I think there's only really two real sets of artwork - the EGA and VGA releases. Some (EGA running on CGA or Hercules, VGA running on EGA) dither down the artwork rather than there being extra artwork for there, and the other versions are largely derived from whichever of EGA and VGA was a better fit for the target platform. Still a meaningful amount of work (especially reducing the 256 colour VGA art to 32 colours for the Amiga port), but it's the kind of thing that happened in games porting in that era.
Earlier this year I studied a few of the Amiga portraits and yes, they reduced VGA to fit in 5 bitplanes (32 colors), but they actually don't even use all of the colors. I found them to be around 20-25, keeping _more than a few_ aside for, say, the GUI.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
I remember being impressed by all these editions even as a teen in the nineties. It's pretty uncommon, especially as a game with graphics on this level. What a nice site that goes in depth with the differences!
Ron Gilbert was such a hero for me, and I'm always amazed at what an incredible story-rich gaming experience you could squeeze onto 256 colours and four floppy disks.
Had the OG Amiga version and always wondered why it looked different on my friends PC. Back then I was a kid and thought it was the different CRT monitor and not 16 v 256 colors lol
Everytime I see CGA graphics in cyan, magenta, black and white it reminds me of my youth and how 'cold' it felt at the time to see those graphics, I could never really get used to it. When EGA/VGA graphics came it felt so warm and in my experience games really started to become to life.
The CGA palettes were designed with three main objectives: good contrast on composite and black and white displays, high contrast productivity UX, and simple ttl circuitry. There was a limit of 16 colours, but if you wanted to step up resolution you had to compromise by selecting fewer colors. A major compromise choice was resolution vs colours. High resolution cost you your magenta and yellow. Have a google for the mode 4 and mode 5 pallets and mathematically why they are the way they are, it’s super interesting if you’re in to retro tech.
In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.
Ditto. My first ibm compatible was CGA, and those pallets represent a really specific era in my memories. I actually jumped from CGA to VGA (DOS to Win3.1 as well!) and it was like somebody had switched on all the lights in a precisely dark room.
Hearing the Monkey Island theme played how it would have been on a high end sound card is crazy. PC speakers did their best but it was composed as a damn symphony.
Having grown up gaming on PC speaker I only knew the wavetable MIDI miracles from hearsay. Now any time I touch some DOSbox retro memory I'm nothing but disappointed becausr those MIDI tunes? They are just that, tinny voyages through the general MIDI instrument set where well made PC speaker programming can have awesome roughness.
I came to comment on the same... I grew up with CGA graphics for my first games, too. It was, in many ways, worse than no color at all. But the jarring visuals and the feeling of it will always stay with me.
I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).
I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.
There were two PC floppy versions - 16 colour and 256 colour. The 16 colour version had fallbacks for CGA and Hercules, the 256 colour version had a fallback for EGA. So the CGA screenshot is the 16 colour version running with CGA fallback, and this is also why there's a set of "256 colour EGA" shots. It's a little confusing, but it's correct.
A friend has a composite extra monitor for the CGA output and I was amazed to discover that it used composite to generate more color for supporting games.
On composite, the game can display more colors. I never knew at the time and was only aware of that a decade ago. ScummVM and DOSBox but knows how to render composite.
This while fully understandable, has one have to go back even further to what it felt like to actually be able to display any graphics at all and what that felt like ...
Lucky you that at least you had a CGA monitor. The were very expensive in my country. I used a Hercules monitor with SIMCGA; it was probably one of the first DOS programs I learned to run.
Sometimes I really wish i could back to this time of my life. Those adventure games had a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced so far. There are some good throw back games on steam, but somehow its different. Is it because I am older now? Would be interesting to be able to experience them from scratch with the mind of my present being.
Anyway, just on to of my mind:
- Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris
underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing.
Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
To add to your list, Machinarium is an absolute masterpiece. Beautiful hand drawn art, and some of the best puzzles in the genre (IMO). Anything from Amanita Design is worth playing, but it takes the cake.
And they announced the sequel just a few weeks ago!
My favourite Amanita games are the Samarost series. Something about the lack of dialogue, devious puzzles, quirky humour, and unique aesthetic combining sci-fi with a world of moss, wood, and weird junk.
Creaks was also excellent, albeit a very different vibe. I couldn't quite get into Phonopolis, although the art direction is stunning.
Going back isn't enough. What I wanted again was the feeling of seeing and playing those games for the first time. The awe. My kids were born in a world where color graphics and digital sound were everywhere so nothing is impressive to them.
I can very much recommend looking at games developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
You can see the learning throughout the years, with the Blackwell Chronicles being a bit linear, and some games in between being a bit of a miss.
But "Unavowed" or the new "Old Skies" are excellent games I consider on par with the old golden age. "Technobabylon", "Resonance" and "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" are also very far up.
That said, I tried playing it again recently and the puzzles do not hold up. Extremely frustrating and unsatisfying solutions.
I would not be opposed to a remaster of the game that also fixes some of the puzzles - similar to what the Cyan team (controversially) did with their Myst and Riven remakes.
The Nintendo DS stimulated a bit of a renaissance in point-and-click adventure games -- maybe because the touch screen lent itself so well to that style of gameplay.
The first Ace Attorney game is riveting from start to finish.
The Professor Layton games are all great.
I've read that Hotel Dusk and Last Window are both really good but haven't gotten around to playing them myself. I can vouch for Last Window's soundtrack, though, which is spectacular.
Grim Fandango is absolutely one of the best games of all time. Yes, some of the puzzles are very difficult. I had to read a walkthrough to figure out the cat race ticket number.
Beatiful, when comparing PC and Mac versions, I got the feeling that the Mac screenshot has the old Mac gamma 1.8 VS PC gamma 2.2 that Apple started to use not that long time ago...
I am very impressed how the 32-color Amiga version is close to the 256-color VGA version (and how much the Atari ST is lagging behind, more similar to the EGA version :)
The Amiga graphics chip had a palette of 4096 colors, you were just limited to 32 at the same time, or 64 with half bright tones, or more with chip/interrupt tricks. I doubt the latter was used on something like monkey island though.
IIRC with Amiga you had a large overall palette like 4096, and a limitation of 32 or 64 colors per scan line/row, but you could vary the colors per row from the overall palette
Was always jealous of friends with Amiga, the games always looked so much better than anything else at the time (helped by bigger tv's and scan lines no doubt).
100%. What Steve Purcell and Mark Ferrari achieved with those 16 colors is simply genius. The 256 color version added detail, but lost much of the boldness and elegance of the EGA version.
I played that version only much later (originally I had it on Amiga and then PC VGA), but the EGA version has indeed a unique charm of its own. It really feels like an alternative, equally good looking relase rather than a downgraded version of the VGA one, which makes sense as iirc it was developed and shipped first.
Some time ago I read a long recollection of Mark Ferrari on the origins of the graphics, but now I can't find it for the best of me. There's a very nice interview where it explains it a bit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4_3P2Oh14 , though.
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
The Lucasfilm Games artists did amazing work with limited color palettes. You can make the argument that the 16-color versions of Secret of Monkey Island and LOOM actually look better than the 256-color versions.
I replayed the series recently and I think the gameplay didn't age that well especially after you played some japanese puzzle games like Professor Layton
or Ace Attorney. It's not the difficulty of the puzzles but rather there is almost nothing intuitive about them and a lot of times they are detached from the story. The story, the writing, the humor, and the characters holds up of course but not the gameplay.
I love both game series, but Ace Attorney has multiple moments where you lose by presenting evidence too early or the "wrong" piece of evidence (even though it would also prove your case). The later games are better but even the Great Ace Attorney has instances of this.
Professor Layton almost all the way through includes trick puzzles which have non obvious answers as well.
Obviously the games aren't perfectly obvious and later games are much better, but they are generally much more obvious than something like King's Quest which was properly brutal. I remember needing occasional hints to manage monkey island but nothing like completing King's Quest where I had to constantly check the walkthrough.
I think this is a problem of many of those old click to play
adventures.
For instance, I found Leisure Suit Larry I in many ways better,
from the gameplay, than "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!".
Now, the latter made much more use of the mouse, so it was easier
and simpler for most players; but I found LSL 1 just so convenient
and quite fast to play, if you could handle the keyboard well. It
was of course nowhere near as convenient as clickety-click via the
mouse, but I had that impression several times with games. SimCity
1 was IMO much nicer to play than later simcities; same impression
I had with civilization, the actual gameplay got progressively more
annoying, slower and laggier.
123 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] threadTechnically not all. The anniversary re-release is missing.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
If you find a game that has a natural Hercules mode they often kicked serious ass, being at resolutions not achieved until VGA.
This post did well.
Guess the right people were awake to upvote it
https://github.com/runvnc/tvclaude
though, "The Eternal Castle Remastered" (2019) used the same palette, and it was pretty good.
In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
https://youtu.be/a324ykKV-7Y?is=Dn0qcERhEasBjloQ
Possibly not the best example but I do feel like Alley Cat looked great in CGA: https://i.ibb.co/wNDvgzQ8/alleycat.gif
I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).
I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.
Anyway, just on to of my mind: - Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing. Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
My favourite Amanita games are the Samarost series. Something about the lack of dialogue, devious puzzles, quirky humour, and unique aesthetic combining sci-fi with a world of moss, wood, and weird junk.
Creaks was also excellent, albeit a very different vibe. I couldn't quite get into Phonopolis, although the art direction is stunning.
It was Venice underground, The Last Crusade (Indy3.exe)
> Simon the Sorcerer
That's not common to hear, thanks for the throwback ;)
Going back isn't enough. What I wanted again was the feeling of seeing and playing those games for the first time. The awe. My kids were born in a world where color graphics and digital sound were everywhere so nothing is impressive to them.
You can see the learning throughout the years, with the Blackwell Chronicles being a bit linear, and some games in between being a bit of a miss.
But "Unavowed" or the new "Old Skies" are excellent games I consider on par with the old golden age. "Technobabylon", "Resonance" and "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" are also very far up.
https://www.scummvm.org/games/
Thanks for reminding me about Beneath a Steel Sky. Still need to play that one :)
And Grim Fandango if you hadn't played it.
That said, I tried playing it again recently and the puzzles do not hold up. Extremely frustrating and unsatisfying solutions.
I would not be opposed to a remaster of the game that also fixes some of the puzzles - similar to what the Cyan team (controversially) did with their Myst and Riven remakes.
The first Ace Attorney game is riveting from start to finish.
The Professor Layton games are all great.
I've read that Hotel Dusk and Last Window are both really good but haven't gotten around to playing them myself. I can vouch for Last Window's soundtrack, though, which is spectacular.
Once with Machinarium, and again with A Short Hike
Some time ago I read a long recollection of Mark Ferrari on the origins of the graphics, but now I can't find it for the best of me. There's a very nice interview where it explains it a bit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4_3P2Oh14 , though.
a long explanation or interview by Mark
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
Professor Layton almost all the way through includes trick puzzles which have non obvious answers as well.
Obviously the games aren't perfectly obvious and later games are much better, but they are generally much more obvious than something like King's Quest which was properly brutal. I remember needing occasional hints to manage monkey island but nothing like completing King's Quest where I had to constantly check the walkthrough.
For instance, I found Leisure Suit Larry I in many ways better, from the gameplay, than "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!". Now, the latter made much more use of the mouse, so it was easier and simpler for most players; but I found LSL 1 just so convenient and quite fast to play, if you could handle the keyboard well. It was of course nowhere near as convenient as clickety-click via the mouse, but I had that impression several times with games. SimCity 1 was IMO much nicer to play than later simcities; same impression I had with civilization, the actual gameplay got progressively more annoying, slower and laggier.