Low colour 80's 90's games that look good today

[copse]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Technically its lots of different shades of gray, but the black and white modes in Rick Dangerous games might count.

Interesting. I don't remember that and can't find it on YouTube. Just spun up WinUAE and it looks like space on the title screen toggles it.

Ultimately, I think this is the enemy of low colour. Have you ever seen someone's black and white photo where they chose to have the colour drained out of it for style? It hurts the brain and the eyes. Black and white Rick Dangerous is exactly like that.

[copse]

Originally Posted by Photon

In the 80s and 90s, users (not only gamers) bought/even bothered to play a pirated copy mostly based on screenshots! It was really the only way to get an idea if it was something you liked or not. I think gameplay footage plays the same role today. You will find out the perspective, the pace, and the tone, setting, or type of game this way.

Magazine reviews would punish both dreary graphics and bad sound, while they wouldn't automatically give a dull game with lots of eyecandy a high total score. There are many examples of this. There were also separate awards for games in reviews, like Commodore User's "Screen Star".

The thing is, if you have to find a gem despite low color count or poor graphics (let's call it "bad screenshots", then, unless a friend you trust says "you'll like it, it's sort of like that game that you like", it will take quite some time to find that gem.

And once you have a game that you like to play, you play it in part to see the great graphics. There's a lot to say for great graphics in games. Especially, it's how you tell foreground and background apart, enemies from friends, and how to interpret the UI.

Amiga obviously can have great graphics in games, so that's what every game compares to. And we celebrate the ones with smooth, great graphics and even some janky and choppy ones.

Head Over Heels is a great example of an interesting monochrome-ish screenshot on Amiga. I think the graphics look smashing. But the game idea and the obligatory black background is also clearly 8-bit - as in tons of games that didn't have backgrounds because they couldn't.

The Amiga can, and whether something looks good enough is judged entirely per platform. An MSX user's jaw drops if there's seeming more colors than possible, and a Spectrum user judges a game with excessive color clash or reverting to complete monochrome. On C64, I think Spectrum ports or even Spectrum-looking games suffered greatly both from poor sales and being played, even if many games used the same charmode. I think it's all judged from what you've seen before on the platform.

But the question is: could a lesser artist pull the same off? Because I think if you play HoH, it's in large part due to the spot-on, interesting-looking, pixel-perfect graphics.

I think in some ways the same is true for Bitmap Bros games. With average graphics, Xenon 2 would not have been played at all, I'm quite sure of that.

I agree. HoH looks garishly coloured, but looks good because the artist was good. IMO Rick Dangerous is painful to play in both colour and black and white, but looked great in colour.

We can also look at this topic at a level which aligns with the Amiga and the ongoing development on real hardware. What is the appeal of being able to make something beautiful that runs within the constraints of real hardware at it's different levels (from 256kb to OCS to ECS to AGA to 060).

And in this case, the question is when the artist chose low colour from monochrome to 4 colours and made a playable game using those colours that looked great (despite any overall shitness), isn't this a constraint we can also explore in the same way.