Adventure Gamers - Forums

diego - 23 October 2015 09:53 AM

Really, what’s the story? I suppose hand-drawn, classic 2D graphics is dying, which could be one of the explanations, but still… I thought about in the light of today’s news that more screenshots of Day of the Tentacle will be revealed later today.

Monkey Island 1

diego - 23 October 2015 09:53 AM

You can’t compare the graphics of 2 games in a 20 years span… Well, we can! The first one was a revolutionary, “near-art” concept for its time, and the second one is just a so-so. Higher resolution means little.

As others have said, the remake of Monkey Island 1 has terrible character design.
I don’t know what they were thinking by making the characters so distorted and ugly.

Pirate in bar—new version
Pirate in bar—old version

Elaine—new version
Elaine—old version
Elaine—old EGA version

The original is also clearer—For example, look at how well the glasses on the guy in the coat show up in the original compared to the remake. And the colors in the remake look muddy compared to the original.

Monkey Island 2

diego - 23 October 2015 09:53 AM

Monkey Island 2 is probably the closest thing that came to mimicking the original, but it still feels one step below the art of the original especially in terms of lightning, and somewhat “stiff”, resembling the Flash-based graphics.

Yes the lighting looks “like a computer did it” rather than a real artist.
The result looks washed out.

Larry 1

diego - 23 October 2015 09:53 AM

Yes, compared to the VGA version it’s in SVGA, but I deliberately added Larry 7 in there - because it’s not better than those graphics, and it SHOULD be, more than 15 years after it.

I actually think the background in the still screenshot of the Larry remake looks very good. However the characters sort of stand out against the background, where in the original they blended in—probably because the background has shading where the characters do not. In the original, the characters do have some shading.

256 color games often have a more intense look than high resolution games.
I’m not sure if this is inherent to using 256 colors or whether it’s due to artists being better back when 256 colors was the maximum number.

Screenshot of apartment in original BS1

Screenshot of apartment in “Director’s Cut”

Screenshot of apartment in BS5.

I think the Broken Sword games all look good—at least in the still shots.

Another post on modern graphics -

this is Daedelic’s stock “old man” they have been using for the past 4 or 5 years

There are about 5 or 6 “old men” characters in Anna’s Quest and they all look 80-90% similar to this guy, which makes them hard to distinguish. They have very little style on their own. Again, compare this to Lucasarts games where every character was so distinctive and you couldn’t possibly confuse them.

Now, Anna’s Quest is a pretty good game but the graphics are just so bland and styleless. Every recent Daedelic game (except maybe Fire and Memoria) uses the same style. Why? Think how different Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle were using 256 colors and low resolution.

Did I blame Daedelic? No.

Didn’t you block me?

Anyway that statement still applies to Deponia and other recent Daedelic games. There’s no reason for them all to use the same style, and for the Anna’s Quest characters to look so similar. This is a trend in many modern adventure games.

Tad - 23 November 2015 02:21 AM

No it doesn’t. All Daedelic did for Anna’s Quest was colour. Everything else was done by Dane Krams. As for the artstyle, you may not like it (which is fine), but that doesn’t make it bad.

And once again, I’m not interested in assigning blame. You might be, but leave me out of that discussion.

I never said ‘I don’t like it therefore it’s bad’. I admit I don’t like it, but that isn’t why I said it was bad. For that you can refer to my original post above. You’re welcome to rebut it, just don’t bring in strawman arguments like me assigning blame.

GeorgyBoy - 14 October 2019 09:23 AM

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, both original MI also look better to me but I doubt many people playing them for the first time now would use the retro mode.
The Larry remake didn’t look bad in screenshots, I think the problem were the animations.

I’ve got a hint of deja vu here from an earlier post on the thread:

wilco - 23 October 2015 12:33 PM

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, both original MI also look better to me but I doubt many people playing them for the first time now would use the retro mode.
The Larry remake didn’t look bad in screenshots, I think the problem were the animations.

Edit: GeorgyBoy’s dodgy link removed from his quote!