# PS1 games from 1997 had better colors than the games today **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [December 15, 2010, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277 "2010-12-15T20:24:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/1 "2010-12-15T20:24:03Z")
[Here](http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/9531/reshotscopy.jpg) is a small photo collage I put together of some screenshots from one of my favorite video games, a game which I still play today despite it being more than ten years old, Resident Evil 2. This game only had pre-rendered static backgrounds, which a lot of people disliked, but the backgrounds were colorful, bold and detailed. If this game were released today, [this](http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/8646/reshotsdesat.jpg) is what the colors would look like. Yeah yeah, I can see it now; someone’s going to post saying, “I LIKE the second set of pictures better.” Naturally. And a lot of people probably agree with you, because if you look at all of the console games coming out now, for consoles capable of unbelievable graphic advances that run on high-definition TVs with better picture than ever before nevertheless have the ugliest, most desaturated, grimy-looking gray-brown-tan color palettes. There’s even a TV Trope for it now: [Real is Brown.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealIsBrown) Clearly I am not the only one who finds it ugly and ridiculous. Take a gander at these [screenshots](http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=resident%20evil%205%20screenshots&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1025&bih=594) of Resident Evil 5, the latest entry in (and disgrace to) the classic series. Compare the color palette you see to the one in the first set of pics I linked to. See what I mean? Why are the game developers now so in love with these ugly colors? And why is it that they had MORE colors in the past instead of less? ---
**Author:** ![MOIDALIZE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e274bd/32.png) [@MOIDALIZE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MOIDALIZE)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/2 "2010-12-15T20:26:23Z")
It’s because of OBAMA. ---
**Author:** ![Least\_Original\_User\_Name\_Ever](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e480ec/32.png) [@Least\_Original\_User\_Name\_Ever](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Least_Original_User_Name_Ever)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/3 "2010-12-15T20:26:51Z")
[For you.](http://archive.perfectduluthday.com/beating-a-dead-horse.gif) ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/4 "2010-12-15T20:27:52Z")
In part, because real _is_ brown. If your game is set in a postapocalyptic wasteland or industrial facility of some sort, browns and greys would be expected to predominate. And games set in postapocalyptic wastelands sell - they speak to something in the popular imagination, I suppose. That said, I think it’s a discredit to developers to insist that everyone is just doing grey and brown. Bioware’s gameworlds, for example, are usually quite colorful - the final stage of the first Mass Effect game was actually quite lovely, I thought. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/5 "2010-12-15T20:35:07Z")
You want color? You want color? I want **A RAINBOW!** [**YOU CAN’T HANDLE A RAINBOW!**](http://img.slidetoplay.com/screenshots/ilovekatamari_3.PNG) Argent, you’ve got some severely specialized wants when it comes to video games. But there are plenty of colorful games being released all the time. Even today. Even on the PS3/360. And a lot of them on the Wii. Secondly, Resident Evil 5 was set in Africa. In a desert. The desaturated color palette and dusty brown environments are because the game took place in dusty brown environment. Complaining about that is like complaining Mario talks in a stereotypical Italian accent. ---
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/6 "2010-12-15T20:35:40Z")
> [@Least\_Original\_User\_Name\_Ever](#): > > [For you.](http://archive.perfectduluthday.com/beating-a-dead-horse.gif) Fuck it, I’ll stop criticizing it when _they_ stop doing it. The game makers are the ones beating the dead horse…beating it, and doing other things to it too. ---
**Author:** ![Least\_Original\_User\_Name\_Ever](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e480ec/32.png) [@Least\_Original\_User\_Name\_Ever](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Least_Original_User_Name_Ever)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/7 "2010-12-15T20:48:56Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > Fuck it, I’ll stop criticizing it when _they_ stop doing it. The game makers are the ones beating the dead horse…beating it, and doing other things to it too. And they’re the ones selling more and more games these days, too. ---
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/8 "2010-12-15T20:51:01Z")
Yes and Twilight makes more money than the Coen Brothers…popularity is not equal to quality. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/9 "2010-12-15T20:57:59Z")
Going over the best-reviewed games of the year at Game Rankings, I don’t see any games that use a desaturated or “browns & greys” color palette. > **[Video Game Reviews, Articles, Trailers and more - Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/game)** > > Not every critic is the same. Metacritic offers aggregated game reviews > from the top critics, and our own METASCORE pinpoints at a glance how each > game was reviewed. I think it’s all in your head man. ---
**Author:** ![Duke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Duke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duke)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/10 "2010-12-15T21:01:54Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > Going over the best-reviewed games of the year at Game Rankings, I don’t see any games that use a desaturated or “browns & greys” color palette. Well to be fair Red Dead Redemption has an awful lot of brown in its color palette…but the game is largely set in dusty landscapes or deserts, so there’s not a lot Rockstar could have done differently. ---
**Author:** ![Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b38774/32.png) [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Swords_to_Plowshares)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/11 "2010-12-15T21:33:36Z")
You read the TV Tropes article, right? It’s because it’s (arguably) the “best” they can do under the current generation hardware. More colors = worse lighting effects. And PC games don’t really seem to be stuck in the morass of brown. This seems to be more of a problem with the aging console hardware. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/12 "2010-12-15T21:39:37Z")
> [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](#): > > And PC games don’t really seem to be stuck in the morass of brown. This seems to be more of a problem with the aging console hardware. Which of these games are stuck the brown? > **[Video Game Reviews, Articles, Trailers and more](https://www.metacritic.com/game/)** > > Not every critic is the same. Metacritic offers aggregated game reviews from the top critics, and our own METASCORE pinpoints at a glance how each game was reviewed. ---
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2010, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/13 "2010-12-15T22:09:14Z")
Is there any reason aside from the setting of a game (post-apocalyptic world, a desert, etc) that games would adopt a washed-out color scheme? What I mean is, is there some kind of graphics-processing tradeoff being made by developers, like “its easier to render killer graphics with more washed out colors than with them”? Anyway, if not, games like the Bioshock series were plenty colorful in spite of being set in a grim, gloomy environment. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/14 "2010-12-16T00:35:31Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > In part, because real _is_ brown. If your game is set in a postapocalyptic wasteland or industrial facility of some sort, browns and greys would be expected to predominate. I’ve been in a lot of factories. They aren’t brown. I’ve been in a lot of cities. They aren’t brown. Even a post-apocalyptic wasteland wouldn’t be brown. The town of Megaton in “Fallout 3” is almost totally brown despite millennia of evidence that\* humans will try to decorate anything they’re living in.\* And hell, even the hotel in that game is brown. The palette of “Brown, grey and muzzle flash” is just a technical shortcut. It’s fucking ugly and it’s not realistic. Fortunately not all do that - Bioshock. for instance, or Crysis - but too many do. ---
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/15 "2010-12-16T02:19:10Z")
Thank you, Joben, that is exactly what I was getting at. Real life is not brown. Even life in Africa wouldn’t be all brown. Clothing, shop signs, homes, billboards, etc would all be boldly colored and decorative. The sky would be blue sometimes; there would be scattered greenery even in a desert. “It’s set in Africa” isn’t really an excuse for this color palette. It’s not just that things are brown and tan, it’s that they’re desaturated and drab even on top of that. Look at [this image](http://playstationlifestyle.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/resident-evil-5-3.jpg) from RE5 and you’ll see what I mean…when you make everything in the game look like that, the end result is that all the areas are indistinct and unmemorable and you never get a real sense of “being there” in the game. Remember _Myst?_ All of the backgrounds were static; it was more like a slide show than a game. Yet every single area was memorable and when you were playing that game you actually felt pulled into the scenery. It was because the developers went out of their way to take advantage of _all_ the colors available to the eye and not just a limited boring drab palette. The colors were bold and vivid; the forests looked lush, the wooden paneling in the library looked like real wood, the technological elements stood out…the game was well designed aesthetically. Contrast that with a game like _Fallout 3_ where, even though the game world was HUGE, every game area basically looked like every other game area. I gave up playing it because the colors were so drab. ---
**Author:** ![Palooka](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/palooka/32/2902_2.png) [@Palooka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Palooka)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/16 "2010-12-16T03:06:44Z")
[lolwut?](http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/2364/moderngames.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Airk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Airk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airk)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/17 "2010-12-16T16:57:25Z")
The BrownGrey trend is mostly confined to first person shooters set in the modern/near future era, sometimes referred to as the Call of Modern Gears of Duty genre. 😛 (And, I suppose, resident evil 😛 ) Fortunately, while this genre sells big and gets a lot of press, it’s not really indicative, at this point, of the state of the industry as a whole. A couple of years ago, you could have made a stronger case for this, but things really do seem to be improving. There are, as have been mentioned earlier, some technical reasons why it’s easier to do a more desaturated palette - and in spite of the console criticism attempted earlier, those issues are no closer to being solved on high end PCs than they are on current version consoles. Fundamentally, it’s an issue of realistic lighting being difficult to implement in very colorful environments, because colors reflect. So people shooting for the highest level of “realism” in their lighting have to sacrifice in terms of their color palette. Fortunately, it also appears, THANKS, perhaps, in part, to limitations on console hardware, that maximum “realism” in graphics is becoming less of a holy grail, and more of a design choice. Even some games that would have been prime candidates for being browngrey a few years ago have actual art direction - ala Borderlands, for example, which, while no Crysis, certainly is interesting to look at. I think most people - game designers included - at this point realize that browngrey isn’t realistic or interesting, and are trying to find new ways to do things visually. Heck, early Diablo 3 screenshots were criticized by fans for being TOO colorful and not grim enough. So progress is being made. And yeah. That’s a nice list of stuff there on gamerankings. It gets even more interesting if you change it to[search for games with more than 10 reviews.](http://www.gamerankings.com/browse.html?site=&cat=0&year=2010&numrev=1&sort=0&letter=&search=) which allows some smaller “scale” titles into the list, like [Plants vs Zombies](http://incomedisposed.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/plants-vs-zombies.jpg) or [BlazBlue: Continuum Shift.](http://pds7.egloos.com/pds/200805/10/27/c0032827_482533226897e.jpg) No shortage of color there. So. Have hope! It’s not as bad as it was last year or the year before that. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![HookerChemical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/278dde/32.png) [@HookerChemical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HookerChemical)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/18 "2010-12-16T22:35:28Z")
> [@Palooka](#): > > [lolwut?](http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/2364/moderngames.jpg) Those are totally cropped. Just look at the Mario Galaxy Pic. They only show the top half of the screenshot. The rest of the game is totally brown and therefore real. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2010, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/19 "2010-12-16T23:59:51Z")
It’s worth noting that the OP has criticized [\*Assassin’s](http://scrawlfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/assassins-creed-ii_2009_06-15-09_01.jpg) [Creed](http://www.consolemonster.com/media/0000001455/screenshots/0000001455-L-c764948.jpg) [2\*](http://static2.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/xbox360/assassins_creed_2/screens/assassins_creed_2_29.jpg) for doing this, as well. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Scud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2010, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277/20 "2010-12-17T00:28:22Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > It’s worth noting that the OP has criticized [\*Assassin’s](http://scrawlfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/assassins-creed-ii_2009_06-15-09_01.jpg) [Creed](http://www.consolemonster.com/media/0000001455/screenshots/0000001455-L-c764948.jpg) [2\*](http://static2.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/xbox360/assassins_creed_2/screens/assassins_creed_2_29.jpg) for doing this, as well. Are you citing those pictures as counterevidence? 'Cause the second and third ones look pretty desaturated to me (though the first one is bright & colorful). [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ps1-games-from-1997-had-better-colors-than-the-games-today/564277.md?page=2)