Oh my god, the immersion! LOL.
Well, I don't believe in the theory that in 1990 people actually liked the low resolution (as it was a hardware limitation) and is only used nowadays by famous people running kickstarters. Much as most people with consoles back then did not like the fact that (also due to hardware limitations) most games they could play were platformers (yet most indie games coming out sell it as some kind of "good thing from the past"). Discussion is kinda pointless without actually asking a sample group. I'm outta here.

Hahahahahaha! Booooooooo! Lazy modern gamer!!!!! :D

Book Of Unwritten Tales 2 uses "projection mapping". Makes this beautiful thing also run well on Laptops.

No, e.g. in Primordia they have to make a magnifying glass you can click so a little magnified area pops up where then you can see how the frigging thing you hovered the mouse over actually looks like. That's a crutch.

Believe what you want, but there ARE people who liked and are still liking such graphics (personally I would have even liked TWP with actual Maniac Mansion graphics, but I'm fine with Monkey Island like graphics too)

I don't know why you are talking about Kickstarter specifically: One reason Indie developers use pixel art a lot is that OK-ish looking pixel art is much cheaper than OK-ish looking HD graphics. The same is true for creating 2D platformers vs. open-world 3D games. How are you supposed to do this as a 1, 2 or 3 person Indie game "studio"?

I agree with that. Pixel-art is more abstract, being something in the middle between text (text adventures, books) and HD graphics (games in HD, movies).

In a book can have very detailed description but it's still all to the imagination of the reader, while in movies (from movie scripts or even movie adaptions of existing books) the director has to imagine all of this and create a whole visible world for the viewers.

Another aspect is that a skilled pixel-artist can create more backgrounds etc. for a game in the same time than a skilled artist can create HD backgrounds.
And proper pixel-art even often looks more detailed and realistic because the brain fills out all the stuff between those dirty pixels vs. HD art where details are either there (more work) or not (less work).

Yes, but the point is, would you like SVGA (640x480) more than VGA (320x200 like here) ? Or even.. fuck it.. 1920x1080? Again, would be interesting with a sample group back from the day.

Oh, and I just remembered, here comes the good stuff:
The moar you know:
VGA CRTs back in 1990 had a much lower inch amount (about 14") than what we have now, so each pixel was about 1/3 SMALLER than you will see it today in your favorite DOSbox emulator. Even then back then we mostly had people who very much CRAVED more pixels (one of my friends coined the phrase "pixel fight" in e.g. Duke3D). So people coming at me today and tell me they like big fugly pixels.. let's say it like that:
Spock raises an eyebrow.

That's true. Heck even TWP uses modern technology like shaders (for dynamic lighting).

I understand. But the alternative would be to draw the whole game in higher resolution which is more expensive and probably doesn't really improve the actual game at all.
(btw. you will also have close-ups in TWP, not for characters but for something like control panels, like in elevators)

Do you mean a sample group with people from back in the days judging now or judging back then?

If it's the first I'd suspect people preferring more the lower resolutions because they have learned that the best graphics come with a price. HD graphics, more details, more polygons, more realistic physics, more clothes and hair moving in the wind... this all costs money to do but doesn't directly affect actual gameplay.
This is all money which could be also spend in other areas like improved game design (or, actual working one), story, additional content etc.

Heh, nice strawman there. I never said that I wanted all games to stick low resolution, not even all adventure games. And Thimbleweed Park was never meant to be the state of the art of videogaming made for a majority audience, with the scope to be progressive. It's a niche product made by a small team of indie devs who do what they like for people who can appreciate it. Are you complaining that Ron Gilbert doesn't try to revolutionize game technology, or are you just ranting for the sake of ranting?

Sir_Kill_A_Lot and Leroux:

Certainly did not want to attack single people and their preferences, they are all genuine. I guess it just irks me that everytime some studio is doing "old school" they have to include the godawful (imho) resolution (320x200) from back in the day.
My can-play-this limit is at 640x480 upwards, so I guess I'm just angry I'll miss out on otherwise very interesting games (like the stuff Wadjet puts out - it's like exactly my genre otherwise).
I understand higher res is more expensive so you have to make a compromise somewhere.
All things I said have nothing in specific to do with this game, which looks really nice (besides the resolution).
Sir_Kill_A_Lot: about the "comes with a price". Yes, but I was HORRIFIED that e.g. in Quest For Infamy, the artists made really high-res portraits while displaying them ingame (whole 320x200 game) on the upper right. Needless to say every [s]detail[/s] recognition was gone.

Haha that's awesome. All fair's then. :)

Hm, I wouldn't sign that. They do think it's a game which could work very well for casual gamers / mobile platforms.
At least that's what they hope. Terrible Toybox won't make more adventure game if they won't be able to finance if themselves (they aren't very keen on doing another Kickstarter for their next game).

(I am a Kickstarter backer and would support them again in a heartbeat)

To a certain extent I can relate to your complaints, too. While I do appreciate pixel art myself, it's true that it looked better on old CRT monitors or very small screens (like a netbook). 320x200 today actually looks worse than back then due to the new monitor technology; even if the graphics are pretty, on these big flat screens they look more pixel-y and low quality than it's good for them. Which is kind of a dilemma even for special snowflakes like myself, as I hate playing games windowed. ;)

I didn't meant to say that the game will be inaccesible to the uninitiated or that it won't find its audience. But point-and-click adventures in general don't have as big of an audience as certain other genres have. It's not where the big business is. Otherwise they would be created by AAA companies again, not by small indie teams. And they don't push the newest technology or revolutionize gameplay either. Most are rather paying hommage to the classics of a past golden age than trying to do something new. (There are exceptions, but I can't think of many. Maybe games like Life Is Strange, or the better Walking Simulators like Firewatch, but would they still count as the same genre?)

As for working as a mobile game, see my comment above. I think the low resolution will definitely look better on a tablet screen than on a big PC monitor.

There is a big difference in drawing pixel-art in its actual resolution (by an expert artist) and scaling something down (or up, like low-res 3D textures in Duke3D you've mentioned).
Not sure if displaying higher resolution pictures in low-res games would be an improvement for QFI (clash of resolutions?).
Also you won't be happy to read that I've learned in their last update that the game was 320x240 and will be changed to 320x200 (also maybe this is an misunderstanding and it's just about the aspect ratio).

I remember scaling of characters (e.g. in DOTT) not being that great, but also not being a distraction.
Also note that in TWP the characters won't be scaled to the resolution of the current room but the native display resolution (well, and of course people ["pixel purists"] complained, you can never make everyone happy!).
For an example look at this (old) screenshot.

I also thought I have resolution limits when I saw The Last Door.
But after reading reviews of people which had the same doubts I actually bought it. I don't have a lower limit anymore :-)

But there is an big audience out there waiting for them. The mobile market seems to be large and mostly casual gamers, i.e. people who've never heard of GOG or even (cough) Steam before.
I think I've also heard that mobile releases of Broken Sword worked quite well. So maybe P'n'C (or rather P'n'Touch) CAN be made big again, or at least a little bit bigger to allow proper funding of new games.

I can imagine that it works, and even well enough to fund new games (as do some indies on the PC). But as for reaching a majority audience, that sounds more like wishful thinking to me. I'm also sceptical about the mobile audience and the PC audience being two entirely different groups. My guess would be that many fan of Broken Sword on mobile devices were already familiar with adventure games from the PC. Then again, I'm often rather pessimistic in general, it's not that I don't wish adventure games success in getting bigger again and reaching new people. :)

Well that all really depends on artist's experience and what the creative process is like.
You can take any digital photograph and put it through a complex, but still relatively fast series of modifications and after you have reduced the palette and resolution, you have pixelart. Then again if you do the opposite extreme alternative and compose the image by hand pixel by pixel, it is going to take ages.

I would argue that for cartoon style graphics creating it in HD is actually faster, as you can take a Wacom tablet and start creating. In low resolution/pixelarts you actually end up with very strange looking creations if you try to do it like that.

I even have some experience in this, as I once scanned a company logo to a very low resolution handheld screen. After scanning you had to manually move pixels around to make it look right. (It didn't exactly help that the device didn't have square pixels, but ones where Y was bigger than X for each pixel...)


You don't need a remake to sell an old game. You only need game files and ScummVM.
Ironically enough, if you want to have the original MI1 graphics with voiceovers, you still need ScummVM (or DosBox) and Ultimate Edition fan patch, as that feature was not in the remake version.


Uuuhhmm... in 1990 consoles sure had enough power to have all kinds of genres, so if there were only platformers, it was either lack of creativity or a marketing choice made by game companies.
Of course with consoles part of the problem is that very few games get western release. There are plenty of games, for instance visual novels, which existed in 1990, but not outside Japan.

But anyway back to resolution, no one really complained about resolution in 1990, at least not to the point of not playing the games. So if games were playable in whatever resolution back then, they should be playable even now.

Arguing otherwise is like saying it's impossible to watch TV series from the last century, because they weren't HD or widescreen.

And I don't know what kind of "sample group" you really need. Isn't the success of several Kickstarters (Thimbleweed Park included) a definitive proof that indeed there are people who like older style graphics?


Lower is better, because out of my five computers only one supports 1920x1080. All of them support 320x200 - and the other five ancient computers that I haven't booted up in years support that as well.


I have no idea what you're trying to say there.
What size the pixels are in DosBox or ScummVM depends on many factors, such as your screen resolution, the physical size of your display, whether you run games full screen or windowed or whether you use some scalers. Oh, and then there's aspect ratio correction too.
I never run DosBox full screen, so I assume whatever your point is gets lost right there.


How funny you should refer to an antiquated TV show which is not widescreen, stereo, doesn't have any CGI, and many of the set items are literally dug out of garbage.
It makes a very convincing argument for the latest technology.

Or are you perhaps refering to the better, improved Zachary Quinto version?

I refer to the version where something without any logic is brought up (like here the worship of ancient resolution the industry itself moved away from as soon as possible when new hardware was available - star trek tv series being no exception) and the person raised on logic his entire life finds it curious :-)