[dleslie]

There's a bunch on Youtube. The art has the typical issues of modern 16-bit and 8-bit games where the designers and artists are not targeting the full hardware stack of the era. Rather, they're targeting simulated machines (emulators) and sometimes also flash carts on original hardware but rendered on modern display hardware.

What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWlprFDAobs

[gryson]

The game makes good use of dithering throughout.

Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).

This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.

[dleslie]

The video I linked is taken of a CRT and is not a screenshot of an LCD.

This is an excellent deep dive on the issues I spoke of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

[pezezin]

As usual, the video you posted mixes up how CRTs look with composite artifacts. Games played on a good quality CRT with RGB or component signals (arcade machines, PC monitors, TVs with SCART of YPbPr input) don't look nowhere as fuzzy.

[dleslie]

And that was almost _never_ the case for 16-bit era gaming, outside of the Arcade. Certainly not for the Genesis.

[pezezin]

The Megadrive had native RGB output, you just needed the right cable and TV. Maybe that was not common in the US, but it was in Europe; heck, the French model ONLY had RGB output.

[dleslie]

All Genesis models were capable of RGB, but almost everyone used the component and/or RF adapter. I own three American genesis models and have yet to ever own a proper RGB adapter for one.

[erik]

It doesn't seem that bad to me? Most of the problems that I see in that video look like recording issues where the camera isn't handling max brightness well. Recording CRTs is notoriously difficult!

Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.

[mrandish]

It bothers me when a new creative work tries to adopt a distinct historical style without understanding its form, structure, context, constraints and motivation. Without that understanding it's just derivative imitation which might evoke echoes of the original but can never match, add to it or take it new directions.

While it may sound odd to want new pixel art to be "authentic" in the same way as new music should respect the structure and form of styles like ragtime, blues or jazz, I think it applies equally. The skilled artists who hand-crafted pixels to look their best on CRTs did specific things to leverage CRT bloom and blending, scanlines, composite color artifacting and interlace dithering.

[gryson]

Are you referring to Earthion specifically or just making some grandiose comment about pixel art in the good old days?

What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).

[toast0]

I'm not quite sure what they're on about wrt bloom. CRT bloom is when a bright image displays larger than a dark image. Classically, this is pretty noticable on say Super Street Fighter II Turbo if you do a super combo finish.

If it's particularly noticeable, it probably means you need to service your CRT. But I guess, don't put important content close to the edges of the screen on very bright screens. But you've already got to be careful of putting things near the edge, so it's just be even more careful. It's not really all or nothing, you also get vertical expansion on lines that are bright; here's a video example [1]. I think you can get a bit of vertical bleeding on bright pixels too, depending on adjustment, which you might

I will say, even though bloom is a screen defect, it can be kind of a neat effect... Super Combo Finishes might not be as cool if the geometry held steady.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHQVowZBm4

[elfly]

Very few people are going to play this on a CRT, tho. And even if you included a CRT shader, most people will turn it off.

It's ok to pine for the old techniques, but this is a game made for a Genesis in modern times. It has to stride both.

[ddrdrck_]

So you believe the artists responsible for this game graphics do not understand all of this ? Would you care to explain exactly how you came to this conclusion ? Because in my non expert eyes, it looks as good or even better as any old school megadrive game on a CRT.

By the way, some of my favorite games on Megadrive are homebrews, most notably Astebros and other Neofid games.

[pezezin]

I completely agree with you. I have all three Neofid games released to date (Demons of Asteborg, Astebros, Daemon Claw) and I played them on a nice VGA Trinitron (clean and sharp RGB), and they look gorgeous, much better that most games of that era.

And before someone mentions composite artifacts: the Neofid guys are French, if and France gave two good things to the world, those were the metric system and SCART. You guys should really try them both.