[bernawil]

yup, honestly this whole take is so tired. Its a factoid pulled out of nowhere.

and the counterexample is easy: the gameboy launched with LCD screens and games definitely where meant to look blocky. The pokemon games are perhaps the most influential nowadays in terms of pixelart style and show all examples of it: the very blocky styles of the overhead view and the more detailed pictures of the pokemon. They also cover the 8-bit and 16-bit era with the gameboy advance.

[PhasmaFelis]

Your counterexample make me think you've misunderstood the point from the start.

Devs design games to look good on the target platform. Obviously you can achieve gradient effects with a CRT and 16-bit color that are very different from a four-tone LCD. Both things can be true.

Edit: And some of them did that very deliberately and documented it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41134689

[bernawil]

the central point of the piece is this:

> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

and my point was that blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games of the era, even though some other games of the era were not meant to be "blocky" many indeed where as the gameboy proves.

[PhasmaFelis]

The author said "often," not "always." The entire point of the article is to explore the details of the phenomenon and show that it's not as clear-cut as people think. What are you disagreeing with?

[dmnmnm]

> Its a factoid pulled out of nowhere

Nope.

And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead.

The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement.

It was exploited in various way in games :

https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2018/03/compatibility-i...

https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persiste...

There was even a game that exploited the screen of the original gameboy to achieve a transparency effect in a spirit (but not implementation) similar to how Sonic devs created transparency on CRTs on the genesis.

https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892

In this case, artificial flickering doesn't look like flicker on the original gameboy screen because it had a lot of ghosting. But it looks terrible on an emulator. You don't get those effects playing the same games on a modern computer monitor.

The various gameboys, and even the advance, were not as crips as you remember them to be, their LCDs weren't particularly high quality stuff. None of the original pixel art of those times were meant to look the way they look on a modern high contrast, high luminance, high resolution LCD or OLED screens of today. It's particularly true as soon as movement is involved as the ghosting was intense and it was one of the weakness of early LCDs as a whole as even the best computer monitors that came out when LCDs started to show up on the market looked horrible in motion compared to a CRT or a Plasma. So, the pixel art era was never about looking at a crisp image.

And many gameboy games look very, very wrong when run crisply on an emulator. They absolutely weren't meant to look like this. That batman game showing massive flickering around water looked fine on the original gameboy hardware.

[bernawil]

I never said that CRTs or whatever didn't influence design sometimes. I just wanted to refute the central claim of the piece:

> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

And no, blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games from the 8bit to 16bit generations.