I used to think pixel graphics looked great, using the right setup they can look great still in 2022.
When I was a kid; before the days of the internet there wasn’t much for a computer nerd/geek apart from play video games, learn coding and maybe a few creative things.
I do however remember seeing how colourful and impressive the graphics were of my trusty Amiga 500, even if it was running off of a 15″ portable television that I got from my grandparents.
The future was going to be bright in terms of processing and graphics power, we now have multithreading, decent memory management, parallel graphics processing and all the other bells and whistles that the 21st century has given us. (and that’s just on my mobile phone.)
Recently Ron Gilbert announced that his ‘canonical’ version of Monkey Island 3 was in development/production and it’s stirred discussions about it’s graphics style, which I must say I really like. Though some have asked why not have the game done in the pixel art style of the first two in the series, personally I’m not bothered either way. I like pixel art, especially pixel art that handles the limitations of a restricted palette to create some amazing graphics, it does however suffer from it’s limitations in the way it’s displayed now, I think in two major ways.
Firstly, scanlines. They break up the blocky-ness of the image to give more of a flow to the image, and Secondly what I consider more important is the bloom/glow that you got with classic CRT’s.
I’ve included a few screen-grabs from WinUAE – the amiga emulator, the before image without any filters, and the after image with a filter called crt-easyglow-hl.
a zip file of all the winuae filters/shaders i’ve obtained over the years
