Just wondering if anyone else has noticed that now that sprites no longer have to be contained in very low res and pixelated drawings, developers can now just free-hand draw the graphics and the end result is a good handful of games looking like some high school kids math folder.

Actually neat looking pixelated graphics look like crap because these new video cards filter them with antialiasing and other stuff to make them fit in larger monitors.

I HATE THAT.

There also seems to be some strange frame rate issues with platformers intentionally designed to look like 8 and 16 bit games.

All this new amateur stuff, however, looks as if I'm being tortured in a JR. High School art class.

Its not like the old sprites weren't a piece of shit either.

They looked like more professionally crafted pieces of shit. =L

Hahaha, still were ugly as hell. But then, I guess we gamers had more imagination so they looked better, mostly because we hadn't seen anything better than the sprites.

Now with today's photorealistic games, we're getting spoiled and the 2D sprites suck big time in our eyes.

Depends on the game I guess. I loved the look of Wizorb and Jamestown, although Jamestown had the problem of being displayed by default in a rather strange resolution, which meant whenever it was scaled up to the full screen, it looked shit.

Those that used professionally crafted pixel art sprites now create high quality professional (digitally) painted sprites instead*.

The shit devs still produce shit.

* Apart from Lucasarts who no longer know what all these *game* things that people keep talking about are.

In 8-by-5 pixels, 16 colours (4-bit) and binary transparency (15 colours if you wanted any transparency in the sprite) there isn't room for much difference between good artists and bad ones. At 512 by 512, 24-bit colour and an 8-bit alpha channel though...

I'd say the availability of large low cost monitors might also be the problem. Todays graphics are beyond belief, but some how, some game company's have forgotton about the gameplay.

Particularly with a lot of amateurish indie titles, the non-pixelated graphics look like shit. True.

However, then you get a game like Rayman: Origins, which is hand drawn and not pixelated, and it looks absolutely fantastic. Or the Shank games. I think it's all a matter of having the right technology in the right hands.

What does bother me though is that in the quest for more detailed graphics, a lot of platformers have begun to have too much crap on the screen at once. I actually prefer a straight 2D game to a 2.5D game in many instances because it is visually cleaner to look at and you need crisp and clear grapphics for a game that demands precise platforming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vtv3nJ-Wy8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtJy7wrAuQ

*edit*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYD7xm2hy8

Depends on what you play.

Some games look great with the 2D graphics. Look at Guilty Gear as well as BlazBlue, they feature hand drawn sprites that look really good (although the 3D in some of them are...kind of bad). Rayman Origins has some really good 2D graphics. Also the 2D in Skullgirls is rather good...(but the backgrounds are pretty meh).

I think it's what they were designed for. Older games like Super Mario Bros and World were designed for lower resolution displays (and I'm using them as an example because it's so easy to point at). And they tend to show when they're designed for low resolution hardware and suddenly get upscaled.

If it's designed for higher resolutions, 2-D can look wonderful. Look at the HD sprites for Disgaea 4 to name probably my most prominent example (Because I can't think of others)