My kids and I have been using Wii to play the Gamecube version of Wind Waker. I’ve had the gamecube copy nearly since release. I don’t have a Wii U and no plans to re-buy the HD refresh of it, anyway.
I had prepped my kids that it might look a bit older.
Wow, it looks amazing. I am using component cables and it does crop/stretch it into widescreen. It looks incredible. It could almost be released today with minimal changes. I was stunned how great it looks. Yes, things are blurry in the background. You have to sail kind of slow, I believe due to load times. But seriously, Wind Waker, a game nearly 14 years old, looks amazing.
We played the Wii version of Okami as well recently. Yes, it looked great. It also was not the HD refresh, but it was the Wii version and had 16:9 format built in.
What other games have you played that still look awesome?
Note: Wind Waker is a great game. My save card, also still in my old gamecube, had my last save as January 2008. I apparently played it 9 years ago, but haven’t touched it since. It’s better than I remember!
90s Doom’s graphics’ low resolution help them. It has the right kind of simplicity which is easily legible while suggesting just enough to get the brain to fill in the rest.
Bioshock is still good.
The PS3 was released in 2006, 11 years ago. It’s specs are pretty laughable by today’s standards, but yet it can run games in 1080p at 60 fps. Yeah only a few titles run at this standard, but one of them is Wipeout HD. I plugged my PS3 into a modern 4K TV and loaded this up and it still looked stunning. (Wipeout HD released in 2008 so that’s 9 years old).
If you can get Myth II to run on a modern computer, and crank the graphics quality settings all the way up (which would have been nearly impossible on a contemporary computer), it looks absolutely amazing. The characters are all still sprites, but they have so many sprites, from different angles, that they’re nearly 3-D.
Most of the games I want to cite as games that still look good have received HD remakes that make them look even better (Odin Sphere, Okami) but there are also some late-pixel-art era games that still look pretty darn good, the obvious one being Chrono Trigger. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has aged reasonably well as well.
Overall, I find that games with artistic design sensibilities age better than games that were shooting for “realism” and that in general, 2D ages better than 3D.
Well 1080p’ish… apparently it uses dynamic resolution scaling so it can get as low as 1280x1080.
I’ll add Crysis as an obvious one. This game came out back in 2007, almost a decade ago! And it still looks damn good, even without mods. Here it is vanilla at 4K:
Some of those shots would put some modern AAA games to shame, even with their improved lighting solutions.
Way back in the day (1997), there was a 4X style game called Enemy Nations. You and a couple opponents were racing to exploit the last inhabitable planet and wipe the other guys out. It wasn’t a great game and had some absurd bugs but one thing I remember is the developers bragging in the manual about how there were no home PCs capable of running it at maximum graphic settings so it would look awesome for years to come.
Obviously, remembering this now is “Challenge accepted – let’s see your game on my modern system”. Unfortunately, although the game is available for free from the developers (they got into productivity software and made EN free), I have never been able to get it to work. I suspect it won’t run on systems past Windows 98. Feel free to try though!
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. RTS game, 9 years old, multi-monitor capable, and still looks great (and is an absolute blast). My son and I still play the hell out of this game, and I haven’t yet found another RTS that I like as much.
My son also plays Doom regularly- a game that came out 11 years before he was even born. Most older games aren’t playable to my kids, due to graphics, but Doom is apparently timeless.
I would generally agree with that, and I think that both gamers and developers have started to be aware of it, too. I believe people are less driven by realistic graphics than they once were–not that they’re not still valued, but people are more willing to give games with other graphics styles a chance, and developers are more inclined to make them. It may also be a chicken-and-egg thing with indie developers: with less resources to shoot for realistic graphics, they aim for simpler art styles, and people are coming to accept that…or people are becoming more willing to accept simpler styles, and therefore are more inclined to give indie games a chance.
I don’t know which is driving what, but I’ve been seeing more things like people praising the stylized art of Firewatch and games with very retro graphics, but strong gameplay and story like Undertale.
What I find ironic is that games that pushed the boundaries back then often look worse, particularly if they went the “3D-model reduced to 2D-sprite” method. It can look good in screenshots, but, in actual game play, you get all that glinting unless you make the screen all blurry.
Good pixel art, on the other hand, will often still look good. Heck, I know of even an NES game that looks good: Jackie Chan Action Kung Fu.
I’m also a big fan of games that used prepainted backgrounds. The original Grim Fandango still looks good. As do the Syberia games (as long as they keep the characters small on the screen.) Even with the backgrounds at 800x600 for the latter, it blows up quite nicely on my monitor.
If you like Doom the most recent iteration of it is supposed to be excellent (I have not played it yet). It made most Top 10 best lists for 2016.
That said it is a AAA title with top notch modern graphics so in that respect a far cry from the original Doom (although it supposedly retains the raw mayhem of run-and-gun that the original had).
Oh. I thought we were going old school here. For me, one of my favorite video games visually is Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man. I still think it looks gorgeous from a graphics design perspective (though the gameplay gets a bit boring.) Jumping ahead a number of years, Super Mario 3, as well. Just a beautiful looking game.
That said, I’m a sucker for 8-bit graphics and bold colors in a limited color palette.
I think the early to mid 80’s arcade games still look cool for the most part. Probably because there was no attempt to make characters look real since it couldn’t be done. So you had Pac-Man and space ships that didn’t look like anything real, but were very cool looking.
If I was one of the companies releasing retro Atari 2600 games on consoles, I would try remaking the game using the box art instead of the 2600 graphics. That would be cool as hell!
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