your lawn. Remember....nothing is as good as you remember it, and the past is a great place to visit but you don't want to live there.

Referring to an earlier post, I must say that the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) had inferior sound quality most of the time, in comparison to the Super Nintendo. The Angry Video Game Nerd has a good comparison of Doom's sound quality on the Mega Drive versus the SNES if you wanna check that out. I'm not a fan of Doom though.

I don't think loving a certain era of video games makes players "grumpy old men." I think the serious gamer is a bit like a video game historian and they see the good and bad of all games regardless of the time period.

There are plenty of new games I love! However, it doesn't mean I have to jump on the bandwagon and only look forward and never look back. We live in a disposable society enough as is. We are brainwashed to believe newer things are always better than older things. Sometimes, that is true and sometimes it is not. For instance,the new Star Trek movie is way better than most of the older ones in my opinion, but I love the original Star War trilogy way more than the prequels. Art is subjective so we have the right to think the way that we do.

@Turbo Genesis 64
Just so you know, I wasn't being 100% serious. I was just having some fun with the way some of posts were written, which did seem to fit the grumpy old men theme I worked earlier.

OK Fox you are no longer on my jerk list! Congratulations.

The PC Engine (TG16) hands down for me. There are so many quality arcade ports on it -- especially in Japan -- that you cannot go wrong. I also enjoyed the HuCard format rather than larger, bulkier carts on the other systems.

There is a reason why Turbo is my first name!

I agree the PC Engine / TG16 is my favorite system of all time. I'm pretty impressed with all that they could jam on a little Hucard. And also the TG16 had a great "Japanese" vibe with its library of games. Too bad so many quality PC Engine games didn't come to shore due to bad NEC selections and Nintendo's monoploy with key third party companies.

Yeah they really should have released more of the Japanese titles in the States; I didn't own one until a friend gave me his old one around the time the Jaguar came out and then I sold it to a collector. I fondly remember playing Dungeon Explorer with 4 or 5 people, hell we even though Moto Roader was fun! But when you went to Toys 'R' Us the NES section simply dwarfed the TG16 one.

You never would have suspected that the PC Engine edged the Famicom in Japan and actually has more titles than any other platform on the Japanese VC (well it did until this past Tuesday; now they have the same number).

hey man, I play all the new stuff, but I seldom have as much fun as when I play the classics, the game developers of today just aren't as talented, it is about far more than console capability...you sound like a gaming 'noob'

I agree 100 % NESnes.

The 8-bit and 16-bit eras had some mad talent that perhaps will never be duplicated again. Technology is important, but I think at the end of the day, the unique vision of the designer is more important. It is how the individual rises up to the challenge. Likewise, the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare, achieved what he did without the luxury of a typewriter or a computer!

As I stated earlier, that wasn't exactly a serious post; more of a jab at the way some of the posts read.
But, as for your statement that developers aren't as talented today, that's just pure B.S. The problem arises more from the fact that most games back in the day had small teams that were more free to explore. There weren't multi-million dollar deals that would break a company if it failed and send a few hundred people out of work, they were much more of a smaller scale. Creativity in those circumstances is given much more freedom to shine.