I don’t know about you, But I love low res, low poly graphics.
I mean, great graphics are awesome, but I just like it if the characters are a bit blocky and the textures are a bit low res.
It keeps things simple and awesome at the same time.
Anybody else like this?
I remember the first 3D fighting game I played called Virtua Fighter on the Sega Saturn, now that was blocky lol! Still, at that point in time I was blown away by the gameplay. I didn’t think they looked good, but what captured my imagination was “Oh look, I’m fighting in 3D!”. It was really quite an experience to be able to side-step and move around in a 3D world while fighting someone. Later on as PS1 graphics improved, I just got more used to better graphics and not the cardboard box types.
Although I don’t like blocky characters anymore, they can still be acceptable. For example, if you want the feel of Dynasty Warriors but with a ton more enemies, then go ahead with blocky characters so that you’ll be able to run the game a lot smoother. I’d still play a blocky game if it offered gameplay and features that make me forget about how ugly they look.
An example of a very beautiful game but I wouldn’t be getting is Dragonball Z Ultimate Tenkaichi. I love the game’s art style and flashy depiction of fights, but the gameplay simply lacks fun. It’s all about mashing buttons and then doing Quick Time Events that have 50% chance of success only. The action scenes definitely portray the hyper-speed fighting that Dragonball’s known for, but as a fighting game, it fails to deliver interactivity to the players. It’s very very beautiful but disappointingly repetitive 
(I’d still accept this game as a gift though, but I wouldn’t be spending money just to buy it).
I think “old fashioned” graphics have more character. Modern games look so industrial and polished.
Yes me! :O)
I like pixels, voxels, cubes and and low res polys with a limited palette as well. Either this or more modern graphics with a style like for instance Valve and some other devs are able to come up with.
I’d rather play detailed stuff every single time. But that doesn’t mean I dislike stylised graphics. Blocky low res is now stylised, because it’s done deliberately.
Less is more?
In some ways abstract simplicity is more beautiful and artful than complexity and detail. The human mind is able to understand meaning outside of the confines of how things appear physically. We are capable pattern matchers, elaborators, imaginers and gap-fillers. We don’t NEED something to look absolutely exactly like physical life in order to know what it is or what it represents or symbolizes. The mind works symbolically, not literally. I find tremendous appeal in every simple-looking game, more than every trying-to-be-real-life game. Real-life-looking stuff, to me, is boring and unimaginative. I really love the look and feel of Dino Run for example - pretty blocky graphics, solid color fills, no texturing. There’s just something innocent and youthful and playful about it. I think reality-looking games tend to be more serious and egotistical.
I still play games that have aweful graphics compared to today’s standard. Even today I fired up my old n64 to prepare for the new Zelda game coming out real soon. Game play makes it worth it.
I prefer those older blocky graphical styles, I think it stopped somewhere around the GameCube/n64 era. In my opinion, too good of graphics/realism take away from gameplay. Sure, call me crazy. In all these new fighting games (UFC) and that new Tomb Raiders game, it just doesn’t look the same or feel like much of a game anymore. I just prefer simple gameplay elemnts, tha’ts all. Movement and realism are over used now adays.
Although I’m never a fan of old blocky games like Virtua Fighter (Even when my childhood is in the 90s), it does give you the nostolgia that the video game isn’t the sort of a fantasy/realism simulator (or what you can call it) but rather a virtual child’s toy that everyone can refer to back in its day. At that time, no one took it seriously because it wasnt much to boast about, who wants to become a terrible looking blocky, smudgy piece of wood when they can be a high-res Dragonborn warrior?
The old games in the 90s probably opened the our inner-child’s desires, because it lacks any form of proper visualization of the character, we can form the idea to imagine and shape the character inside our mind.
So, who’s a graphic fan of Deus Ex?
← This fellow!
i dont realy mind its all about the gameplay but i do love low detail like in minecraft but the ds is my favorate console(3ds now) but it had the worst graphics ever but pokemon, zelda, lochs quest and all those other great titals made it for me the best console ever all it was missing was a supersmash brothers game.
I feel this is 100% correct. We were able to extrapolate our own ideas of the characters, add voices if the game had none and do things that generally were required while reading books! The old games let the players imagination flourish. That and with all the abstract, you weren’t sure of all the secrets that the game devs intentionally hid without any achievements to let you know they were there. They were vast lands to be explored, without any knowledge of everything that was in it. I miss the days when I didn’t have the internet at my disposal to help me through a tough spot in a game. Where I had to explore the game to find its secret items and not even have the option of a walk through, unless you subscribed to Nintendo Power.
Yes, for instance, in the mario games, there is always a secret level where you can hit the blocks that are on top of the game screen, creating an opening for mario to waltz on the top of game level and further falling down into the secret wave pipes.In Deus Ex, NPCs react to your every actions, whether you’re faced in a hostage situation and TNTs are armed everywhere, you can save the hostages, fail in the attempt, ignore this mission and proceed to the next one, or kill everyone in the process.
Games like these are a gem nowadays.
@ImaginaryHuman
Oh, DinoRun is pure art without yelling “look, i wanna be an arty game” and a true masterpiece as a game in all aspects, the game-, graphics- and sound design and it’s wisely balanced. You could make tons of screenshots for all the beautiful colours it comes up with alone. One of the best games which have been done within the last years, much kudos to PixelJam.
I also love the style and techniques games like TheDreamMachine and Lume are coming up with.
One thing i was very surprised about was the presentation quality many of this years IGF entries offered. There was a lot of different styles and eye candy, very inspirational, but also to a certain degree many games were almost overpolished, were focused too much on presentation only and whilst offering more polished mechanics too they weren’t interesting as games anymore. In ended up with only a minority of all those entries, on a first view, very professional looking games, being really interested in and these often were more abstract ones or those with a convincing game design as well were both the presentation and the game design just fit together. There were a number of bad examples with very nice graphics but with bad, boring or too simplistic game design. Somehow this reminded me of all the faults the big guys in the AAA segment had done all those years just on a Indie level. So, more entries, yes, much better looking, yes but also interesting and convincing as games, only a fraction.
I think the way a dev tool works and where it sets its priorities can also influence the game design and that certain tools often breed certain type of games and there is room for improvement in designing dev tools in order to making better games easier. Anyway more back on topic… it would be truly awesome getting the chance working together with someone like Dan Malone on a game with the right game design.
I don’t care much about the level of physical detail in a game as long as the main character has more than 1000 polys. What I do absolutely hate is games with run-amok animation. I enjoy games with immediate response times, and absolutely cringe when my character is doing some grandiose animation sequence while I mash keys. Its one of the reasons I hated GTA4. They tried to make the character and vehicle movement too realistic. At all times I felt like I was piloting the titanic while navigating in that game.
I love low-res graphics. I’ve been doing some experiments with low-res and low-fi graphics, will upload a demo soonish, but for now please check out Andrew Shouldice’s fantastic Hide http://www.superfriendshipclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=117 which uses a simple ortho camera and render texture to greast effect.
Ugh, that is a big issue, I hate that. Anyone play Doritos Crash Course XBLA title? It feels like a classic nostalgic game, having the same motions and controls of all my past favorite 3rd person games.