Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

EGA Monkey Island is similarly beautiful.

I feel EGA forced artists to work within the limitations of the available color palette, and good artists created awesome stuff (like shown in this case). Once they had VGA, some artists rushed to use every color gradient they could get away with, and this ruined their art till they got the hang of it.

Something similar happened with the transition from pixel art to 3D games -- games were 3D because they had to, whether necessary or not. And many suffered from it. (Arguably, many still do!)

Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way. I don't think more is always better, a lesson that seems to be lost on some game developers...

View on HN

Perhaps I'm just looking at things through rose tinted glasses, but I very much agree with this. I like to think that good pixel art works with the imagination. The artist puts down the broad strokes and lets the imagination fill the rest! There is a huge amount of skill that goes into good pixel art. It's not enough to have attention to detail, but an intuition about engaging and working with imagination.

The more realistic the graphics, the higher the risk that it falls into the uncanny valley trap. The brain is already half fooled that it is seeing reality (or something that is supposed to be real) but if it's only slightly off, there'll be a feeling of unease. Of course, early 3d games were far off from feeling real, but they were already a step up and there was less headroom for imagination. The low polygon count models just look janky instead of endearing.

Pixel art completely sidesteps this uncanny valley by not trying to be realistic, instead it tries to engage the brain to fill in the details. It's perhaps halfway between reading a book and watching a movie.

E.g. looking at early 3d games, they just feel dated. One cannot help but compare them to today's 3d graphics and of course the oldies fall short by a very far margin. Comparing pixel art games to a modern AAA 3D game title is just so obviously apples to oranges that there is no struggle due to loss of fidelity.

Again, perhaps my view is biased because I grew up with the pixelated games of old. Still, I'd like to assign the excitement of the early 3d titles more to the novelty (at the time) than from the fidelity of the graphics. I think the pixel art style will (or already does) have much more staying power.

> I like to think that good pixel art works with the imagination.

Fully agreed with this and the rest of your post. Are you familiar with Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics"? I'm not particularly a fan of the whole book, but I really agree and am fascinated by the concept of "closure" he describes: the way the mind "fills in" the details that are missing in sequential art (i.e. comics), so you mentally create movement and detail when there is objectively none. This even works for storytelling itself, from a few "action" frames you mentally reconstruct the story, and this requires little effort.

I think the same happens with pixel or line art. You just need some cues and then your brain gets to work on creating the scene.

>E.g. looking at early 3d games, they just feel dated. One cannot help but compare them to today's 3d graphics and of course the oldies fall short by a very far margin. Comparing pixel art games to a modern AAA 3D game title is just so obviously apples to oranges that there is no struggle due to loss of fidelity.

>Again, perhaps my view is biased because I grew up with the pixelated games of old. Still, I'd like to assign the excitement of the early 3d titles more to the novelty (at the time) than from the fidelity of the graphics. I think the pixel art style will (or already does) have much more staying power.

I happen to agree that early 3d games like PS1/N64 look rather ugly, but nostalgia is very powerful, and retro low poly models is now its own aesthetic [0]. Like with pixel art, artists will take liberties with what was actually capable with hardware at the time, but people who grew up with the style will probably appreciate it more.

[0]https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/321754/Designing_a_demak...

I never played this Indiana Jones game, or have much memory of other EGA games that I can think of, and to me, 90% of the VGA screenshots in this article look better than the EGA ones.

To me, the limited color palette doesn't strike me as a differently meaningful sort of limitation than, say, the appearance of Mario 64 vs Mario Galaxy.

The imagination always fills in the gap - I don't remember KOTOR looking worse than Mass Effect looking worse than Mass Effect Andromeda, say, but if I go back and look at them, they definitely were more limited - but if you don't have the memory of just how much your imagination originally filled in, I think it's harder to look past the actual pixels.

I though C&C Red Alert was incredibly realistic. Or that rail shooter Star Wars game with "live action".

Looking at them now makes a case for imagination being an important part.

I'm sure it has to do with the games I grew up with, but I still think EGA Last Crusade is better than VGA, and I find beauty in EGA Monkey Island and even in blockier games like Kings of the Beach or Street Rod! And of course, I love the EGA graphics of my adored Space Quest I, II & III.

Yes, this means I go back to those games now and I still find their graphics cool looking and evocative.

> The imagination always fills in the gap

Fully agreed! I think this is a quality that gets lost with games with more realistic graphics.

> To me, the limited color palette doesn't strike me as a differently meaningful sort of limitation than, say, the appearance of Mario 64 vs Mario Galaxy.

I believe it is a meaningful limitation. It's like working in a black & white drawing with a pencil, or with an early comic book illustration. It's not just fewer colors, you must re-think the illustration. An obvious example is the use of dithering, which when done right can be a beautiful art form. With VGA, you need way less dithering, if at all.

I agree that some of the VGA art looks better, but here's the curse of the higher definition: if you look at the crypt scene, the VGA flavor has more detail, but now the crypt walls look as if made of modern concrete and the stalactites look as if made out of clay. This is not an issue with the EGA version because these details are left to the viewers imagination and it will tend to superimpose the details exactly according to the viewers expectations. In the VGA version, there is nothing left to the imagination, the brain is just confronted with the fact that the crypt walls are made in the style of brutalist architecture from poured concrete. This does not mesh at all with the setting of an ancient tomb! At least my subconscious has strong views on how ancient tombs are supposed to be :)

There's a similar issue with the first scene inside the nazi fort, where the wall in the EGA version is made of rough hewn rocks and whether you imagine them to be slimy, moldy, smooth or rough is entirely up to you. There are only the broad strokes to guide your subconscious. The VGA version presents a done deal of what looks like modern masonry. Again it's jarring - we are supposed to be looking at the ancient foundations of the fort.

In other cases, the artists did a better job with VGA so it's either OK or in rare cases better than the EGA version. Perhaps it also comes down to how vivid one's imagination is. Someone who has no preconceptions about the scenery or does not have a particularly strong visual imagination will just see a bunch of rough lines in the EGA flavor, and they won't mind the somewhat off putting lighting or details in the VGA screens - they'll just assume that's how it's supposed to be.

Agreed with a lot of what you say -- it's what I mentioned as "closure", using the concept from "Understanding Comics". It's a powerful mental tool, and artists should be wary not to undermine it with the "wrong" details (i.e. details that contradict or undermine the story your brain is building for you).

However, the article does show examples where the EGA screen is undeniably better, for example whenever there's a lightning effect. I can't understand why they weren't made for the VGA version, especially considering how easy they are to make with a simple palette rotation. The castle exterior looks so much better, more detailed and with more effects in the EGA version that it boggles the mind.

Last Crusade supported CGA. I don't know how it was implemented, though -- it looks like dithering was used at least to emulate some of the EGA colors. [1]

That wasn't the only change, through. I remember that there is a rotisserie in the castle which rotates in EGA/VGA, but does not in CGA, so they likely knew that the computers with CGA could not handle the animation as well.

1. https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/indiana-jones-and-the-las...

Frankly those screenshots in CGA look like 90% dithering and are pretty hard to take in.

Yes, to me those are examples where CGA didn't work well. It wasn't suitable for this kind of scenes. This cyan-magenta-white default palette was also pretty jarring; the green-red-yellow one was better looking.

but when viewed on a composite monitor, you see something quite different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

Yeah, it feels like someone was told that they needed to support CGA a few weeks before the final deadline.

IMO, nothing looks good in CGA. It's not just that it's 4 colours, it's 4 awful colours.

I'd take a 1-bit Mac game over CGA.

This is obviously highly subjective, but you might be thinking of CGA's default palette (magenta-cyan-white-black). The device had more than one palette, and many games used the red-green-yellow-black palette, which looks much more pleasing to me.

Here's an example where it's used, and it looks cool to me: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/defender-of-the-crown/scr... (the text is hard to read, but that's because of the low resolution).

> I'd take a 1-bit Mac game over CGA.

Those indeed look pretty cool, but that's a matter of higher resolution which allows for cool dithering effects. CGA color modes were pretty low res, so it's likely that's the actual problem you have with them, not just the 4 colors. Or rather, the combination of both factors.

That's the low intensity dark green-dark red-brown-black palette, not the high intensity light red-light green-yellow-black palette. The high intensity mode was about a quarter as garish as the cyan magenta mode, which won't make your eyeballs bleed, but it's still a mite bit uncomfortable.

The dark green dark red brown black palette was indeed probably the least bad palette, but it suffered severely from a lack of contrast. That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.

The reason the cyan magenta white black palette was so common is because it had both black and white, meaning the text was easy to read.

The Tandy graphics adapter allowed a programmable palette. It was still just 4 colors, but the programmer could choose which 4 colors they were. (out of the 16 colors a CGA monitor could display) This was such a minor increase in complexity for a 10x improvement in usefulness it's shocking to me that IBM didn't include that in the CGA.

First things first: thanks for the insightful reply!

Yes, I meant the low intensity palette, you're correct. I disagree with you in that I don't find it "the least bad", but actually beautiful. It has a kind of "wood engraving" vibe to me.

> That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.

I respectfully disagree. It's true that the contrast is lower than with a brighter color, but it's still not a problem for my eyes. For me, it actually has to do with the blockiness of the low res font; also there's some aliasing with the "m" and similar characters that confuses my eyes and I have to make an extra effort the parse the characters -- the same would happen were this black font on white background.

The Tandy fascinates me since I saw that video by The 8 Bit Guy. Sadly, I never owned one!

Bare in mind the displays of the time would have blended the pixels.

Likewise those who complain that CGA is “only 4 awful colours” have clearly never used a proper CGA system the way it was originally intended.

The following YouTube video does a good job describing what CGA was really like back in the day: https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc

This is largely cherry-picking revisionism. I saw CGA on the displays of the time at the time with the games of the time, and can confirm it was mostly terrible. EGA couldn't come fast enough.

You’re missing the point. I wasn’t suggesting CGA was brilliant. I was just saying that CGA actually works best when differed because the screens of the time blended the pixels to create new colours. And that the reason CGA uses the colour scheme it does is because that allows for more colours to be created via blending.

EGA was definitely a massive step up, no question. But people also miss the point of CGA when they look as sharp screenshots rendered on a pixel perfect LCD display.

Good point. Fiddling with blur in Gimp does remove plenty of that dither noise. Though of course now my eyes keep trying to refocus, just like in the olde times.

This is fascinating. I never realized it was meant to be used that way.

In practice, (and I saw plenty of ugly CGA) I don't think I ever came across one of these composite outputs/monitor combos.

CGA looks worse in modern screenshots though. The colour palette could be awful but the monitor would add some blur between the pixels and that helped. EGA had the same. VGA 320x200 was pixel doubled (640x400 was fed to the monitor) so it looked much blockier.

And if the colour palette wasn't to your taste... For years I had CGA with a monochrome composite monitor. So it was all shades of green. The old LucasArts and Sierra games were fine on mono CGA.

Also we walked uphill both ways to school, etc, get your 4k displays off my lawn...

I had a greyscale VGA and Fate of Atlantis looked pretty good too.

Yep, CGA in monochrome is quite pleasant. Black, amber, and two intermediate shades of amber, what more could one need?! It's really much nicer than any of the garish CGA colour palettes. [With the possible exception of the black-red-cyan-white undocumented palette.]

EGA is great though, 320x200x16 is just one of those natural sweet spots that many different early computers eventually settled on.

CGA color looked even better on a composite color monitor (like a standard TV). Developers were able to abuse NTSC color artifacts to get a surprising amount of color out of their games. The downside was that text became generally unreadable.

Speaking of CGA, Defender of the Crown was my favorite. https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/defender-of-the-crown/scr...

Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing. I think CGA is an extreme case of "working with limitations/constraints". It was hard to get it right, but when they did, as in this case, it was awesome.

Man, I must have had hundreds of hours into that! Always go with the Greek fire.

2-bit pr0n: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/defender-of-the-crown/scr...

Mac games of the old are known for 1-bit graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y01lZbrxxb0

Not much to look at, but plays well into the noir theme in this case.

The aesthetic recently had a resurgence in the indie scene, with ‘Obra Dinn’ and whatnot. Many gamemakers especially reminisce about Gameboy's four-color palette.

Some modern low-color games might have more than two colors, but are designed essentially in grayscale and allow switching the whole palette: https://pioneersgame.tumblr.com/post/112307966203/i-doubt-th...

Though of course, this time the four colors aren't some arbitrary acid-neon colors, but are chosen by the authors.

Good call: Obra Dinn -- a game that fascinates me -- definitely captures the old Mac aesthetic. Intentionally, of course.

A note to iOS users, this page hijacks your back link and is really annoying! The content is cool though.

CGA shines on a crt, usually.

Some CGA games just look stunning with CRT/composite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

Indeed. I found out about CGA's amazing composite output only recently, watching a video by The 8 Bit guy. I was completely unaware of this back in the day...

It shines on a CRT with composite input. It's still the same eye-piercing nastiness people are familiar with today if you used an RGB monitor like the IBM 5153, which IBM marketed for use with the CGA card.

Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way.

I agree! I have a CGA game still inked on my left arm (in case any of you ever need to identify my headless corpse).

Which game?

The Black Cauldron.

Can we get to see a picture of your tattoo? It sounds cool!

I really thought this game/book was lost in time. Glad to know there's a fellow pig herder fan.

Both the books (all of them) and the Sierra game were a very big deal to me. Weirdly, I've never seen the Disney movie.

I know where my copies are. I can see them from where I am sitting. (-:

Indeed, the transition from pixel art to 3D games really set back the beauty of the games for some years.

The Last Blade II (1998), IMHO the pinnacle of 2D fighting games (both in terms of graphics and replayability): https://www.nintendolife.com/games/neogeo/last_blade_2/scree...

Virtua Fighter (1993), pioneering 3D fighting game: https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/virtua-fighter/screens...

IMHO even Tekken IV (2001), released three years after The Last Blade II, aged worse and looks uglier today: https://www.fightersgeneration.com/games/tekken4-p2.html

As someone with no nostalgia for the PSX/N64, it's hard not to look back on that as an entire generation of ugly graphics. SNES pixel art has aged beautifully, Cloud's polygons have not.

That's not even counting the many, many games with wonky cameras. It feels like cameras were not widely figured out until the 360/PS3 generation.

100% agree. It's telling that most contemporary pixel artists work by choice with a limited palette. The actual number of colors, even in complex pieces, is often shockingly small.

The early LucasArts VGA games look worse than their EGA versions, but their artists learned to use VGA better. The Dig makes great use of VGA color.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/dig/screenshots

Agreed! And what an amazing game The Dig was. I liked that it was less "humorous" than the standard adventure fare, too.

I had a PCjr in the 90s, which meant that most games were CGA unless I happened to find one that supported the rare-but-more-common-than-native-PCjr-EGA Tandy TGA 16-color mode, in which case I’d get 16 colors. Every game acquisition was a crapshoot to see if I was lucky or not. Native EGA was out.

I only owned PC clones. I discovered the Tandy in that 8 Bit Guy video in which he argues it was the best DOS gaming computer. I wish I had owned one!

> Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way.

This is one reason I appreciate Downwell. You unlock new 4-color palettes as you progress. Some are really nice to look at and completely change the mood of the game.

What is Downwell?

Seems like another one of those games with a few colors and swappable palettes.

‘Down Ward’ does that too: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fisholith/down-ward-owl... (or would do if it was funded—not sure of its fate).

Oooh, now that I've seen it I like Downwell. To me it has a distinct "Speccy" vibe to it. It's not just pixel art, it looks like a ZX Spectrum game!

Yes! Limitations inspire creativity; necessity is the mother of invention; video games from the earliest days of the industry / art form have (by far) the most replayability and "fun per pixel" or whatever metric you care to choose.

My first PC XT clone had Hercules and CGA on an orange monitor.

4 shades of a single colour isn't so bad.

Really wish I hadn't sold it now as I did a lot on that machine. Even ran Windows 2.0 passably.

I really, really wanted something capable of playing Wolfenstein though so it had to go. :(

My first PC XT clone also ran Hercules with an ambar monitor. SIMCGA FTW! I still feel very nostalgic about that look & feel. I programmed my first real graphics using that hardware.

(I started with a Commodore 64, but I was too young and didn't really manage to output graphics with it).

The same thing applies to MIDI music from the same era. Though I'm not sure how much of it was related to the technology and how much was the culture or aesthetic influences of game makers at the time.

The sunset over the dock on Mêlée Island is simply stunning. Amazing what the artists could do with 16 colors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com