[AdmiralRalwood]

Hyper Light Drifter (Steam, GOG, Kickstarter, official website), a game that was kickstarted back in 2013 (to the tune of $645,014, over 2300% of its ask of $27,000), has finally released (well, actually, it released yesterday, but I was too busy playing it to make a post about it).

All I really have to say about this game is that it is absolutely gorgeous; the kind of amazing pixel art that compares (favourably) with the likes of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, except instead of being in a point&click/touchscreen audiovisual adventure, it's in a punishingly difficult top-down action-adventure RPG that combines reflexes with quick tactical thinking in a mix of swordsmanship, gunplay, and constant dashing to try to avoid taking damage that you can't really afford.

If you didn't already get in it through the kickstarter campaign, you should take a serious look at it.

[Dragon]

Could've looked nice if it wasn't so pixellated.

Really, no "pixel art" game that I've seen has so far even managed to come near the quality of actual games from the era. Maybe because developers at the time were doing their darndest to avoid looking pixellated. It was considered a bad thing then, and rightly so.

[The E]

Could've looked nice if it wasn't so pixellated.

Really, no "pixel art" game that I've seen has so far even managed to come near the quality of actual games from the era. Maybe because developers at the time were doing their darndest to avoid looking pixellated. It was considered a bad thing then, and rightly so.

 

Another major difference is display technology: Pixel art on an analog CRT looks massively different to pixel art on a digital flatscreen. Old pixel art can actually look absolutely hideous on modern displays, as this video demonstrates:

On the topic of Hyper Light Drifter: It's a completely sweet game.

[Mikes]

Could've looked nice if it wasn't so pixellated.

Really, no "pixel art" game that I've seen has so far even managed to come near the quality of actual games from the era. Maybe because developers at the time were doing their darndest to avoid looking pixellated. It was considered a bad thing then, and rightly so.

Axiom Verge ... was simply amazing. No if no but. I would have agreed with you before I had played that, can't agree anymore now though. ;-)

[zookeeper]

Really, no "pixel art" game that I've seen has so far even managed to come near the quality of actual games from the era. Maybe because developers at the time were doing their darndest to avoid looking pixellated. It was considered a bad thing then, and rightly so.

 

Well, if you dislike the intentionally pixelated style then I guess there's not terribly many games since the golden days which rival or surpass the classics in art, but fortunately it seems that that won't be true for long, when we see the release of the likes of Owlboy, Tower 57, Timespinner and Heart Forth, Alicia.

Another major difference is display technology: Pixel art on an analog CRT looks massively different to pixel art on a digital flatscreen. Old pixel art can actually look absolutely hideous on modern displays, as this video demonstrates:

To be fair, that seems specific to games where the art and palettes were tailored to that kind of specific hardware. There's no intrinsic difference in how "pixel art" in general looks like on a CRT or LCD or whatever, and it's not like a modern display is incapable of displaying everything that an archaic display could (especially when you have more physical pixels to utilize, since no one runs a 320x200 game in an actual 320x200 window on their HD display). I guess someone might prefer the blurry look of an analog TV to a sharp LCD, but even so one could just as well argue that the latter still displays the art more correctly and as it was intended.

Mostly when people talk about pixel art as an art style they don't talk about games that are that old and almost universally seemed to have really hideous art anyway, but more about the later console era, which is more or less agnostic to the display technology.

[The E]

To be fair, that seems specific to games where the art and palettes were tailored to that kind of specific hardware. There's no intrinsic difference in how "pixel art" in general looks like on a CRT or LCD or whatever, and it's not like a modern display is incapable of displaying everything that an archaic display could (especially when you have more physical pixels to utilize, since no one runs a 320x200 game in an actual 320x200 window on their HD display). I guess someone might prefer the blurry look of an analog TV to a sharp LCD, but even so one could just as well argue that the latter still displays the art more correctly and as it was intended.

That's actually not correct! If you look at when and how pixel art was made, you'll see that this was all art made to look good on NTSC or PAL screens, taking into account the particular physical properties those displays had.

Timothy Lottes has a couple very interesting comparisons on his blog:
http://timothylottes.blogspot.de/2015/07/crt-shadow-masks-vs-lcd.html
http://timothylottes.blogspot.de/2015/09/tonemapping-slot-mask-simulation.html

There were a couple very good illustrations of the effect in that last article, but apparently the image links are dead now.
The point here is that using a CRT actually makes a huge difference for pixel art, and how it looks; the really good artists of the 16-bit era used the inaccuracies inherent in the analog tech to enhance their artwork immensely.

Further reading:
http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-how-to-add-crt-filters-to-16-bit-games-on-pc/
http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/660

[Dragon]

Yeah, most of the 16-bit classics that pixel art games try to emulate are console games, which could take advantage of CRT screens of the TV sets they were used with. CRTs also tend to somewhat smooth out the pixels themselves, meaning that their low resolution was not as apparent as it is on modern hi-res LCDs. Combined with the fact displays (even TVs) of that era weren't particularly big, a 320x200 CGA game could be made to look surprisingly decent (and even on a large screen, they'd be more blurry than pixellated). This is not the case anymore, though. What is baffling is that modern pixel art games usually look like they're trying to "recreate" the stretched, pixellated look of a 16-bit game on an LCD screen, as opposed to how they were actually intended to look.