Comment by seabombs

Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.

This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.

https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

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Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.

When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.

As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.

There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing minigame.

I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.

Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.

Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.

Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.

It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.

I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.

I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.

Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.

(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)

Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.

That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.

Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.

Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.

Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.

You have no idea on how charming these games look.