Amoni-The-Sabertooth

Nat& Spectrum System - θ∆

@Amoni-The-Sabertooth

Farewell Cohost! :(

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Genderfluid || LGBTTQQIAAP+ Ally || Bi/Pan || Poly || Feminist || PLURAL AF || Actually Creetur Shaped ΘΔ& || Table-top and gaming nerd || 3D Enviro/Asset Modeler and Surfacing Artist || Frequent Writer and Lover of Prose Poetry || May be Skunk Brained || BEWARE my content can be NSFW. 18+ 🔞 || Twitter Migrant

RIP Dogbomb
1963 - 2019

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Amoni-The-Sabertooth
@Amoni-The-Sabertooth
SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets
QuestForTori
@QuestForTori

People often don’t believe me when I say there was a huge pushback in America against 2D games in the 5th and 6th console gen

But looking back at old magazines, gaming TV shows, and message boards of the era, the sentiment was extremely common. A lot of the gaming community was so gassed up about the leap to 3D that they viewed 2D games as obsolete as black-and-white movies. When official publications reviewed 2D games that they had to push positively, they seemed ashamed or in denial about the game being 2D, and tried to talk up its other graphical features (Okay I’m talking about Nintendo Power specifically in this case).

This sentiment didn’t really begin to die until the late-00s retro boom and the simultaneous dawn of console indie games. A whole decade of people losing their shit if they saw sprites, lol

SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

proof that gamers have been getting upset that games not made specifically for them exist for almost three decades (and let's be real, probably more)

also proof that you should never listen to anything a gamer says

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in reply to @QuestForTori's post:

DogLadyHeather
@DogLadyHeather

this was prevalent in the industry too. Capcom had to threaten Sony into letting megaman 8/X titles release on the PS1 by potentially withholding resident evil 2, which is insane to think of. you can thank the marketing push for really instilling this mindset, 3D was seemingly the only point of their hardware, yknow, to "showcase the power of playstation."

a recent favourite was an IGN review criticizing SOTN's graphics for looking too SNESlike and flat. SOTN! flat! what a time to be alive.

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Ludovico-ltd
@Ludovico-ltd

I started reading PC gaming magazines in the early 00s and i can't remember how many times in that 2001-2004 era i saw reviews criticize a game for having sprite art because it wasn't 3d graphics. They gave a sports management game, who are mostly made up of spreadsheets, shit for not being 3d at least once i remember. Sometimes they even docked points for pre-rendered backgrounds no matter how pretty they where.

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ja2ke
@ja2ke

I remember it feeling like an absolute crazy breath of fresh air when I got Alien Hominid for the GameCube. I had nothing else on the system like it. Even stuff like Viewtiful Joe that mechanically presented as 2D and highly stylized were still clearly 3D visually.

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Codarobo
@Codarobo

oh i fucking remember. and i mean, being a kid at that time, I was absolutely excited about 3D too. it makes some amount of sense that the business strategy for many companies oriented around figuring out 3D first and putting all their resources into it... but on the other hand, we could have had SO much cool shit if 3D just.. didn't show up for another 5 or 10 years

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Codarobo
@Codarobo

Also I feel like the N64 was one of the worst offenders here, because more than even the playstation I feel like it was "the 3D console". Both because the technology of the console was very oriented around 3D, moreso than the playstation or saturn I feel like, and because sprites looked like ass with the blurry texture filtering that gets applied to everything, and also the small amount of space most games even had to store textures in the first place

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sleeps-darkly
@sleeps-darkly

honestly it's kinda interesting that some of the best 2d games of that generation were released on Playstation too

like, it's notable how SotN for Saturn, a system that was set up for 2d, was much worse than SotN for PS1.

megaman, oddworld, lomax? (idk, people don't like it, but it was one of the games i played a lot), metal slug, legend of mana, breath of fire 4 (tricky, it's kinda mix of 2d and 3d, but counts i guess), alundra, lunar, final fantasy tactics, valkyrie profile...

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Codarobo
@Codarobo

Wrt sotn i figure that might just be that capcom was way more interested in the Playstation (for good reason) and just put more effort into the ps version but that is absolutely me speculating.

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Modren
@Modren

iirc the game also used a resolution mode that the Saturn didn't support, so all the sprites and tiles were pre-stretched. There's other issues besides that, but that's a big one right off the jump.

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dog
@dog

SotN for Saturn was sent to a different team to port, instead of being done by the team that originally developed it, which I bet is a big part of why it turned out like it did.

Lunar's lead platform was Saturn, fwiw! That version only came out in Japan, but it had some extra graphical effects that got toned back on PS1. Same deal with Metal Slug. That said that PS1 exclusive port of Metal Slug X is way way better than it had any right to be, it's really impressive.

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NotMiki
@NotMiki

I'm curious what spearheaded the resurgence of 2D games. The Wii certainly had prominent and well-marketed entries (NSMB, 2006, DKCR, 2010). Maybe relatedly Square seemed to have a lot of success re-releasing NES/SNES-era Final Fantasy games even earlier than that. Cave Story was 04, not really sure if that had anything to do with anything, at the time.

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Kishi
@Kishi

It was Mega Man 9 (2008)—a numbered sequel to a known IP from a major publisher, for consoles, with intentionally, specifically NES-style graphics. Utterly unashamed of itself. The reception to its sheer boldness was overwhelmingly positive and instantly sold the idea that any given game can and should have whatever graphics best suit it.

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