Sir_Kill_A_Lot: Another aspect is that a skilled pixel-artist can create more backgrounds etc. for a game in the same time than a skilled artist can create HD backgrounds.
And proper pixel-art even often looks more detailed and realistic because the brain fills out all the stuff between those dirty pixels vs. HD art where details are either there (more work) or not (less work).
Well that all really depends on artist's experience and what the creative process is like.
You can take any digital photograph and put it through a complex, but still relatively fast series of modifications and after you have reduced the palette and resolution, you have pixelart. Then again if you do the opposite extreme alternative and compose the image by hand pixel by pixel, it is going to take ages.
I would argue that for cartoon style graphics creating it in HD is actually faster, as you can take a Wacom tablet and start creating. In low resolution/pixelarts you actually end up with very strange looking creations if you try to do it like that.
I even have some experience in this, as I once scanned a company logo to a very low resolution handheld screen. After scanning you had to manually move pixels around to make it look right. (It didn't exactly help that the device didn't have square pixels, but ones where Y was bigger than X for each pixel...)
PixelBoy: Monkey Island remakes were generally disliked (and for a good reason). Gabriel Knight remake was not convincing either. Double Fine remakes like DOTT turn the old arts which was hand-crafted to perfection to look like any random Flash game, even if it's quite fateful to the material otherwise.
Sir_Kill_A_Lot: I might add that there are also important improvements worth mentioning, first and foremost the ability to actually buy this games again (and secondly that most of them have classic mode included...).
Also being able to play MI1 and MI2 with those now known voices was nice.
You don't need a remake to sell an old game. You only need game files and ScummVM.
Ironically enough, if you want to have the original MI1 graphics with voiceovers, you still need ScummVM (or DosBox) and Ultimate Edition fan patch, as that feature was not in the remake version.
Sir_Kill_A_Lot: Regarding Ron Gilbert: He didn't really like those and decided against close-ups in TWP for this exact reason!
AlienMind: Oh my god, the immersion! LOL.
Well, I don't believe in the theory that in 1990 people actually liked the low resolution (as it was a hardware limitation) and is only used nowadays by famous people running kickstarters. Much as most people with consoles back then did not like the fact that (also due to hardware limitations) most games they could play were platformers (yet most indie games coming out sell it as some kind of "good thing from the past"). Discussion is kinda pointless without actually asking a sample group. I'm outta here.
Uuuhhmm... in 1990 consoles sure had enough power to have all kinds of genres, so if there were only platformers, it was either lack of creativity or a marketing choice made by game companies.
Of course with consoles part of the problem is that very few games get western release. There are plenty of games, for instance visual novels, which existed in 1990, but not outside Japan.
But anyway back to resolution, no one really complained about resolution in 1990, at least not to the point of not playing the games. So if games were playable in whatever resolution back then, they should be playable even now.
Arguing otherwise is like saying it's impossible to watch TV series from the last century, because they weren't HD or widescreen.
And I don't know what kind of "sample group" you really need. Isn't the success of several Kickstarters (Thimbleweed Park included) a definitive proof that indeed there are people who like older style graphics?
AlienMind: Yes, but the point is, would you like SVGA (640x480) more than VGA (320x200 like here) ? Or even.. fuck it.. 1920x1080? Again, would be interesting with a sample group back from the day.
Lower is better, because out of my five computers only one supports 1920x1080. All of them support 320x200 - and the other five ancient computers that I haven't booted up in years support that as well.
AlienMind: Oh, and I just remembered, here comes the good stuff:
The moar you know:
VGA CRTs back in 1990 had a much lower inch amount (about 14") than what we have now, so each pixel was about 1/3 SMALLER than you will see it today in your favorite DOSbox emulator. Even then back then we mostly had people who very much CRAVED more pixels (one of my friends coined the phrase "pixel fight" in e.g. Duke3D). So people coming at me today and tell me they like big fugly pixels.. let's say it like that:
I have no idea what you're trying to say there.
What size the pixels are in DosBox or ScummVM depends on many factors, such as your screen resolution, the physical size of your display, whether you run games full screen or windowed or whether you use some scalers. Oh, and then there's aspect ratio correction too.
I never run DosBox full screen, so I assume whatever your point is gets lost right there.
AlienMind: Spock raises an eyebrow.
How funny you should refer to an antiquated TV show which is not widescreen, stereo, doesn't have any CGI, and many of the set items are literally dug out of garbage.
It makes a very convincing argument for the latest technology.
Or are you perhaps refering to the better, improved Zachary Quinto version?
