Lots to dig in to here — thanks for posting. Internet Archive says the site has been around since ~2010, which is a likely indicator that its current iteration is handmade :)
The best adventure games are 2D because random walks there always return (Pólya). Not true in 3D, so puzzle games there end up either too easy or too difficult.
I would like to throw in one 3D example, which I found to be excellently executed: Metroid Prime (1) on GameCube.
Looks beautiful, beautiful soundtrack, very much has you puzzled when solving the puzzles for the first time, tons of secrets, and maybe we can call it an adventure.
I like how so much of this is interactable and has so many game like properties. Makes exploring the website and all the information actually enjoyable and intriguing.
It had a charm the full game was missing. It reminded me of a puppet show and how large something so low fidelity can feel when filled out by imagination.
I think it was more the folks involved. Real story tellers and weirdos with great taste and somehow supported by organizations that got finished titles published.
Wasn’t there a dive on Freddy Pharkus up on FP recently?
These kind of folks still exist and still create. There is a lot more noise to sort through these days.
soulfulness has nothing to do with 2D or 3D, but more to do with mass market commercialization of games, where the creative vision is not from an individual artist (or very small number of them), but via design by committee, and various managerial interference for profitability and market appeal.
That's why you will find the modern AAA games (which is of course 3D) very soulless. However, the same soul still remains in indie games.
I’d have agreed until the indie gamedev scene adopted the retro/PSX aesthetic in earnest and, for me, it has become an indicator of soulfulness. It’s not nostalgia at all, it feels to me like going back to an era when AAA high-fidelity open world by-the-numbers games wasn’t even in the cards. It’s people making a game aware of their limitations, which is what people did in the 2D era of slow CPUs and doing the most with what you have.
This aesthetic will keep trucking on in the AI era of slop, which will eat pixel art, will eat vector art, will try to eat high-res 3D art (and fail miserably), while only indies will care about the PSX/PS2 aesthetic with its fake dithering and 960x540 viewport size.
I'm not sure what "soulful" actually means in this case, it sounds like a vague / handwavy term. Art direction? Style? Feel? Atmosphere? I'd like to refute the claim by posting some of my favorite (3d) games but without understanding I can't lol
2D necessarily aimed towards design (like illustration). Results were proportionate to talent.
3D (up to when I could be attentive) was immensely ugly, unartistic, if you take "2D as design" as a parameter. Flat (paradoxically), random - you take a screenshot and typically find the opposite of aesthetic pleasure. The instrument is not immediately fit for artistic purpose.
-- That more control can be imposed to painted flat material is hardly controvertible.
-- That the results prove that triangles defined objects are tools that require much higher mastery - well, if you cannot see it for yourself, suppose a panel of art critics will be there.
> I'd like to refute the claim by posting some of my favorite (3d) games but without understanding I can't
It doesn’t make sense to want to refute an argument you don’t understand. If you don’t know what the argument means, you don’t know if you agree or not.
Seems like you’re assuming (probably correctly) that “soulful” means something positive in some specific axis and your immediate reaction is that no, the thing you like must be better in every way. That response is already tainted with bias.
They're saying they have an estimation of the meaning and a response to it, but need to confirm their estimation before they continue. That's what you're supposed to do.
Tiny Life is an homage cover of The Sims, played in the key of The Sims 0 -- Little Computer People, 1985, one person and his dog living on one floppy disk. It has in soul what it lacks in resolution, and soul was always the hard part.
My kids mostly play Roblox, Rocket League, Fortnite and ~FIFA~ EA whatever-it’s-called-now. But they do enjoy stuff like 2D fighters and 2D mobile/tablet games too.
Ive found it’s been less about 2D vs 3D and more about content that matches their interests.
Kids love games regardless of depth. It's definitely about what they find interesting and what the reward structure is. My kids don't understand Factorio and that's okay with me, but the do love fiddling around with the old Pokemon GBA games.
I guess if you were born in 1980, your teenage years start with Doom - which was a relief from being trapped in a world of disappointing parallax effects - and end with Silent Hill, and Alpha Centauri, which used awkward homespun voxels to make its low res 3D sprites because it still wasn't something you could just pick off the shelf and stuff into your game. In 1999 there was a mixture of games going 3D when they shouldn't (Earthworm Jim 3D, Prince of Persia 3D) and indie developers still being frustrated because they couldn't.
> biased with older generation that [has] grown up with
It is a matter of aesthetics. So it is possible that the gap is not about nostalgia, but about artistic exposure.
I could give you an example of a suggestion that there has been a flood of degradation: I was exposed to a television recently tuned to a videomusic channel: the limited samples I glimpsed were about "young and fit", as if the collective visual show converged to heavily "body oriented", in a heavily basic manner. When "commercial to the median" floods the spread imagery and artistic awareness is on the contrary not encouraged, you can get - and I have witnessed them - people nodding at the ugliest things.
Capcom's departure from 2D always saddens me, they mastered sprite art and now it feels like a lost technology. There's a whole bunch of indie games keeping 2D alive and yet none seem to ever match the fluidity of Capcom's 2D, e.g. their fighting games, Breath of Fire, Zelda Minish Cap, etc.
I wish those techniques were passed down a lot more.
The first five Pokemon generations had fantastic pixel art. Each generation had its own distinct style and felt like a solid step up from the last.
The fifth generation (Pokemon Black/White) was unique in the sense that it was the first generation that used the same hardware (the Nintendo DS) as the previous generation, so they had a chance to get more experimental by using a pseudo-3D overworld and fully animated sprites during battle to help differentiate those games from Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.
After that, they attempted to make the transition to full 3D for the 3DS era, which is where the series really fell off a cliff. Each new generation feels less like a new world full of distinct handcrafted sprites and more like a poorly-shaded mess of recycled 3D assets that somehow struggles to maintain its intended frame rate.
I feel the same way. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike was so good. The Mega Man X games for the original PlayStation were the peak for me, I'm reverse engineering them to figure out how they work.
SNK fighting games are incredible as well. Mark of the Wolves and Last Blade 2 have some incredible art and animation. Always makes me sad when I remember nobody really plays these things anymore.
This style just ages well, doesn't it? I still play Zelda: Link to the Past every few years but I can't play Ocarina of Time even though it's probably the better game. That early 3D with the fogging and pop-in and muddy textures just doesn't hold up, but pixel art is timeless.
Yes. I stopped playing video games when 3d happened ( mid to end of the 90s) because most games were either uninteresting (3d for the sake of 3d), or plain ugly.
I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .
There are timeless early 3d games too. Metal Gear Solid or FFVII are popular examples, but there are also: Thief, Morrowind, Deus Ex, American McGee's Alice, and many more.
Then again, it is indeed a much different aesthetic than pixel art.
That's fair. I haven't played Metal Gear Solid for a long time but I did replay Deus Ex a few years ago and it still holds up. The low resolution is a bit of a problem but it's not a barrier.
Early 3D on the PC was better than on the N64, though. The low draw distance and blanketing everything with fog was pretty horrendous in a lot of games.
I've noticed that stock mesh/texture Deus Ex has staying-power partly because everything is visually cohesive. Most objects have similar levels of detail and follow similar implicit rules for how they are (or aren't) complex.
This is, unfortunately, easy to ruin that with partial mods, breaking your immersion when two objects from different universes are in the same room.
Ff7 is an interesting example : I’ve never understood the appeal of the original game which I’ve always found to be truly hideous, including when it came out. It looks like chunky pixel soup - I’d rather have 2D pixel art which looks clean.
Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.
Yeah, I’d agree, I definitely wouldn’t classify FF7 as graphically timeless.
I think most people would agree that early 3D games (PSX and N64 era) - particularly ones attempting to achieve texture-mapped photorealism, like FF7, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider etc. did not age gracefully, at least where graphics are concerned.
Contrast that with something like Mario 64, which, while still chonky, looks way better because it’s so highly stylized.
But for whatever reason, here in HN you see a lot of people that don't play games but feel the need to give their opinion on the gaming industry, criticize modern gaming, and ramble on how old games where better. I find it really weird...
No, as the previous poster said, this is my lived experience, and I play games these days. I’m neither criticizing modern gaming nor rambling on how old games were better. If anything I have a very solid gaming culture, having spent a great amount of time trying out things.
What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.
Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.
I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.
While I certainly played several shooters (DOOM, Quake, CS) a bit, but not with any passion.
But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).
Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.
In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.
I remember TA very distinctly - my brother was very good at it, I’ve always been hopeless at RTS games.
You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.
Perhaps it's more of an acquired taste, but there are definitely modern games that intentionally try to replicate that old style of 3D graphics. There are even things like animations on YouTube that aim for it as a stylistic choice.
I'm guessing young folk have more nostalgia for this type of thing
In the vein of "intentionally old 3D graphics" it's not quite the same thing but I'm reminded me of the old indie horror game movement where a lot of them were pixelated, low color depth, and low fog distance because those things help the scariness.
This is interesting because Zelda: Link to the Past, despite being a great SNES game, came out quite early in the SNES lifecycle and has quite basic pixel art compared to most top-down SNES JRPGs which came out later. Some of the prettiest being Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean.
I agree that the early 3D games (PS1/N64) have not aged well graphically.
It's more of a generation thing. Early 2D games had atrocious graphics as well, both due to technical limitations and the inexperience of game designers. You could probably say much the same of text-based games. (At least on personal computers, it was true.)
2D might never die but modern 3D can be a compelling workflow for producing this kind of content.
The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.
Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
Vampire Survivors took its sprites from free asset packs. There was controversy over it, allegations that the sprites were ripped from Castlevania games, but ultimately they denied it all, I think.
Seems to have been smoothed out though. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is arguably the best the game has to offer, and apparently with Konami's blessing. "Beating" the level is truly a joy.
> It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D
Some do. The talking heads in Fallout were sculptures, for example (I think from paper, but cannot remember well).
But drawing vs rendering from 3D models can be either an aesthetic choice (Braid is an example) or an optimal choice depending on your workflow, expertise, equipment etc.
And in the current times, also Generative NNs I think were proven a possibility to generate animation.
You cannot produce "this kind of content" without a lot of manual work. Think a character that has like 3 pixels per eye, and one for each pupil, and that one pixel moves 5 times during the dialogue animation, at exactly the right moment so you know what it expresses. You don't get that by averaging high-res 3D content. Now someone can see this as a challenge and make something that will fool some people, for some time, of course. There is so much pixel art to steal for that purpose, after all. Just like you could do with the masters, who expressed a whole lot with a few scribbles or strokes of a brush... but even trying that means not getting it, at all, and someone who doesn't get it will not produce anything worth looking at, ever. It's like hearing sex exists and figuring out ways to realistically stain your sheets so your friends think you had some. Why even, ever.
So then you optimize your workflow, but at what cost?
I find it much more painful to put in any amount of time into something that isn't what I intended. Of all the places to insist on efficiency, this is probably the most unreasonable.
2D physics is an evening project for a week or two. 3D physics is an exercise in smashing your head against a wall, and is basically no fun whatsoever (I’ve written a 2D and 3d physics engine and shipped games as a physics programmer)
I like to think that this is why Havok was such a big thing when it came out and was integrated into (3d) video games, there was a whole slew of games coming out then that incorporated it into gameplay and it was a novel experience. Physics based puzzles and weapons in Half-Life 2 was probably the biggest example of the time.
I'd be inclined to agree. It's very hard to design a physics based video game to be fun IME - puzzles and sandboxes are the only two places I've seen it effective. I'd love to see more examples!
There is also a 2.5D paradigm. I made a small demo of a 2.5D where I generated pure 2D pixelart sprites and embedded them in a Blender+Unity 3D level. Personally I find this mix very exciting.
102 comments
[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadWith an infinite expected return time...
Looks beautiful, beautiful soundtrack, very much has you puzzled when solving the puzzles for the first time, tons of secrets, and maybe we can call it an adventure.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780526 for example: it is a DIY, and there is a demo of playing Doom in apparent 3D.
Another system in which matching interactive design and art could be difficult - but surely not impossible, and, on the contrary, a good challenge.
https://cardgallery.tales-tra.com/cards_blue.htm
https://www.deviantart.com/abysswolf/gallery
Literally hundreds of characters. Between this guy and TFA, I feel spoiled.
https://xvibit.itch.io/xvibit
It had a charm the full game was missing. It reminded me of a puppet show and how large something so low fidelity can feel when filled out by imagination.
Wasn’t there a dive on Freddy Pharkus up on FP recently?
These kind of folks still exist and still create. There is a lot more noise to sort through these days.
That's why you will find the modern AAA games (which is of course 3D) very soulless. However, the same soul still remains in indie games.
This aesthetic will keep trucking on in the AI era of slop, which will eat pixel art, will eat vector art, will try to eat high-res 3D art (and fail miserably), while only indies will care about the PSX/PS2 aesthetic with its fake dithering and 960x540 viewport size.
3D (up to when I could be attentive) was immensely ugly, unartistic, if you take "2D as design" as a parameter. Flat (paradoxically), random - you take a screenshot and typically find the opposite of aesthetic pleasure. The instrument is not immediately fit for artistic purpose.
-- That more control can be imposed to painted flat material is hardly controvertible.
-- That the results prove that triangles defined objects are tools that require much higher mastery - well, if you cannot see it for yourself, suppose a panel of art critics will be there.
It doesn’t make sense to want to refute an argument you don’t understand. If you don’t know what the argument means, you don’t know if you agree or not.
Seems like you’re assuming (probably correctly) that “soulful” means something positive in some specific axis and your immediate reaction is that no, the thing you like must be better in every way. That response is already tainted with bias.
https://tinylifegame.com/
Likewise, there are plenty of amazing games nowadays, but the ragebait culture makes us focus on the bad ones.
are we sure that its not biased with older generation that grown up with such tech and have more nostalgic feeling in their hearth ?????
no bias comment here
Go look at the 2d-hd games that Square Enix is putting out
My kids mostly play Roblox, Rocket League, Fortnite and ~FIFA~ EA whatever-it’s-called-now. But they do enjoy stuff like 2D fighters and 2D mobile/tablet games too.
Ive found it’s been less about 2D vs 3D and more about content that matches their interests.
It is a matter of aesthetics. So it is possible that the gap is not about nostalgia, but about artistic exposure.
I could give you an example of a suggestion that there has been a flood of degradation: I was exposed to a television recently tuned to a videomusic channel: the limited samples I glimpsed were about "young and fit", as if the collective visual show converged to heavily "body oriented", in a heavily basic manner. When "commercial to the median" floods the spread imagery and artistic awareness is on the contrary not encouraged, you can get - and I have witnessed them - people nodding at the ugliest things.
I wish those techniques were passed down a lot more.
The first five Pokemon generations had fantastic pixel art. Each generation had its own distinct style and felt like a solid step up from the last.
The fifth generation (Pokemon Black/White) was unique in the sense that it was the first generation that used the same hardware (the Nintendo DS) as the previous generation, so they had a chance to get more experimental by using a pseudo-3D overworld and fully animated sprites during battle to help differentiate those games from Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.
After that, they attempted to make the transition to full 3D for the 3DS era, which is where the series really fell off a cliff. Each new generation feels less like a new world full of distinct handcrafted sprites and more like a poorly-shaded mess of recycled 3D assets that somehow struggles to maintain its intended frame rate.
When I first heard people complain I shrugged it off because people always complain. But having seen it myself...
So many easy to fix basic mistakes. Such poor craftsmanship. I would have never shipped something looking like that.
SNK fighting games are incredible as well. Mark of the Wolves and Last Blade 2 have some incredible art and animation. Always makes me sad when I remember nobody really plays these things anymore.
I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .
Then again, it is indeed a much different aesthetic than pixel art.
Early 3D on the PC was better than on the N64, though. The low draw distance and blanketing everything with fog was pretty horrendous in a lot of games.
Also it enhances the places with more furniture, trees, objects and new areas. OFC there are new weapons and upgrades too.
This is, unfortunately, easy to ruin that with partial mods, breaking your immersion when two objects from different universes are in the same room.
Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.
I think most people would agree that early 3D games (PSX and N64 era) - particularly ones attempting to achieve texture-mapped photorealism, like FF7, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider etc. did not age gracefully, at least where graphics are concerned.
Contrast that with something like Mario 64, which, while still chonky, looks way better because it’s so highly stylized.
What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.
Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.
I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.
But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).
Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.
In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.
You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.
I'm guessing young folk have more nostalgia for this type of thing
I agree that the early 3D games (PS1/N64) have not aged well graphically.
https://github.com/GhostlyDark/OoT-Reloaded
(big fan here)
The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.
Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
Some do. The talking heads in Fallout were sculptures, for example (I think from paper, but cannot remember well).
But drawing vs rendering from 3D models can be either an aesthetic choice (Braid is an example) or an optimal choice depending on your workflow, expertise, equipment etc.
And in the current times, also Generative NNs I think were proven a possibility to generate animation.
> in the current games economy
Indie vs mainstream have different constraints.
bro doesn't know Metal Slug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTfaTLkt3Y8
I find it much more painful to put in any amount of time into something that isn't what I intended. Of all the places to insist on efficiency, this is probably the most unreasonable.
(Just suggesting.)
Demo: https://acatovic.github.io/afterlight-play/ Tool I used to create 2D sprites: https://github.com/acatovic/ai-game-studio