As i have said in previous posts i have been gaming since the proverbial dawn of time. And recently i have been getting back into some of the old retro games i used to play. On my 360 i have downloaded a few games from the Xbox Live Arcade and my latest addition is Castlevania: Symphony of the night. One of the games i did unfortunately miss in my early gaming years. Whilst playing the game i came to realise that gaming way back when was beautiful to look at. The attention to detail of every single pixel on the screen was fascinating
Every Pixel has meaning in Castlevania: SOTN
To me playing castlevania was like watching a painting come to life on screen. And tat is one of the man reasons even from just only playing it for an hour or so it will be down as one of the best games of all time.
I ten started thinking what other games I thought were quite amazing visually back when i was playing on the mega drive and on the pc. I then remembered one of my all time favorite mega drive games. Alienstorm, from what i remember the game play was very simple but the aliens looked pretty ghastly. I took the chance to look at some scree shots today to find that even though Alienstorm was a totally different game. It had the same attension to detail within the alien enemies.
eventhough its not on the same visual level as Castlevania, Alienstorm has great character detail
as you can see the aliens get a good depth of detail to get their lumpy texture across to the gamer. This is a great use of pixle art in my opinion.
Around the same time i was playing Alienstorm i was playing the classic Wolfenstein 3D on the pc (In ‘can i play daddy’ mode from what i can remeber. I was still pretty young) So for this blog i desided to find an image. In my opinion even though the visuals are good they are really nothing compaired to the likes of SOTN or the charater detail in Alienstorm. Maybe this was an earlier game? or Pixles just really dont work in an FPS game? I’ll leave that for you to deside.
wolfenstein 3D: Not using pixles to their full visual potencial in my opinion
So there you have it really. Retro games to me are like classic art works. And when they are done well i cant help but just stop playing the game for a few moments and take in the the visuals.
I think the thing with Wolfenstein was more the fact that it was a ’3D’ title – the same sprites had to be visible from various different distances – although the soldiers looked alright from a distance, up close the pixel formations looked a lot less detailed. Obviously with games like Alien Storm, the sprites are always viewed at the same size so are made specifically to see at that distance from the ‘camera’.
Gotta love 2D design though – it takes a true artist to pull off great visuals.