Greentext

There's many factors, honestly. For example, a lot of pixelated games have animations that break the "pixel barrier", eg, a character moves smoothly over half pixels. Another thing is pixel scales being completely different. Sometimes a character or an icon has larger pixels than those on a map. Another factor is simply a variety of textures and colours- older games had limited colours for most objects, counting the underlying map as an object in itself. Not every colour could be used, and sometimes, a lot games weren't actually on the same saturation as people remember.

Music will be another factor.

A reason to use pixelated graphics isn't necessarily for nostalgia, it's that it's simply easier to make the game look good and consistent. Which is excellent for an indie game. 3d graphics could be more costly and higher res graphics are harder to look better due to the added detail. With pixels, your brain kinda just fills it in and it doesn't go to the uncanny valley.

I think good examples are the likes of windwaker and thomas was alone. Both had simplistic art styles which wasn't pushing the console to the limits, and both are beautiful games.

I remember when I had to make a game for an assignment. Other classmates were trying to go for realism humans and such, mixing and matching downloaded graphics and textures. It looked how you'd expect. The most detailed texture I used was a skybox, then made my own textures and models which were simply flat colours and neon green cones for trees and big boxes with ramps for hills. I then played around with the emissive properties until the lighting looked nice. I got good marks, the graphics were cited as a reason.

I digress,

I think here the pixel art is too good, back in the day they wouldn't have been making something so complex.

As Yahtzee has suggested, people aren't nostalgic for old games, but for how they felt playing old games. Much harder to capture that, and beautiful pixel art alone isn't enough.

This is why shovel knight looks and feels like the old classics it’s imitating. They artificially limited themselves to color pallets and some technical limits that old systems had. I think they ended up using 18 colors instead of 16, and double the sprites on screen, among some of them. Indie games usually just go with what looks good and use modern limits because they can. Most the time it’s not a choice, they just do what works and that’s ok too.

Anon is old, anon can see through the matrix.

When you were young you didn't see the game, you just experienced the world.

you need a good scanline filter if you want modern pixels to look like classic ones

you can never go home

no indie rpg will ever make me feel like playing Golden Sun as a kid did

Because these characters aren't built the same as old games. That was part of the magic of older games, using as few resources as possible but cleverly cutting the spirit into easily manipulated bit maps that can be flipped and rotated as necessary to animate the character.

These are overly detailed and missing the CRT effect.

I also think gaming now a days just feels different and not in a childhood wonder sort of way but a walking into an obscure bookstore kind of way. Social media makes learning about a video game way too easy. Spoilers are hard to avoid and the more people talk about a game the less novel it feels. I didn't spend much time on forums as a kid so most games i learned about was via word of mouth or from demo disks. I'll never forget my first play through of Halo 1 on the OG xbox. Played it coop with my bro. Was completely scared shitless when the flood was introduced. No one told me there were zombies in my shoot man game. Like no one talked about it. Good times.

We know what is possible today. When these old games were new they were quite frankly cutting edge and pioneering what was possible.

You don't achieve that today even with the most dedicated adherence to retro limitations.

Could anyone id the game in the screen shot for me?

I will take this moment to recommend Crosscode, one of the all time greats

It was the television or crappiness of it that made them look better than it was...

https://www.gamerevolution.com/originals/378895-heres-retro-games-look-awful-compared-remember

yea funny enough I got that high when recently playing Planescape torment but not Baldurs Gate I, dont know why. Still a good game though.

a lot of what makes old game have that charm isn't just having the good pixel art but also matching the system sprite design, color pallet and replicating the imperfect displays of the time. Which the last is the one i think tends to be forgotten about a lot. Of course not all games are trying to replicate a style but more like a general vibe.

That's why I love UFO 50.

It really went hard at capturing what I love about classic games. The Desert Western RPG was so good, even with all of its grind.

It's not just the pixel art but the rest of the game as well.

The actual pixels are more defined. You can't just emulate crt fuzz without emulating crt fuzz.

Maybe because it's not limited. If your comfort games were in RPG Maker, then 24-bit pixels are right, but good art is wrong. If they were on consoles, they should be aggressively paletted and tiled.

Try homebrew. An NES or SNES game will always look about right, because breaking those limits is a thousand times harder than embracing them.