Posted by maximilianburke 18 hours ago
I can relate to that. But as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back. I mean that literally: we couldn’t afford a computer so my dad would haul home his work computer each weekend. We’d call BBS’ on it, print stuff. Play shareware games. It pissed my mom off because it took up half the dinner table. But my brother learned to code this way too.
So later on when my friends got EGA and VGA, CGA meant “poor.”
Fast forward many years and I have kids and were in better financial circumstances than my dad and mom back then. My kids have MacBooks. One of their friends was over one night and was visibly embarrassed that all she had was the school assigned Chromebook. She and my daughter were doing homework and her friend said that she wished her family could afford better laptops.
I didn’t want to embarrass her but then next morning after I made pancakes and I was sitting at the table I was like hey let’s take a look at these Chromebooks (we had an old one sitting around) and the three of us sat there and in about an hour and a half they’d put together a very simple farm game in the spirit of Stardew Valley on PICO-8.
Point being, we live in a world where especially with AI, it’s easy to think we can do everything. And it can feel like that, which means that when you can’t, you feel worse that you can’t because it would appear everyone else is doing amazing things with no limits.
But maybe we need more limits on things. Maybe that 4 color palette forced devs and artists to be creative back then in ways that make things better for everyone.
— Charles Eames
For example, 'Weekend Film' competitions have long introduced minor arbitrary constraints only announced at the start to prevent pre-work, such as "Blue socks must be seen and at least one character must have an accent". Often, the socks would be only be seen in the background for a few frames and the accented character would be a passerby overheard for 2 seconds, yet filmmakers, judges and audiences found the presence of the constraints caused all the projects to be more creatively diverse in completely unrelated ways.
Interestingly, the effect doesn't have one name. Artists and designers have terms for it, cognitive psychologists have another term, behavioral/organizational sciences and engineering/innovation research each have their own literature as well.
As a kid and teen CGA and EGA looked absurd to me, even when that was the best one could get at home. So I waited until VGA to get into PC gaming. Now in middle age and having tried my hand at VGA+ art, it is delightful to see well rendered at at every color depth.
Before it was a dumpster fire Twitter’s 140 character constraint made it fun. An infinity of possibility leaves most of us motionless.
A couple more registers to have some kind of selection of the colors would have gone a long way.
Respect for the graphics artists in general for that time to be able to make something out of almost nothing, four colors or less and/or black and white low resolution.
Possibly not the best example but I do feel like Alley Cat looked great in CGA: https://i.ibb.co/wNDvgzQ8/alleycat.gif
though, "The Eternal Castle Remastered" (2019) used the same palette, and it was pretty good.
In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.
I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).
I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
The first time I played Monkey Island on an Hercules monitor, it made me fall in love with graphic adventures. Years later, I played the VGA CD version. At that time, I bought the Monkey Island CD, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle. They were the peak of LucasGames.
Anyway, just on to of my mind: - Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing. Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
You can see the learning throughout the years, with the Blackwell Chronicles being a bit linear, and some games in between being a bit of a miss.
But "Unavowed" or the new "Old Skies" are excellent games I consider on par with the old golden age. "Technobabylon", "Resonance" and "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" are also very far up.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677770/The_Case_of_the_G...
For this reason, I find much more interesting those modern games that scratch the same itch but try different mechanics and styles.
Obra Dinn and Golden Idol are for sure in my top three of post-2000 adventure games, and I would add Outer Wilds at the top.
Her Story is also worth mentioning. Good acting, very polished presentation. Fun retro feel and a great gameplay loop. The only possible drawback is that there's no clear victory (this seems to be typical of Sam Barlow games, which are all worth playing). You're left to come to your own conclusion, which may or may not be correct.
Other smaller games in this niche would be "Death at Fleming Manor" (it's a bit laboursome to play) and "The Seance at Blake Manor" (Took me a bit to get used to, but honestly very interesting), if we're collecting. Which we should. Maybe I need a blog.
IIRC, the only interaction with the scene is using the pocketwatch on a corpse.
And Grim Fandango if you hadn't played it.
That said, I tried playing it again recently and the puzzles do not hold up. Extremely frustrating and unsatisfying solutions.
I would not be opposed to a remaster of the game that also fixes some of the puzzles - similar to what the Cyan team (controversially) did with their Myst and Riven remakes.
There were a couple of games though (like the curse of monkey island) that gave you a bit of a choice on how much you cared about spending time on puzzles.
In the TikTok era, you could probably make the argument that even a shape matching puzzle is obtuse and overly difficult and it could be a popular opinion.
The first Ace Attorney game is riveting from start to finish.
The Professor Layton games are all great.
I've read that Hotel Dusk and Last Window are both really good but haven't gotten around to playing them myself. I can vouch for Last Window's soundtrack, though, which is spectacular.
Going back isn't enough. What I wanted again was the feeling of seeing and playing those games for the first time. The awe. My kids were born in a world where color graphics and digital sound were everywhere so nothing is impressive to them.
Once with Machinarium, and again with A Short Hike
My favourite Amanita games are the Samarost series. Something about the lack of dialogue, devious puzzles, quirky humour, and unique aesthetic combining sci-fi with a world of moss, wood, and weird junk.
Creaks was also excellent, albeit a very different vibe. I couldn't quite get into Phonopolis, although the art direction is stunning.
https://www.scummvm.org/games/
Thanks for reminding me about Beneath a Steel Sky. Still need to play that one :)
It was Venice underground, The Last Crusade (Indy3.exe)
> Simon the Sorcerer
That's not common to hear, thanks for the throwback ;)
These games gave me the same sense of wonder and curiosity in an adventure puzzle game in the same way that Elden Ring reminded me of what it was like to experience Hyrule Field for the first time in Ocarina of Time.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
If you find a game that has a natural Hercules mode they often kicked serious ass, being at resolutions not achieved until VGA.
Professor Layton almost all the way through includes trick puzzles which have non obvious answers as well.
Obviously the games aren't perfectly obvious and later games are much better, but they are generally much more obvious than something like King's Quest which was properly brutal. I remember needing occasional hints to manage monkey island but nothing like completing King's Quest where I had to constantly check the walkthrough.
For instance, I found Leisure Suit Larry I in many ways better, from the gameplay, than "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!". Now, the latter made much more use of the mouse, so it was easier and simpler for most players; but I found LSL 1 just so convenient and quite fast to play, if you could handle the keyboard well. It was of course nowhere near as convenient as clickety-click via the mouse, but I had that impression several times with games. SimCity 1 was IMO much nicer to play than later simcities; same impression I had with civilization, the actual gameplay got progressively more annoying, slower and laggier.
