Recently I was messing around and editing some screenshots of SimFarm ("SimCity's Country Cousin" released in 1993) and I came to the realization that I had never actually taken the time to look at the game's graphics up-close. Inspecting its usage of color, I found that this game's style - which for the longest time I'd taken for granted as "looking good enough, I guess" - is actually composed of a very impressive instance of working-within-limitations that does its job so well, you actually forget that it looks pretty.
My whole life, I thought this game used a lot more colors than it actually grants itself access to; SimCity 2000 has a whole 256-color palette after all, and that game came out roughly around the same point in time. In actuality, SimFarm only has 15! Using just a small handful of reds, greens, yellows and blues in meticulous dithered patterns SimFarm makes its otherwise-mundane visuals truly pop, simulating details that really only exist within the tricks it plays on your eyes. Now, granted, this is nothing new; just about every single game of the time used the same technique to emulate a greater depth of color, particularly the many products that shared the standard EGA 16-color scheme: Commander Keen, the original Monkey Island, etc... but it somehow feels more striking here. Maybe it's the fact that it's all in muted earthy tones, or the fact that pink and purple are completely omitted from the palette... or maybe it's simply the fact that expecting 256 colors and finding this instead just hits different. Hell, I think this is the first time I've seen a DOS game use only 15 colors - and believe me, I've looked for the 16th color! It's just not there!
In fact, the game uses three distinct palettes... it's just that two of them only exist for the title & logo splash screens. So at least the game isn't completely devoid of the color purple.
Anyway, I just thought this was a neat example of how to elevate relatively simple low-color graphics by way of really effective dithering, and wanted to share it. Playing SimFarm might be analogous to watching grass grow, but at least the grass is damn nice to look at!