/vr/ - Retro Games

you gotta admire a game where the hero is a dude in a wife-beater.

jesus christ this box art is amazing. this mustve been done by some by some famous manga artist of the time.

Majuu Ou even had pixel art style cutscenes in it with unique art

>>4686473
>Game has small sprite
>End up with MASSIVE play area
>End up having movement comparable to IWBTG due sheer screen size
Noice

Aw man I love Majuu Ou. Anybody who hasn't played this game seriously needs to give it a swing.

>>4686489
yeah, this was one of the innovations that Majuu Ou had over something like Castlevania 4 where simon was yuge.

the screen real estate offers alot more mobility and time to dodge shit. it is also helpful when you transform into a fucking dragon with wings hand you gotta fly!

lots of people are wrong to write off Majuu Ou for having smaller sprites, but in this case, the turn out to be an asset that makes the game better.

>>4686465
>i wana talk about a genre that modern devs are too pussy to make anymore.
Funny. Nowadays if you want to make your indie game popular the best way of doing so is by getting some e-celeb to react to your game's dificulty.
There are even games unironically adversing their dificulty as a feature.

>>4686516
difficult by today's standards maybe.

i still think there has not been a game made since, that is as difficult as Ninja Gaiden Black.

>>4686465
Whining that the world isn't how you want it won't bring you anything good. If you are unsatisfied with all the games that get made these days then do something about it and make the kind of game you want.

>>4686465
ActRaiser 2 is great. Very underrated.

>>4686525
You should try playing Celeste. Granted it starts easy, but play it until the c side.

>>4686534
agreed. the visuals are awesome too. looks like a moving pixel art of michelangelo paintings. easily one of the most difficult games on the SNES. a real man's game.

>>4686539
Don't even think it's all that difficult, even if you are playing the US release.

another JP exclusive was Ghost Sweeper: Mikami

this was a really well animated and highly expressive classicvania that has alot of charm to it.

>>4686546
>US Release
Aw man, is this one of those games where they fudged the difficulty to make it harder to beat during a rental period?

>>4686550
yeah this was common practice for a while.

even the original release of RE1 on ps1 had this kind of shit done to it.

contra 3 too.

this one's been kicking my ass
stand up and shout-inducing

Super Valis IV is not only an excellent classicvania, but it is also the best Valis game of them all.

not sure why, but there is something about sexy anime babes and SNES pixel art and color pallet that just feels right.

>>4686465
>>4686512
>>4686549
If these games weren't even popular enough in their hay day to warrant just translating them, it's no shock that devs now don't want to sink money into making a new one.

Also it's a myth that modern gamers don't appreciate hardcore games. The thirst for them is part of the reason roguelikes and fighters are bigger now than ever.

I think the biggest reason why old style action platformers and shmups aren't as popular now is the repetition in them. Few people now want to replay the same exact level multiple times.

>>4686580
the reason why there so many roguelikes isnt becuase people like them. its because they can be made cheaply above the line. theres no design involved with an algorithm that generates shit.

why settle for good and thoughtful level design, when you can have infinite shitty level design and not pay any designer?

>>4686538
C sides are intense but short. The true challenge is obtaining all the golden strawberries, which require you to complete the chapter deathless. The B side chapters, especially the summit become insanely brutal under these conditions.

look at Rondo of Blood, which is widely considered the greatest classicvania of them all.

why? because of attention to detail and interesting level design that actually conveys a story. compounded with meticulous artistry with the production design, you will rarely see any indie rogue like that dares to approach this level of deft artistry.

>>4686550
Yeah, but not that much. You get less lifes and enemies take one more hit.
Luckily the PAL release is fine and received a 60hz patch too.

>>4686586

>theres no design involved with an algorithm that generates shit.

fucking lol

it was a game dense with challenging secrets. it does not rely on bullshit randomized challenge that makes no sense.

>>4686586
I could go ranting being a dick, but there's no point. I get that the genre isn't for everyone, it never has been. But you don't really understand them.

>>4686516
Most of what is touted as 'difficult' by indie standards is a game with save-state like checkpoints. Which is both depressing and hilarious that such thing passes as 'difficulty'.

OP also mentioned that old games had cutting edge visuals, great sound, and awesome designs. While indie games have graphics that would have been laughed at in the 90s, ear-rape, and seem to be in a contest to see who can create the ugliest, stupidiest looking protagonist. Indie games approach a level of ugliness the overwhelming majority of them downright unplayable.

>>4686569
Glad you mentioned this game.

It's got multiplayer!

>>4686580
>ability where you can rest and restore HP, but you can't move or attack next turn

I've played a few indie "roguelikes" and I can attest not only are these games not roguelikes but they are ultra-casualized. They do not have perma-death. Your character is presented as dying in the story but the way the game actually handles it is you get to keep a ton of your upgrades. The goal isn't to gain mastery of the game and be able to clear it on one life, it's to do several runs and get a bunch of power ups than beat the game after you've buffed up your character.

It's a fucking grind game.

>>4686612
There isn't. Whether a platformer is 30 units wide or 25 units wide is not design.

There's more design in the first level of Strider than there is in the entire sum of some shitty roguelike.

>>4686673
i keep thinking of this.

there are some exceptions of some indie games looking great like Iconoclasts, Flinthook or Ori and the Blind Forest... but generally likw 95% of all indie games look like utter ass.

>>4686697
Definitely played computer platformers that looked like left picture.

>>4686705
this is apparently a real game that got released on PlayStation fucking 4. this isnt some freeware browser game, its being sold for actual money.

>>4686697
Ori was funded by Microsoft, that's as far from indie as it fucking gets.

>>4686687
does it have FOUR players?

>>4686697
It's even worst when you evaluate them not only by the quality of the art but by the style. All 3 of the games you mentioned have character designs which are at best bland and at worst hideous looking. This is why SNES and genesis games that have technical specs still end up looking better, because their styles rock.

The only indie game I can think that has both good quality pixel art and a good style is the Shante series, which completly fails at challenge.

It's utterly absurd how the entire cannon of indie side scrollers fails to meet requirements that hundreds of old side scrollers past decades ago.

>>4686719
it was acquired by msoft year after they were already developing.

semantics aside, it is a very good looking game that had its art team already assembled before msoft was a factor.

>>4686554

>>4686730
i cant get into the Shantae games. i find the gameplay extremely lacking any imagination and feels very by the numbers.

underneat the cute visuals and animation is soulless and pedestrian platformer that feels like it was designed by a committee.

>it's a grandpa forgot to take his medicine and now spergs out about modern games episode

>>4686743
I could barely bring myself to play them and couldn't even bother completing them. But at least they have a style which is good and art which doesn't suck, to my knowledge they are the only inide side-scrollers to ever pull that off. Which by the standards of old games isn't much of an accomplishment.

>>4686697
Is the game on the left even an actual game?

>>4686764
I've seen worst.

I always sucked at these games. I could blaze through Megaman X or Super Mario a World no problem, but I never got past the third level of Super Castlevania IV. Maybe I should go back and try these games again!

>>4686756
another thing i see alot these days is how so many modern games have a complete disregard for darkness or use of black.

this is Rendering Ranger and its a super famicom game that looks like it couldve been a ps1 game. its basically like contra, but with DKC style prerendered visuals and plays as good too.

unless you were playing something like Oddworld or FFVII, you didnt really see gritty art direction like this at the time. Rendering Ranger mightve been the only super nintendo game to attempt anything like this at this scale.

artists back then really new how to get the most out of what they had to achieve amazing results.

today not so much.

>>4686769
Doesn't answer my question. Obviously that image is a joke as most NES games do not look as good as Little Samson. What game have you seen that looks worse?

this is the best example of a modern day classicvania, and the result is an amateurish looking pile of day-glow vomit.

>>4686782
Demon's Crest. This is not a PS1 game, it's a SNES game.

One thing I notice is that darker themes and use of color tends to correlate with tougher games. They are also more likely to have enemies that look menacing, dangerous, or threatening. We also get heroes that look tougher and bolder.

>>4686790

>>4686790
>Obviously that image is a joke
It's not. Some people really have this mentality of everything old=good, everything new=bad.

>>4686790
Go on steam and search for the tags "indie" and "minimalism". You will find dozens if not not hundreds of worst looking games.

Also there's a strange notion that the NES is somehow "how retro games looked". The forfront of visuals are the arcade, the snes, and the genesis.

This is an SNES game, an SNES with a graphical enhancment to the chip but still magnitudes lower than what you could do today.

>>4686687
one of the few cases when murricas cover rocks.

>>4686690
First off, easily over 95% of all the roguelikes ever made would fall under the category of "indie".

Second, if you played something without permadeath it wasn't really a roguelike, it was what most would call a "roguelite" which are similar too but a fundamentally very different genre.

Things like grinding up items over multiple playthroughs is counter to the very spirit of the original genre and I fully agree is terrible. As are for example, the pokemon mystery dungeon games which literally are as you described, mindless grinding games in boring randomly generated maps.

The precise goal of a roguelike is that through many plays and many deaths you do gain mastery of the game's systems. So that even though you can never predict what is going to be around the next corner, and death is always one bad decision away, you still manage to persevere and win despite the odds being stacked against you.

Randomized maps are partly good because these are games you're meant to play and fail over and over while learning so you're not bored by the same dungeon every time. But personally, I see another great thing about them. I find that with a designed map as in dungeon crawlers, you can always feel the hand of the designer to a degree. So with rare exception for example will there be a long path that just stops at a dead end with nothing there. In most games that would be considered bad design.

But consider it in the context of a roguelike. You're low on food, so every step you take matters. You see that there's a corridor leading off somewhere but you have no way of really knowing if it leads anywhere. It makes even the simple decision of whether to explore that path a weighty and potentially game ending one and that's why they're typically turn based. In a good roguelike almost no decision us an easy one and there is always death looming behind you. Some people (many) hate that, but it's like crack to me and almost no other genre delivers like it does.

>>4686802
A game directly based on the style of old vic 20 platformers.

>>4686798
this is another good point.

the designs of heroes are truly lacking in concept...especially from indie devs who claim they are inspired from classics.

firebrand/arramer is an interesting character to me because he is an inhuman montser. rarely do games today have you assume the role of the fucking monster.

youd think this would be more common since being something nonhuman like a monster or mecha would allow for more varied or unique gameplay opportunities./

>>4686596
Is Dracula X the same as Rondo of Blood?

>>4686690
Ohh and in a well made roguelike, grinding a lot will just fuck you over and get you killed as well.

>>4686826
Tell that to the band players amiright?

>>4686825
No. They have different levels but it's so similiar to feels like a remake. Rondo is the superior of the two having better level designer and cooler graphics.

>>4686825
no.

dracula X is hacked up and severely edited version of Rondo.

lots of content missing.

>>4686830
Yeah there are some that are heavily grindy, and some like that, same with how many people like roguelites. I don't consider them great though.

>>4686818
>First off, easily over 95% of all the roguelikes ever made would fall under the category of "indie".

You'd have to define indie in such a way so that most retro games are indie for that to be true.

>it was what most would call a "roguelite"
This is an idiot word that means nothing but you are confused about genres. A roguelike is by defination turnbased.

Randomness is not even a defining factor in something being a roguelike, otherwise fucking card games would be counted in the category.

As for the subject of randomization. It works in turn based strategy games because whether the goblin is 2 squares away or 1 doesn't fuck up level design that much, likewise whether the room is 3x3 or 4x4 squares isn't going to make or break a game. Action games depend on prescious and careful placement otherwise it's either too easy or too hard. There's also more stats to toy with in a turnbased game while in an action game so much of player success is decided by your input skill that there the act of toying with stats can't have much depth (not to mention that toying with stuff like how fast you kill things will break level design by having you kill things either too fast or too slow).

So randomization sucks for action games except in an extremly minor cases, like whether an enemy drops extra health or ammo. Randomization in the stage structure itself is doomed to give you shitty levels.

And anyone that prefers an infinite amount of shitty levels to a couple GOOD levels is an idiot.

not a classicvania but i do think it is worth mentioning because it has a very profound foreboding and dark atmosphere.

clock tower also happens to be one of my favorite survival horror games ever made.

>>4686695

All the lowest effort 'roguelikes' I can think of
rely on pre-made rooms, like Rogue Legacy. Isaac is pre-made rooms.

TBQH algorithms and procedural generation are fine, it's just that people are morons about actual implementation. If anyone actually tried, they could procedurally generate sane levels.
Dead Cells has done pretty well, though it isn't perfect.

>>4686862
Example of a Dead Cells level? Also, BotW's map is procedurally generated.

this is a SNES game without any enhancing chips. how come there is no indie game that looks as good as it?

>>4686824
It's because indie devs are talentless losers. A good artist can produce decent art with just about any tool. You could even give him a pad of binder paper and a crappy #2 pencil and he'll still be able to produce something that will be fun to look at .

A bad artist will fail with any tool you give him. But given a choice between different tools he'll choose the tool that's easiest to work with. Indie 2D artists don't go with low res pixel art because they like it, they are doing it because it's easier to work with than higher resolution 2D art and modern 3D art. Sort of like how children will prefer crayola and construction paper to gimp and a top quality tablet.

>>4686872
forgot the image

>>4686868
Which BotW are we talking here? Also, here's an indiedb article on how Dead Cells level generation works. Still not perfect but a far cry above some others I've seen.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/dead-cells/news/the-level-design-of-a-procedurally-generated-metroidvania

>>4686881
Because it is expensive to hire good pixel artists

i dont even think Lucasarts when they were in their prime in the 90s didnt even have craftsmanship on this level. and they were making thier shit on PCs... this was a SNES game.

>>4686831
>>4686850
It has less sprites and less quantity of levels than Rondo, but in turn it has completely new levels (with new backgrounds, which IMO look better than the Rondo ones), and new bosses.

>>4686889
seems weird to me since there was a time when 95% of all games were made up of pixel art. where did they all go?

>>4686856
>You'd have to define indie in such a way so that most retro games are indie for that to be true.

Correct. When I say indie game, I means something made by a small number of people who are fans of a genre and not part of a big studio. To me an indie game from 1985 and an indie game from 2015 are the same.

Roguelikes and "roguelites" are related but truly different genres. Confusing them is like calling fighters and beat 'em ups the same genre because in both you puncg and kick.

>Randomness is not even a defining factor in something being a roguelike,

It absolutely 100% is one of the key defining factors. If you don't understand that you are trying to talk about a genre you know literally almost nothing about.

>>4686881
There are a few.
Owlboy comes to mind. Motherfucking Cuphead is probably the best looking game evermade if we are talking nonpixelart.
This "No indie game has or will ever look good" bullshit is tired and lazy. It usually comes from people who clearly don't actually play any indie games.

>>4686907
cuphead and owlboy are the exceptions. they are 2 games in an industry of 100s of games being released in a year.

>>4686904
A roguelike is a turn based RPG with permadeath. That's the only requirement. That's why ADAM is a roguelike while diablo 2 is not. Because ADAM is no randomly generated but is turn based but Diablo 2 is action based so it's disqualified.

Like I said dude if you want to start calling card games roguelites. The deck is 'randomized' with each shuffle, sort of like how a video game level is randomized each time it's generated.

>>4686885
The Zelda one.

>>4686907
so while cuphead and owlboy are only 2 good looking games (one of which was puplished by msoft of people) you rarely will see inde devs attempt to make games on that same level or put the same amount of effort or care.

this used to be the rule. not the exception. it was a race to have the best looking game possible.

>>4686913
And the game your posting isn't an exception?
Of course most of them won't look good.
Like 3 people made a game and you want it to look like the best of SNES games.

>>4686931
And it still is in the AAA sphere.
It was and is a stupid race. A good game doesn't need great graphics. They only help a marginal amount.

>>4686918
>A roguelike is a turn based RPG with permadeath. That's the only requirement.

Again, you're talking about something you don't really know anything about but you assume you do. I could write another huge post explaining, but at this point I don't think you even bother to read or pretending to be stupid so you can make obtuse points. Here's a link about what makes a roguelike if you're actually curious.

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation

>>4686935

wonder project j wasnt the exception. the SNES is home a library of some of the most technical and deft example of pixel art in videogames.

you were pretty much guaranteed to find some amazing looking games on the snes that hold up today. even a retarded ass movie licensed game like fucking Hook has tones of character and quality animation that is on par is miles ahead of the junk that gets put out today.

even though these SNES games had bigger teams working on them, the devs today have access to much, MUCH better and more efficient tools and technology that anyone can afford.

there is no fucking excuse for bad art except for being a shitty artist.

>>4686935
Once you have to resort to saying "we're only X" people you've lost all fucking credability. Shit art is shit art. PERIOD.

>you want it to look like the best of SNES games.

Not him but with all the fucking advancements in art programs and the entire collective human knowledge of pixel art available for free I would expect them to look better than the best SNES games. Better tools and better learning should mean better art, not making shitty art and than complaining when the games look worst than something made 25 years ago with inferior tools.

>>4686918
Also, big lols for calling ADOM, ADAM twice.

>>4686872
>>4686881

Iconoclasts, Owlboy, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Axiom Verge, Shovel Knight, Freedom Planet, Sonic Mania and probably a few others all have pixel art that doesn't look like shit.

TBQH the problem with a lot of the pixel art that people make these days is the obsession with pastel colors. Owlboy pulls it off but I think it would look better if it was less washed out.

What a lot of people miss is that even while they used minimal colors in pixel art because they were forced to by graphical limitations, they were still using all the tools at their disposal to show off detail.

>>4686941
it is not the same.

the race today is pushing graphics. not art.

i poorly worded what i meant when i said it was a race because back in the SNES era, developers werent pushing past the means that would affect gameplay.

>>4686963
>Owlboy
Ok

>Crypt of the Necrodancer,
Hideious ugly.

>Axiom Verge
Hideious ugly.

>Shovel Knight
Hideious protagonist and bland art on everything else.

>Freedom Planet
Ok

>Sonic Mania
Isn't that a non-indie company just recycling old assets?

>tldr
It's not just about pixel resolution it's about making something that is pleasing to look at. Indie artists suck at that 99% of the time.

>>4686963
everyone keeps saying the same few games everywhere i go.

these are drops in a fucking ocean.

>>4686965
The race has always been for both art and graphics and continues to do so.

And the indies suck at both so much they are practically running backwards.

i cant believe i lived to see a time when this retarted ass Tim Allen home improvement game manages to be more artistically proficient than most indie games on the market.

The style in this game is crazy good.

this is the kind of faggot shit that gets made today and people are duped into thinking this is 'retro'.

>>4686972
This is because the companies that actually hire good artists mostly tend toward a non-pixel style.
(See: Supergiant Games)

>>4686971
Owlboy is kinda ugly IMO.

Necrodancer isn't stellar, but it's a far cry above zero effort art.

Axiom Verge has two things about its art. One, it's intentionally not pretty, the enviroments are made to be at least a little disgusting. Two, it's heavily animated and looks worse in screenshots.

Shovel Knight is following NES limitations and doesn't look any worse than Mega Man.

Sonic Mania has a lot of reused assets but they weren't left untouched. The entirely new zones look pretty good, too. As for the indie side, true. Not indie. Small dev team though.

>>4686972
This is for a game in development

>>4686990
>>4686978

These are both ugly as piss, what are you smoking.

Also part of this has to do with modern programs not being generally tailored for pixel art. Trying to do it in GIMP or Paint.NET is a huge pain in the ass with the complete unsuitability of 95% of GIMP's tools and the tiny palette of PDN. Programs from back in the day like Deluxe Paint were actually much better for pixel art.

>>4687015
Nice. Looks kinda PS1 era. Would like to see without gif artifacts, animation here is pointless.

>>4687008
>Shovel Knight is following NES limitations and doesn't look any worse than Mega Man.

The Shovel Knight himself is a faggot. It completely kills my ability to ever want to play it. Even his name is garbage. The idea of creating characters that are cool or even just fun to look at seems totally alien to indies.

As for the idea of intentionally limiting your sprites, that doesn't exclude you from being criticized. It sounds like it's just an easy way for talentless artists to trick people into being content with bad art.
"oh I intended to make it look like shit, that counts as retro"

>>4687015
that is kinda neat looking i gotta say.

>>4687021
Shovel Knight doesn't look great, I'll admit, but it's got good character design and more importantly, it's fun as fuck.
No idea why this game turned into graphicsfag circlejerk hour. OP wanted games that are like Classicvania.

>>4687027
>this game
This thread, rather.

>>4687019
>>4687023

not a classicvania- more like one of those 'cinematic' platformers like prince of persia or flashback. Nosferatu is another very impressive looking snes game with a strong horror atmosphere. i think the lead artist went to go work on symphony of the night, and it shows.

you really can tell the nosferatu artists knew their shit.

>>4687043
Seconding this game, it's not really what OP wants but more people need to know about it. I lost my shit when I first encountered some little goblin dudes and MC just puts up his dukes and brawls with them. I was expecting him to be helpless or whatever.

>>4686563
Bro, that’s literally a cut down port of pc engine valis 4

Give the pce credit when it’s due

i almost forgot about Psycho Dream.

its a sorta classicvania/Strider style action game.

very surreal imagery. not sure what any of it is supposed to mean but looks amazing in action.

>what is a roguelike?
>here's why genre-x is objectively crap even though I don't know anything about it
This topics are cancer

>Here are some good SNES action games
This is a good topic

does Skyblazer count?

>>4687085
nah, player character is far too mobile and acrobatic.

This is how Metroid would probably look with modern indie pixel art.

is the Koumajou denestsu games any good?

>>4686971
hideous. no second i.

>preferring Dracula X over Rondo of Blood

Pic related is on NES with just 4 colors.
There's that Famicom Detective 2 suicide scene that has better animation than many animes.

>>4687056
Even Dracula X, for how messy a port it was, redid some of the graphics to profit off the SNES palette. Super Valis IV didn't even do that.

>>4686903
Developers fell in love with prerendered 3D graphics done on expensive Silicon Graphics hardware. The last true pixel art games came from the CPS3 arcade era and the GBA/DS and it was all B teams or passion projects like Chippoke Ralph no Daibouken PS1 by what would be called "indies" today, except they were far more professional and passionate than the indies of today.

Nintendo tried their best keeping it alive, but the Wii Wario Land game bombed and then they cancelled a Kirby prototype in the same style and went with 2.5/3D for most future works. There was a developer interview about SFV how they found pixel art style manuals in a warehouse. The know how is simply lost, just look at big companies trying to port older games to the PS1/DS/mobile ending up with abominations right out of RPG Maker.

>>4687120
I played the first, no ideas how the rest are but that one sucked. They have some really bad enemy spawn points where you take cheap hits unless you memorize it's exact spawn points. There's also dumb things like putting a ton of high hp really mobile enemies in a tiny corridor.

The game rewards inching the screen way too much.

>>4687174
>Developers fell in love with prerendered 3D graphics done on expensive Silicon Graphics hardware. The last true pixel art games came from the CPS3 arcade era and the GBA/DS
They were so popular that a shit ton of GBA games use them.

>>4687174
you mean Little Ralph's Adventure?

i have a copy of that.

I'm cheating because Odallus isn't retro

>>4686825
They have sprites and some music in common and that's it.

>>4686473
>stretching to 16:9
Stupid faggot.

>>4687115
Is this post meant to be ironic?

>>4687115
Is this post meant to be ironic?

>>4687115
Is this post meant to be ironic?

>>4686480

Ideed. I wish Demon's Crest had a cover as cool as that.

>>4687120
I've only played the first. It has good bosses, but very poor level design. Lots of rooms have what appear to be platforming challenges in them, except the player character can just fly over everything. It's rarely worthwhile to fight enemies or engage with the environment in any way as opposed to just flying to the next room. The major exceptions are areas filled with enemies that launch rapid attacks as soon as they appear on-screen. As >>4687179 notes, this just encourages inching the screen, which is even less fun than just ignoring everything.

It would've been a lot better as a boss rush.

>>4687379
AM2R reuses a lot of sprites from Super and Fusion. Its quality is more the exception than the norm. Not an argument.

Just take a look at any of the critics' darling indie "metroidvania-inspired love letters", Axiom Verge looks like puke.

>>4687425

>Axiom Verge looks like puke

Have you played the fucking game?

>>4687425
Ohh I get that, but you have to admit it's kind of funny to have chosen Metroid specifically.

Anyways, most indie games look like crap because decent art is much harder than most people think and they're done on a budget. I think a lot of old games also look like garbage, but if the game is interesting then I don't really care.

This isn't what I'd call a good "game", but it's one of the few mergers between art and game that I've seen done well. The graphics are crappy, but it doesn't really matter in the end.

>>4686687

one of the best soundtracks on the NES. the game itself is good too when you figure out what you're doing., it's worth playing just for the soundtrack though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gqd6xn0snE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICBJzSzNKjU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhRQ6_LK3hA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LssY0pFDNys

>>4686797
Wait, what? It looks nice

>>4687115
https://youtu.be/UcBXnqdPqGA

>>4687174
>There was a developer interview about SFV how they found pixel art style manuals in a warehouse.
Are these manuals online?

>>4687787
Yes.
You're not going to pull that
>B-b-but it's ugly because it makes sense in context
schtick, are you? I also think it's overrated as fuck, even the level design thing.
Down the trash with the likes of Volgar the Viking it goes.

The Mummy Demastered is a closer, yet still flawed, follow up to older pixel art games. Even the difficulty is old-school, which didn't get it any fans and then critics cried in a chorus "bad design". That might answer >>4686465 btw.

>>4688456
I only ever saw one or two slides from its content in a GDC video. It's an internal document, and Japanese corporates would rather sit on until bitrot, or even destroy something than it to leak not according to the "rules".

General idea (pic related is from some stuff found in games) was that the concept artist (who did BoF3/4) designs concept art easily translatable to pixel art, they do a blob dummy generic NPC with all the animations and then that blob is refined to details specific to each NPC and overlay costumes, weapons, moves, animation lines... with some general drawing theory (colors, lighting, body proportions, recognizable silhouettes, walking cycle, skips in animations to suggest a faster action, ..., and most importantly some common sense, at least in-universe, and better inspiration and ambition than LJN level pixel art)
The more color limitations the better (as long as it's not MSX/NES levels where it only works with specific art styles) since that forces the artist to care about lighting, consistent one, and not end up with something flat or right out of RPG Maker, and lesser detail for more efficiency (the good old trick with walking sprites covered with bed sheets for when they sleep just to cite one example)

>>4688561
Not him and I haven't played it, but from screenshots I think it looks quite good. What are your issues with the graphics?

>>4687818
Not impressed.

>>4686465
>>4686473
>>4686480
Anyone know where I can get a reproduction of it with English patch on a super famicom cart? I see it for pal but not ntsc

>>4686554

I seen Majuu Ou frequently get compared to Resident Evil if it played like a classicvania. I think this is something I’d like to see more. The idea of something like these action horror games but in a modern setting. Like instead of Dracula or Frankenstein inspiration, it was inspired by Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

>>4688762
I got mine on Etsy.

Just played bloodlines on my genesis and now I'm looking for more. Wanna play Rondo of blood on my crt. I don't have a turbo graphics though. My choices would be the snes version but that q different game as I understand it. How is the wii version? Does it do 240p? Or I can emulate the TG 16 version on the same wii. What do you guys recommend?

>>4688610
Not him.
Graphics are okay.
Not really a challenging game.
My biggest gripe is the weapons all feel the same.

>>4688792
the wii version is fine. problem is the wii VC shop shut down a week ago. unless you bought it already, youre shit outta luck. youll have to emulate or get the PSP version which is unlockable which means playing the shitty remake.

>>4688807
Got a soft modded wii and a torrent of all the wii ware games ever realsed already downloaded. I assume I can get them games to play on my modded wii without an issue

>>4688809
thats an option too. youre set.

>>4687325
>frogposter
Don't think we can't tell you're the same faggot in every thread.
Stupid faggot.

surprised nobody mentioned Rusty yet.

you get a whip and even face off with nightmarish abominations. pretty damn close to casltevania and even has a hot babe.

there are tons of dithering effects to make the visuals possible on this since it was a PC98 game.

>>4688814
Im a physical copy type of guy when it's realistic but I jsut haven't gotten down the TG 16 rabbit hole mainly due to cost of games

>>4688862
same. if you must have a physical copy, the best and most affordable option would be the PSP Dracula X Chronicles.

it has the original Rondo of blood as an unlockable as well as an enhanced port of symphony.

do the Sunsoft NES batman games qualify?

i feel like they do.

>>4688862
Yeah, I don't count ports of games to count. If I'm gonna go phsycal I'm gonna get the TG 16 version. And if it's as good as people say I might be on ebay looking for it

>>4688871
Was meant to reply to
>>4688868

Magic Sword, a JP exclusive

Magic Sword overall is a pretty underrated super famicom game.

>>4688879
>>4688875
i fucked up.
this wasnt a JP exclusive. no idea why i thought it was.

>>4686959
>Not him but with all the fucking advancements in art programs and the entire collective human knowledge of pixel art available for free I would expect them to look better than the best SNES games. Better tools and better learning should mean better art, not making shitty art and than complaining when the games look worst than something made 25 years ago with inferior tools.

You are doing a disservice to the people who made the fantastic art you rave about. Artwork like the golden age was produced purely because the artist they hired were masters of their craft with years of experience under their belts. No amount of tools will ever replace that. We've already seen the results when automation takes care of animation, especially at the hands of amateurs. Art is a craft that will always require skill, and a good idea. Tools can make the job easier but it will never be the deciding factor.

It sickens me when you and your ilk seriously believe that a bunch of shit tier amateurs should be at the same level as an entire team of masters.

>>4688985
we have decades of masterful examples to learn from. how the fuck did 99% of pixel art go backwards?

>>4688807
>youll have to emulate or get the PSP version which is unlockable
man, just download a save file off gamefaqs with Rondo, SOTN and Peke already unlocked. That's what I eventually did.

PSP version is pretty good since it has:
- a retranslated SOTN with the cut JP content and playable Maria restored, and less loading
- a translated Rondo, emulated with soft subtitles for cutscenes and a quicksave feature
- Peke easter egg is visible without complicated emulator settings
- dual audio for all of the above

All of this is exclusive to this version. Only the Wii version attempted carrying some of it and that was only the audio dub, not the text translation. Only issue is that the sound looping for the Rondo port sometimes bugs out, and the existing PPSSPP emulator softlocks when playing its cutscenes. Maybe censored werewolf penises (Rondo only) if that's a deal breaker. I had a blast with it on my PSP.

>unless you bought it already, youre shit outta luck
lol
but well, the Wii VC does have a hidden native 240p mode for CRTs. Idk if the PCE emulation supports it though, I know for sure some (N64) don't.

>>4688610
That was me. And that pic sums it up. Also played it for a while and buyer regret already set in in the first 30 minutes. Everything about it is so unappealing and ugly and, that's not only the grimdark womb feel they were going for.

>>4688870
Thread became about quality retro platformers anyways so post to your heart's content.

>>4688985
Little Ralph Adventure was a pure passion project made by a team of hobbyists with almost zero prior game developer experience, and still looks like a worthy successor to SNES era games.

It's just that indie pixel platformers today normalized mediocrity.

>>4688807
The remake is better than the original Rondo.

>>4689070
What does the PSP version do for aspect ratio? I wanna play these games in my 4:3 crt in 240p. Is the wii ware version not in English?

>>4688985
>We've already seen the results when automation takes care of animation,

What are you even talking about? 2D art isn't 'automated' anymore now than in the past.

>It sickens me when you and your ilk seriously believe that a bunch of shit tier amateurs should be at the same level as an entire team of masters.
What's sickening is to demand lower standards and whine about how we should accept crap art that would have been left at in the 80s or 90s.

These people you are defending descrate their art form with their pathetic and ugly attempts, which not only do not get close to the 'masters' but rarely even match the shovelware SNES pixel-art.. They try to tarnish the legacy of old games by enshrining their abortive attempts at games as being equal or even better than the games of the past or be telling people pixel is supposed to suck (so don't critisize me!). They routinly annoy everyone on the planet who wants to browse steam by making them have to shift through ugly garbage.

After damaging both people's time's and the legacy of the past they and their defenders have the balls to say not only should we not criticize them, but we should accept their garbage and all the damage it causes and give them money for it!

>>4689089
wii ver is in Japanese

>>4689097
Ohh shit, might have to rethink my plan

>>4689107
outside of some dialogue, its mostly in english.

its a castlevania game. you arent gona miss much.

>>4689089
There are options for native 1:1 game resolution and a resized full screen one with borders. All of them are in 4:3. I saw someone on youtube had it on CRT with an elaborate setup involving a real PSP and some cropping.

Can't stress this enough though: I really recommend against emulating the PSP Rondo vanilla emulated port. Thing is, it's still the best way to experience the game until we get PCE emulators with soft subtitles, since the cutscenes were without subs originally and that version subtitled all of it, even the ferryman vertical text and sound test thing.

Second best way to play it is the original PCE version with a fan translation patch applied. It uses the official English dub for cutscenes out of necessity (since that's a technical limitation of the PC Engine only solved on PSP because they used a custom emulator) but also tries to translate SOME of the text.
The official American Wii VC version didn't even try, they just threw an unaltered JP iso with the mp3 files for the voice acting replaced with the English dub... partially.

All of this means jack shit if you don't care about understanding what happens in the game, can read and hear moon, or would watch the cutscenes on youtube later, since then any version is good enough.

>>4689123
what is there to understand?

richter, saves the babes, slays the night and vanquishes the evil. done and done.

>>4689123
Someone hacked the wii ware version to have the translation. Might go that route now. Why would I care about sift subs if it's translated now?

>>4689129
Maria's dialogue is funny, and in her mode all stage names are her commenting on the whole ordeal.
>I really hate to take the long way around
>This is so scary
The ferryman has some things of interest to say still in their moon glory in the Wii NA version.

The game is light on story for sure, but it's not like you don't miss anything if you can't understand what's going on.

>>4689003
Most of the pixel art you like was made by professional artists (usually a team of them) working for companies where producing the graphics is their main job.

Most of the pixel art you think is shit is made by amature artists who are doing as a side project.

>>4689140
That's... one way to solve the problem.
Soft subs are for those who still want to hear the jp audio. It's all a matter of taste, and one reason why some weebs ignore the official localisations for Dragon Slayer.
Fortunately, Rondo of Blood's late English dub is surprisingly good and the locution is clear enough.

>>4689150

that is still a shitty escuse since they still have more resources available. one resource they have that the pros did not have was an abundance of time. the pros worked under brutal deadlines. these amateurs got all the time in the world. owl boy took like fucking 10 years for fuck sakes and it has the lamest character design ever.

>>4689150
Haha no, the BoF one juggled between sprite design, designing concept art for cover and manuals, writing story content, and producing responsibilities.
Tons of games had credits listing only one or two sprite art designers, sometimes the breakdown made that even more obvious.
Gimmick, Little Samson and Little Ralph Adventure were made by small, almost indie teams.

>"Most of the pixel art you think is shit"
It is objectively shit though
>"is made by amature artists who are doing as a side project".
>actually they didn't care as much about it
>see, it's an afterthought in their lives
>now YOU must care about that, refrain from calling out its shittyness and buy it
>"art"
Don't see how that changes anything about its shittiness.

>>4689162
Making good art has very little to do with resources.

>>4689162
agree except that owlboy is kino

>>4689150
Shit art is shit art. The demand to be judged at a lower standard is simply the cry of defeat by bad artists who know they will never amount to anything.

>>4689156
Hahah wish I wasn't so obsessed with playing on a crt or if jsut use component on my HDTV from a real PSP. I jsut scored this 40 inch Sony thag does 480i/240p and legit the memes are true. Retro games look so good on it. My HDTV is an LG oled that looks amazing and even with that the crt blows it the fuck out, especially with how clean motion looks. Something about these retro games look so good on crt TVs it's magic.

Not to mention how input lag is non existent on crt. I didn't even realize how much I compensate for input lag in it modern games till I played on my crt.

>>4686924
That's not true, is it? From what I know it's consistent across every copy.

>>4689171
time is definitely a resource even the best artist needs.

>>4689168
I'm not trying to say it's not shitty. Just that expecting professional quality artwork out of amateurs doing fan projects is a little silly.

I also find it funny how hung up on graphics so many people here are. Good graphics are swell, sure but one of the less important things for a game.

>>4688610
The graphics are good when they are good. They aren't consistent though. The bosses and a few large characters have Saturn tier spritework, but most of the game is NES tier.

That was still the most fun game I've played so far this year though.

>>4686743
I felt the same way about mighty switch force, game feels like shit but looks and sounds great. I think that is wayforward's hallmark. I liked mighty milky way, but it wasn't a platformer, so it didn't suffer the same issues.

>>4689182
And indie fags have more of that than the old artists seeing as how they set their own deadlines. They also have access to superior tools, many of which are free or extremely cheap. And a wealth of masterful pixel art to study and learn from.

What's missing is talent.

>>4689187
art=\=graphics

good art direction is timeless and isnt trapped by technical limits.

>>4689196
Art direction is part of graphics. No one who actually plays games cares about number of polys or flavor of the month post processing effects.

>>4689198
>No one who actually plays games cares about number of polys or flavor of the month post processing effects.

It's more like people care what you do with them. Polys and effects are simply tools, they are only as good as the artist using them.

>>4689202
this.

the graphics are a means to an end.
it is what you make with them and how you use them is what counts

>>4689196
Yeah and it's harder than most people think. I'm not saying bad art isn't bad. Just expecting good art out of bad artists is pointless and that a game with poor visuals can still be a good game (in my opinion)

Both are nice obviously, but personally I take a good game with bad graphics over a bad game with good graphics every time.

>>4689202
Well, that's the point. I like good graphics, I like my games to have good graphics. Resolution, poly count, and post processing don't really do much to make good graphics. They can do a little, but are very low on the scale.

Just play Distorted Travesty 3.

>>4689308

>>4689318
It's pretty much the perfect example of brutal but fair difficulty and done by a very modern dev. It even has a castlevania section more fun than any castlevania game made in the past decade.

>>4689308
Has a fitting title, I'll give it that much.

>>4686465

Sword Master and Kick Master

>>4689376
>/v/

>>4686539
>>4686534
It's really criminal how much this game gets shit on. I played it first and never had played the previous game before but recently emulated it, it's an alright game but the much lauded world building sim city mode is very bare bones and not that great actually. I much prefer Actraiser 2 for the visuals and much greater move set.

>>4686465
>i wana talk about a genre that modern devs are too pussy to make anymore.
check out joymasher

>>4686797
Why don't fucking nu-devs understand that gradients fucking ruin the pixel aesthetic?

>>4686797
>>4688110
That game looks amazing in action.

Problem is that its not a great game. But it looks amazing, watch youtube footage.

>>4689563
Because not everyone on earth agrees with you?

>>4689558
I played a bit of both their games. As in I did about half the first level before quiting out of boredem.

Their Ninja Gaiden clone completly fails on level design. It doesn't have good pacing, Ninja Gaiden forced the player to be fast by having enemies respawn if they waited too long or in Ninja Gaiden by placing enemies in positions where they would get easy hits on the player if they didn't keep moving. This is a staple of old games.

Oniken not only has that but seems to reward scrolling the screen slowly, taking out the enemy that appears and not moving again until you've dispatched it.

It also has a really bland visual style, even if the levels were better I don't think I'd be motivated to play it when there are NES games that look cooler.

Their castlevania game seems to have even WORST design, escpially on the enemies, to the point where I quite the game after seeing the abomination of pixel art they had for their first boss.

They also seem to have gotten even worst at pacing with that game. Borrowing everything that slowed down the games from SoTN in terms of level lay out while having even less aggression from enemies than the their ninja gaiden clone.

They got worst at both level design and art.

>>4689698
Oniken isn't close to as good as Ninja Gaiden, but it isn't a Ninja Gaiden clone. It plays more like other games such as Vice: Project Doom. Which it also isn't as good as well, but that's less of a gap than between it and NG.

>>4689698
you're not wrong on any of your points really, though subjectively I still enjoyed both games.

Oniken does have bland stages, but can blast through them at reasonable speed. The main strenght of the game are very nice methodical pattern learning boss fights, and I'm into this kind of thing.

Oniken is trying to be a Demon's Crest clone the most, the above also applies to it.

>>4690048
>Oniken is trying to be a Demon's Crest clone the most, the above also applies to it.
*Odallus

>>4689178
>The demand to be judged at a lower standard

What are you even babbling about? By all means place your money on things you think meets your unrealistic standards, but at the end of the day you cannot replace talent with tools and "resources". Whatever the fuck that means.

>>4686465
not gona let you die here

>>4690131
>unrealistic standards
Different anon, but with how fervently you defend scatological indie "artstyles", I doubt you have any.

Went and played King of Demons thanks to this thread. My game crashed the first time through so I used the level select to get back to where I left off, and got the bad ending. I switched it to hard mode and played the whole thing through again right away. Overall it only took a few hours, game is very short, but it was really fun. Pro tip, all the characters have a divekick but the dragons is the absolute best.

>>4686465
Wow I completely forgot about this game. Great gem, thanks for bringing it to my attention again.

>>4686489
>>4686512
You'd totally hate any indie game that looks like Majuu Ou and claimed to be 16-bit.

>>4691651
I've never seen one that looks like majyuou... they mostly have overly big "pixels" that have a different resolution from the background, try to make the sprites overly rustic with a better resolution than making the most beautiful sprites you can with shitty res, and the gameplay is also usually not as tight.
I did like the looks of the little game that was launched with the new mummy movie, but the character was a pain to control, and they didn't quite nail the level design. It was good but there was something off about it.

>>4686580
dude, >>4686586 and >>4686690 are right.
Current roguelikes are the same generic shit with different sprites and MAAAAYBE a new gimmick to boot it (like necrodancer).
I've seen bands that are more different from each other than two pixelated roguelikes made in this decade.

>>4686802
This is a pretty fun/challenging puzzle platformer with catchy music, also see: >>4686819

>>4686931
>>4686931
>you rarely will see indie devs attempt to make games on that same level or put the same amount of effort or care.
But back then, the pixel artists were PAID by companies to take the extra effort/care because it was their JOB. I'd imagine indie devs work on their games in their spare time, on top of having an actual job.

>>4689150
So what? Am i supposed to wear the macaronni necktie to the big business meeting because little timmy spent half an hour glueing linguini to it? I know he's not armani, but still, even the shittiest 2d graphics back then were as good as the best indie graphics today.
They have the resources to nearly automate graphic development, why not use them and tweak the art until it's good? Why not learn how to actually make pixel art? Why have double standards for people because they're shit at what they're doing? You either do it well or get the flak, no way around it.

>>4691783
And it will look like a weekend project and play like one. Being "good for something you didn't get paid for" is not being good.

>>4691817
I don't know if you're genuinely stupid or just pretending so you can rant.

the nintendo switch has modern games of this genre
irony much?

>>4691885
sure dude, keep eating shit because it's "quite nutritious if you consider it comes from an anus", i'll keep myself to good games with good art direction that don't look like someone made it in half an hour on mspaint.

>>4691969
Lol

Bump

>>4686554
HOLY DIVER

>>4688826
you are one salty stupid faggot, Id rather have a million frogposters in here than a single 16:9 faggot

>>4693845
Ride the tiger

>>4691969
At this point you're just being obtuse for the sake of giving yourself a soapbox. No one is saying most indie art is good, or that we should all go out and buy shitty steam bundles cause they did their best or whatever strawman you keep going on about. The point you refuse to get is that you're greatly underestimating what went into making those old games.

>>4694482
In no way I'm more obtuse than you, you're not moving the goalpost, you're moving the whole stadium.
These "indie" games have the same proportional amount of funding an old game had,and since crowdfunding became a thing they aren't passion projects taken care of in the developer's free time anymore. I know full well how old artists had to make things do with less resources and bad deadlines, for a meager paycheck since companies took the meat of the game's profit.
Their effort is exactly why I see indie 2d retro sprites in a bad light for the most part, because all that effort made them less profit and fame than whatever 3 seconds the dude from fez took to draw his character.
I'm not underestimating anything, you're the one underestimating how shitty work conditions were then, and how they still were able to produce quality art with palete limitations, small sprites, lack of layers and all the crap indie artists don't have to go through and still can't produce quality more than tree times a year.

Too much of a stretch? Vinyl at least felt like it used Castlevania's subweapons exclusively for attacks.

>>4691817
>They have the resources to nearly automate graphic development

There are no tools or resources that can do that. None. The most that exist that can automate the process is skeleton animation and an auto tile map editor. There is no program that will shade the sprite appropriately if you click a button or generate a walk cycle if you provide a base sprite. A majority of the work is still done manually because they can't be automated.

I would really love to see these resources you keep bringing up. This would be a boom to the community if they can do what you're saying they can do. Why are you hoarding them anon?

>>4691651
show me an indie game made in the past 6 years that attempts anything like Majuu Ou.

>>4695443

Was this the best goevania?

>>4688561
what do you even have against Volgarr the Viking?

please tell me you aren't just a contrarian/""""purist"""".

>>4695447
this sorry-ass wanabe ghost and goblins hack-job?

you seriously believe that they are even trying?

its so lifeless and bland looking. it looks worse than the game it is inspired from.

thats the thing with Majuu Ou and castlevania... majuu ou might be castlevania rippoff, but it has its own personality and distinct style.

this looks like a Chinese knock off.

here is another example of indie bland character design and inappropriate use of ugly effects that do not belong in a game like this.

>yet another thread of muh graphics faggotry
Jesus, how much of a shallow minded shitter do you have to be to dismiss games based on the graphics? Probably the same kinda ppl that watch yt videos instead of playing games and think they've got an opinion.

>>4695457
>they
It's one guy doing everything except the music which is pretty damn impressive

>>4695481
he should learn art.

being a good artist costs nothing.

look at how much more character and personality is here compared to his peck dreck. you think capcom artist's had access to something like asperite in the early 90s?

>>4695495
forgot the pic

>>4695481

It's not impressive dude. The resources are out there that would have made the game for him and do it better. Why do humans even make games? The resources can do everything.

>>4695495
It costs time. Do you understand how much time developing a game takes? If all he had to do is make art then it'd be doable, otherwise he'd be stuck spending 6-8 years of his life making art for a game to end up with a mediocre waste of time like Owlboy since the other aspects aren't nearly as fleshed out. Also they didn't have aesprite but they had decent enough spiriting tools, there were some screenshots of some Ys sprites in software and the toolset was all there by the looks of it

>>4695495
>you think capcom artist's had access to something like asperite in the early 90s?

They had access to artists under their employment with years of experience who were trained to use the tools at the time.

>>4695506
you know what resource the capcom developers in the 90s and 80s didnt have?

fucking TIME.

these games were made in barely a year. the deadlines the artists were under were excruciatingly tight.

>>4695516
That was their full time job and even then they were pushed to their breaking point. Single indie developers already have jobs more often than not, AND they can't dedicate to just one aspect of game development they have to do them all at the same time which is tremendously difficult even with premade engines like Unity and Game Maker. Having an additional artist focus solely on the graphics would be a massive improvement. Again do you know a damn thing about game development?

>>4695508
today, indies and hobbyists have even more readily available tools and all the collective knowledge and instructions at their fingertips.

generations worth of examples to learn from, that they themselves have been raised with at an impressionable age... and yet they still produce fucking garbage.

>>4695527
>>4695429

>>4695527
Which tools automate spriting? Aseprite isn't a magical auto-art software, it simply has some convenient features and nice workflow but at its core it's not much more convenient than MS paint for pixel art. What instructions make placing down pixels an effortless task? What collective knowledge eases the workload? Name specifics instead of vague horseshit.

>>4695516

you know what resource indie developers of today don't have?

Payroll

>>4695504
It might be icycalm, he's clueless enough about game development and confident enough about his clueless opinions to spew such trash.

https://2dwillneverdie.com/blog/how-much-do-sprites-cost/

>The article goes on to say that a character in pixel art would take a professional artist about two hours per frame (four frames per day), at a salary of $20-$30 per hour. So a character with 500 frames of animation could initially cost $20,000 – $30,000, but then the cost of fine-tuning and reworking the animations to balance gameplay can actually double the price by the end.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180226154835/https://www.polygon.com/a/street-fighter-2-oral-history/chapter-2

>According to Yoshiki Okamoto, Capcom didn't set budgets for individual games in 1991 and instead counted backwards at the end of production to see what it spent. For Street Fighter 2, he estimates 10 months of development with no overtime pay, for around 35 people at an average cost of about $7,000 per person per month. So roughly speaking, $2.45 million, though others disagree on some of the specifics, with Noritaka Funamizu saying in a 2002 Edge interview that the development length was two years.

This is not a trade anyone can just jump into and have tools handle it. It's a heavily skilled based work that needs more than just "time" to get good at. This idea that the only thing that indie devs needs to do is to "git gud" is unrealistic, especially when a majority of them are one man armies. If we were talking about a small indie team of people, then sure there is definitely room for criticism. They should have hired the best they could afford if they formed a company. But most of these people are working on games as a hobby. I'm not saying that should be their excuse for their poor work. If they're shit, they're shit, nothing will change that. But what people need to understand is that if you're going to an indie dev for entertainment, then keep your expectations in check. A majority of these people are amateurs that are learning the craft. Expect amateur work. Go somewhere else if you want professional level work.

>>4695457
you’re deliberately b8ing or like getting upset for the sake of it

>>4695429
Way to cut my phrase short exactly as it was about to make sense. You can easily draw something and transfer pixelize it with programs, THEN you tweak the graphics so they don't look like computer generated shit.
Forget reading comprehension, try reading the whole sentence for once.
>I would really love to see these resources you keep bringing up. This would be a boom to the community if they can do what you're saying they can do. Why are you hoarding them anon?
Here you go: https://www.pixel-stitch.net/
1. make a crappy non-pixel sprite
2. use skelly programs to make
3. walk/jump/run/hit animations
4. use above site on each frame
5. TWEAK the graphics like I mentioned before and you were unable to read
>tweak: (informal
>improve (a mechanism or system) by making fine adjustments to it.
>"engineers tweak the car's operating systems during the race"
>synonyms: adjust, modify, alter, change, adapt; refine
>"the product can be tweaked to suit your needs"
there, you have sprites better than what 90% of what indie artists output.

>>4691705
Man, everybody always uses that Sword & Sworcery sprite as the bad guy indie hipster baddies example. But it's a beautiful game. The colours are evocative and the animation's quite detailed and characterful.

>>4696002
No you don't, you have a gabled shitty mess that's hard to read and will require so much tweaking that the effort's better spend drawing a more simplified sprite from scratch

>>4696072
if indie artists made half the effort you mention every game would be at least as pleasant as shovel knight.

>>4696086
No they wouldn't be lol, go ahead and try to make a sprite in this way you'll find that it's not only time consuming but produces shitty results

>>4696002

You can't be serious

This is the magical resource you're referring to? This isn't going to make anything worth a damn. If anything, this would generate the same level of faux retro shit you hate so much. Capcom's caveman methods you love to use an example are more advanced than this.

This is the most elaborate joke I've seen on /vr/

>>4696047
Don't you know there is only one style of pixel art and anyone who dares to differ is a huge new age faggot!?

>>4696047
Most "hipster indie pixel crap" that triggers /vr/ looks ok imo, it's the gameplay that's a letdown

>>4686465
> modern devs are too pussy to make anymore.
I think you're wrong.

>>4696974

>>4696978

>>4696986

>>4696989
Almost as if OP were full of shit and should play better indie games...

>>4696991

>>4696047
The funny thing is that Sword & Sorcery sprites are so simple on purpose. Their reason is to contrast with beatiful and detailed backgrounds, reinforcing message about how small man is when compared to world, or nature.

>>4696002
Dude, what? That's gonna look like SHIT. Signed, sprite artist.
You gotta be fucking retarded to think something like that would work. First, skeleton animation looks like shit at its face value. There is a reason only joke games like QWOP use it. And what you want to do is to... pixelize it? That's not fucking pixel art! It's gonna look like fucking vomit!

If you want good sprites, just hire pixel artists. There are thousands of people who are great at pixel art, and all you need to do is not skimp out and pay them. Boom, you get great looking artwork.

Pic related:
>on top, Mutant Alien Assault, game with crappy programmer art.
>on bottom, Super Mutant Alien Assault, sequel for which they actually hired a proffesional spriter. And yes, this is actual gameplay.

>>4691825
So just to bring this conversation back:

>Q: Why do sprite based games not look as good as the 90s?
A: Because since then no one is being employed to make spritework for games.

>>4696047
This. Just because it's pixel art, doesn't mean it's specifically trying to mimic pixel art from a particular set of years.

>>4695495
Locomalito works almost full-time as a graphic and web designer, and also, he has a family to attend. It's almost a miracle he gets some little time to do indie games.
I do love classic pixelart too, but it's completely unrealistic to expect Capcom-quality art to a single guy who does what he can.

>>4696974
Dis game so gud. Still have to go back and try to beat the hard path.

>>4697326
>horrendous tiling
>gauss-blurry clouds badly delimited with an airbrush eraser
>gradient right out of PowerPoint
>chaotic object sprites with awful outlines, awful contrast and awful aesthetics

They weren't wrong when they said beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Even a bedroom amiga sprite artist would be ashamed to put out sprites like those.
Even 16-bit games with badly resized CGI and art done with higher color depth then passed through a shit filter of dithering and color replacement didn't look like this.
Even in the 2D games of the 32-bit era where some developers fell in love with that RPG Maker aesthetic and went drunk from no palette limitations, they still didn't put out shit like this.

>>4696991
>>4696978
>>4696974
It's a pretty sad sight to see an indie anon trying so hard to shill that raw shit when fucking LJN shovelware games had much better looking sprites.

>>4696991
Wings of Vi is pretty much the ultimate action platformer in terms of meticulous, challenging level design and bosses

>>4697528
They play as good if not better than the classics though, Volgarr in particular perfects the classic Castlevania formula while adding its own twists to it

>>4697312
This is the main thing so many here seem to not understand.

>>4695516
Those people were trained artists before they were hired.

>>4697528
>shovelware
It's not even that bad! The graphics are certainly above-average.

>>4686465
I tried this for the first time yesterday. Fun but that anime battle music during the boss fights is... something.

>>4697528
So you're surpised that a game made by a company with many people looks better than something done by one person?

At least have fair comparisons.

>>4699753
>something done by one person
Which is still not the case for a lot of those shitty indie games, but here you go:

>X68k, Windows
www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6qy99S-MqE

>>4697528

LJN is a publisher, not a developer

>>4699737
>>shovelware
>It's not even that bad! The graphics are certainly above-average.
Well that was the point. Even joyless crappy discount bin shovelware back in the day could have graphics to that level.

Most indies today pay no care to how pleasant it is, nor how good and original it plays, yet expect reviewers to suck their dick for their "spiritual successor love letter to {$FAMOUS_VG1} inspired by {$FAMOUS_VG2}" and 10/10s everywhere. In the end it's more often than not a spectacle in ugliness objectively worse than games from 30 years ago held back by palette limitations.

Salty grapes have the gall now to say visuals that don't look like vomit or unfinished sprites are impossible standards. They wish, just like other failed artists in academia with "abstract paintings", the threshold for how pretty something has to be to be considered art is lowered so much to the bottom of the barrel and then borrowing underground some more just so that their low effort is considered pretty and SELLS.

West can't into indie games. They're all badly drawn clones/ripoffs of decades old games.

Japanese doujin are better.

>>4696992
>>4696991
>>4696989
>>4696986
>>4696978
>>4696974

all these games look like fucking shit.
why is the art so weak? looks like amateur hour.

>>4699872
>Japanese doujin are better.
Yeah, they're well-drawn clones/ripoffs of decades old games.

>>4699863
>Well that was the point. Even joyless crappy discount bin shovelware back in the day could have graphics to that level.
I'm just sticking up for Warlock because it's not as bad as you'd think (although still not that great...). I mean, why is there even a Warlock game? The movie was five years old when it came out, and it's not exactly Star Wars. It's like the won the license in a poker game or something.

>>4699542

you cant train talent.

>>4699916
Latent talent means almost nothing. Skill comes through hard work and practice. Not just with art.

>>4699916
fucking shounen villain in here

>A LOWBORN LIKE YOU COULD NEVER DO SUBPIXEL ANIMATION LIKE THIS KAKAROT

>>4693845
YOU'VE BEEN DOWN TOO LONG IN THE MIDNIGHT SEA

>>4699916
>falling for the talent meme

>>4689218
>bad graphics
>console ascii
pick one

>>4700438
You're trying too hard.

>>4700443
ascii is literally no graphics mode, its fucking console text

>>4697528
Thanks, doc

>>4700452
They're still very simple graphics. It's not really the point. What matters is gameplay.

>>4687215
>Odallus
This game any good? I try to keep an eye open for old school platformers coming out on Steam but I never heard a peep for this one. Did the old school look turn people off or is the gameplay just not that good?

>>4696992
Loved the look of this game. Feels like a super simple metroidvania with not a lot of branching paths, but I got burned out at the water section because of all the tedious repetition. Should probably get back to it at some point.

>>4696978
This is a pretty good GnG homage. Too bad I can't beat the second level. But then, I can't beat the second level in GnG either, so I guess the difficulty is pretty on-point there.

>>4694714
This was an okay game, but the lack of bosses and general samey-ness of the levels makes it a bit tedious to try to play through in one sitting.

I feel like this would be a fun game to try to speedrun though. Managing your health while making the choice between running through everything (costing health) and stopping to kill things (costing time) would make for an interesting speed meta. Also deathwarps, deathwarps everywhere.

>>4686465
>a genre that modern devs are too pussy to make anymore

This is really misleading, it's the publishers who don't want to fork out the cash that are the issue. Plenty of devs would like to make these games (and some indie devs stil dodo), but they don't sell large enough numbers to interest investors. Devs gotta eat dude.

As the modern gaming audience expanded to include more mainstream and casual players, it caused the super-hardcore players to become a smaller and smaller percentage of the total consumer base. There's just not enough of you to interest the big publishers.

>>4701624
>Devs gotta eat dude.

So do publishers. Smart marketing decisions is how they stay in business.

>>4701629
And how is pouring a lot of money into a niche product that will have small returns a smart marketing decision? I'm talking about large publishers here, the types that either go big or go home with their franchises and save the risks for weird low-budget spin-offs.

>>4701419
It's above average, not an amazing game or anything but if you're a fan of Demon Crest's approach to non-linear level design (which is something you don't see much of) then you should check it out.

>>4701647
>And how is pouring a lot of money into a niche product that will have small returns a smart marketing decision?

It's not. The smart decision is not to.

>>4701675
In terms of control scheme does it play more like a classicvania or the newer Castlevania games? Limited movement options or a lot of them?

>>4699872
Japs put out a lot of total trash that never gets translated, or released, or even mentioned in the west, see Comiket trailer compilations. Japs also avoid many styles and genres. I've played a lot of good doujin shmups, but I'm yet to play a single good doujin 3D platformer. Meanwhile you have Super Cloudbuilt and A Hat In Time coming from western developers.

>>4701701
Closer to newer, and you get more movement options as you progress in the game. It's also rather gear based, you'll have to keep an eye out for secrets or you'll have a bad time. If you want games with limited movement, Volgarr The Viking, Curse of Issyos and Maldita Castilla are good choices.

>>4689308
the series is okay, thats the best i'll give you

>>4701718
Thanks! I'll probably get it since it's currently on sale right now.

>>4696002
How about shut the fuck up if you dont know what you are talking about.

>>4701712
Comiket trash is comparable in price and quality and development scope to Game Jam and at best freeware newsground flash games and early access trash, not even commercial western indies.
Even the pricing reflects that. It usually just covers the costs of the disc/package/pittance paid to the event organizers.

doujinshi indies in Japan are lots more professional, they even try forming companies. New corp. which did Little Ralph Adventure. Tomo Sakai who got Sunsoft to publish his game, Gimmick. Compile-Maru recently by the Puyo Puyo creator broke and going solo. Then the best success story of them all, Gamefreaks which begun as a handwritten gaming magazine with some famicom games produced on the side.

If that's your best defense of western indies, that's just desperate.

>>4686465
Buster for the X68k (1995)
Its gimmick is no spamming attacks because limited stamina, and some of the later level design is cheap but fair.
(got remade for Windows with prettier graphics and no more limited linearvania physics)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT2gMwbkJao

>>4701903
Bringing up 80s and 90s games is disingenous as the market is completely different, many big western developers has very similar starts at the time, see John Romero going from releasing small games via disc magazines. The west produces huge numbers of trash though that's true but it's not much of a concern since quality titles are easy to find and as Ive already stated unique when compared to doujin

>>4701926
>Compile-Maru
>first game in 2017
If that's still not enough, then how about Korobon Studio, Rikki, Moppin (Downwell dev, now Nintendo employee) and for a recent successful western example, Christian Whitehead?
Also the bedroom euro developers who went on to pioneer AAA gaming you speak about, and the low-grade indies of today, if their pre-corporate output was compared, the latter still come out of it miserably inferior in work quality, artistic flair and ethos.

>>4701926
> is disingenous
>as the market is completely different
says the one comparing competition games released for cents or for free with western indies priced 40 bucks developed for years, to support his conclusion that doujins being prettier than western indies doesn't matter because it's a sea of shovelware (lol)

>>4701941
What of them? Talk about the games instead of the way their careers shaped up. For instance Downwell is essentially just a dumbed down Super House of Dead Ninjas and the guy's position at Nintendo doesn't change that one bit. And what, if you compared all modern indie devs to the early works of people who went on to be successful the indies will look terrible? What an insightful statement. Why don't we compare good western indies to the shareware garbage that was released in a magazine and isn't talked about, is that going to be favourable? And as I said, this is just an irrelevant rant, an abundance of shit games doesn't matter because good ones are incredibly easy to find.

>>4701945
>to support his conclusion that doujins being prettier than western indies doesn't matter because it's a sea of shovelware (lol)
Where did I say this exactly? Point me to it or atleast where you inferred this from. All I did was point out the basic fact that doujin devs release a lot of utter trash aswell, the rest you've pulled out of your ass.