aspro said:

I think it is because as you look upon the greatness of the next generation, inside you know you'll never be able to go back and play your old favorites with the same sense of wonder and innocence.  You feel a increasing sense of loss, like a childless woman entering menopause. Unable to stop the forward progress of time you are bargaining with the choices of your past.

I'm struggling to think of examples where this sort of thing has happened to me. The closest I can come up with is not getting very far in any of the old school Final Fantasy games on the PSX anthology due to the incredibly slow moving openings...but you know what, the same thing basically happened with Final Fantasy IX. (Fuck that game.) Maybe the same thing will happen with XIII too, though if I managed to force myself to play through FFXII then I think I now have the constitution to survive whatever the hell Square throw at me.

On the other hand I've had no trouble going back and playing Golden Axe and Altered Beast (just the two most recent examples, there are others of course) and enjoying them a great deal. Yes, they absolutely suck, but they would have sucked just as much at the time. Maybe the graphics would have been technically impressive back then, but they still look great today, and the enemy design and whole tone of the game is just hilarious. Okay, that's 2D graphics, so you might say that doesn't count.

Let's go for everyone's least favourite console when it comes to graphics: the PSX.

Ridge Racer 4 was brought up recently, and after watching some videos on YouTube it still looks great to me. Okay, there are a lot of jaggies, and the cars look a bit like cardboard, but the transitions from tunnels to the sun is still spectacular; the lighting effects themselves (if you could call them that) are still highly pleasing, and there's a genuine sense of speed.

Another PSX game that I can think of that went in for some graphical criticism recently was Metal Gear Solid, but in many cases the muddy, pixelly graphics add to the atmosphere, and it's no accident. Konami (suck a dick, Kojima, it's a team effort!) obviously used the aesthetics of the PSX to help create a cold, stifling and claustrophobic atmosphere, putting to use the lack of fidelity possible with PSX hardware. You can see this from the visual design of the levels, to the direction of the cutscenes in which there's a great deal of focusing on everything but the people's faces, but when you do get to see their faces it's often to disturbing, and very well played effect. I actually think the direction in the original is vastly superior to that of the latter MGSs; it certainly sticks in my mind more.

Now here's the thing: the games themselves do not change with age, so why should our perception? I remember (apart from being amazed by the music, and the lighting) thinking that the Ridge Racer cars looked cardboardy when I originally played the game; except when they were slippery smooth metal in a tunnel. I remember noticing all these things at the time; I didn't suddenly have my eyes opened to them because the PS2 had more powerful hardware. They were plain to see then. And I can't have been older than 9 or 10. If a 9 or 10 year old can easily pick these things up, then all you old farts should certainly have no problem doing so too.

The PSX game I've played most recently is the original Crash Bandicoot. My impressions? The colours were great, though a little sensory overloadish with those big, harshly coloured pixels. The controls are loose, and it's a bit hard to judge the depth of Crash himself. My impressions at the time? Pretty much exactly that, except I was motivated to put in the time and effort to overcome the obstacles of the controls and the poor depth of field.

Let's skip ahead a couple of generations. My initial impressions this gen's graphics? I'm feeling a bit lazy now, so let's just do this quickly: The people look like they're poorly moulded out of plasticine or clay; the lip syncing is absolutely, laughably horrible, wtf is going on with fingernails? Apart from the pixels, fingernails may as well be out of a PSX game. Hand animation is absolutely, shockingly bad---even worse than the lip syncing! And it's not masked due to having weird arse PS2-era fingers. When people look back at this generation, they're going to have all these complaints (amongst many others).

This isn't a blog, because I'm wondering: why don't people complain about these things at the time? They don't magically appear after a new generation has commenced, they've always been there! Why doesn't it bother them at the time? Why can't they appreciate where these technical limitations have been used to good effect (ala MGS), or cannot appreciate some of the good things that these games did well, just because of a completely arbitary, unrelated flaw? The appreciation applies to the time as well: no one was talking about how MGS really played up the PSX's graphical limitations to effect---the opposite was true! Any graphical talk was simply masturbating over the technical progression, and while technically it was amazing, it was really the limitations that drove the whole aesthetic of MGS.

And yes, I said these people. Apply it to the minority group of your choice.

P.S./conclusion:

Another thing I find bizarre is, how can anyone's graphical perception or design perception be trusted when they don't notice these things at the time? On top of that there's clearly a lot of the gamer's own imagination being projected on to a video game's graphics, despite what anyone would have you believe, a lot of the interaction between a player and the game isn't just through gameplay.

When you get a quote like this (I'm going to blank out the game; you can try and guess what game it refers to) then it's clear that there's some sort of cultish mind control going on:

"The worlds in blank look so real it's easier to believe you are actually there than playing a computer game."

That sure as hell ain't even close to being true today, and never has been. Yet at the same time; it always has been. When was there an era of video games where you couldn't believe you were really in that world? I could get completely lost in pong, and the real world would cease to exist (and I'm not 50 years old, so I'd experienced the graphical fidelity of the SNES, before I played Pong). I think therein lies the problem: video games are inherently about letting the aesthetic of the game become realistic, no matter how unrealistic and abstract it is. So the crux of my question is, why don't you let an old game still trick you into thinking it's real? Not. a. thing. has. changed.

P.P.S./but not conclusion.

Why can people appreciate abstract or impressionistic art, yet throw in big pixels and a few years, and it becomes hideous shit? Artistic quality is not a valid argument: you're still looking at shit, but with more pixels.

"Still my point is that it is about what others are doing in that same era. Whenever I say a game is ugly, it is in reference to what other games are doing at the time."

I can definitely understand this as you're directly comparing it to the game's contemporaries. Plus, all the flaws and the like are actually talked about at the time, so it's not some weird enlightenment that happens several years after the game was released.

Yeah, R4 does still look good. It's an impressive PS1 game . . . on an SD display. Stretched to fit 720p display, and it looks absolutely awful; it's nearly unplayable.

Yes it fucking bothered me at the time. And we all complained about it constantly back then. I came through that generation reading EGM, OPM and XBN and they harped on it all the time.

"Bad camera" was an essential component of any platformer review. It was just a given that platformers had lousy cameras.

Maybe not at first, because when camera control first came on people didn't even really have the terminology or understanding what was broken. They'd say a game had "bad controls" when what they really meant was, "I couldn't control it because I had no fucking idea what I was looking at and no way of changing the view".

We only talk about it now, as a game with bad camera is the exception, (as Spector says about Epic Mickey in his recent interviews). It's notable as opopsed to the norm.

I need to go play Paper mario for a while, but if I get bored I'll grab a fist of magazines and give some examples.

Accesibility matters to me. I like and can play older games but for some reason I feel like they are something I want to play in a handheld format.

Instantly accesible and playable in a screen right in front of me. That is part of the reason I am interested in the Wii U, being able to play the VC games on the screen like a handheld, wireless and non-tethered to a television. I feel like I would go back and play so many games.

But Aspro, that's not the fifth generation!

That's better.

Speaking of better, which is your pick out of these two that stand above the rest?

The off cuff conversational digression: "Also, the camera does some ridiculous things to confuse you".

Or the missed chance to swear: "...a camera that is as dumb as a horse"

Anyway I hope the sigh wasn't too sincere. If it was I hope that you can find some cheer (my brain is melting, you know what I mean) in the fact that I really enjoyed reading through those, even if they were just random excerpts. Fascinating stuff, and what a list of games too!

State of Emergency*, Jet Set Radio Future, Maximo, Castlevania 64, Tom Raider 3, Syphon Filter, Rugrats: Search for Reptar*, Crash Bandicoot 3 and Apocalypse.

*Yeah, what are you looking at?

gamingeek said:

Accesibility matters to me. I like and can play older games but for some reason I feel like they are something I want to play in a handheld format.

Instantly accesible and playable in a screen right in front of me. That is part of the reason I am interested in the Wii U, being able to play the VC games on the screen like a handheld, wireless and non-tethered to a television. I feel like I would go back and play so many games.

They look better on a small screen too. That's why I was such an enthusiastic DS/ PSP owner.