/v/ - Video Games

Cuphead

Literally anything by Vanillaware.

>>15573442

Cuphead was great.

>>15573539

A great example of a "low-res" style done properly. The dev is putting in a lot of work to reduce artifacts.

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1363742#msg1363742

Mirror's Edge 1 is beautiful. Catalyst looks worse since they moved from mostly concrete + high detail normalmaps to mostly reflective surfaces, despite using higher-resolution textures.

Pic related. I never liked the uniform designs though.

Say what you will about TF2's art direction now, but before (arguably) the mannconomy update, the artstyle was still really nice and had a distinct theme. I don't know if there's a specific name for the theme, but it was that kind of early 1900's Industrialist America style. You can still see it in the maps and the default gear of the classes, even if the lighting (a somewhat major part of the design) has been changed. I'm just now noticing it, but I can see some resemblances to this very same style in the first Incredibles movie. Don't know if the second one still has it cause I never saw it.

>>15573612

This. The girls also had a surprising lack of tush. Thumbs down!

There are a lot of obvious choices, but I'd put forward Amanita Design. Their storybook style is really distinct.

The later Psygnosis games that capitalised on the futuristic neon-wireframe look using the early ps1 graphics quite succesfully since the look holds out to this day as well as a couple others like XIII and Paper Sorcerer that just took an established genre and simply tried a new look for it without touching much else.

>>15573690

I am only including Gears because I feel that it's style was so hyper-masculine it almost hurt, also the Lancer is one-of-a-kind.

sue me

>>15573852

No, the whole feeling of flow is fucked up by the open world. You end up just taking the same linear routes between sections of the open world to get to the missions. The main missions themselves are OK but the side missions are boring as shit. The world is littered with collectibles, each of which stop the player, play an animation of Faith pulling out a computer chip or something, and thus completely kill the flow. If they had been smart, they would've let players simply pick up collectibles while running. There's a skill progression system for some reason, but a third of the skills are acquired from main missions, and half is simple stuff like "more hit-points", making me wonder why they bothered. The remaining unlocks are stuff from the original game, like quick-turn, and rolling when falling, which feels frustrating. It's like if a Mario game required you to finish ten levels before using mushrooms, just pointless grind.

The characters are all worse, including Faith. Your supporting cast is an autistic sheeboon and an edgelord. Faith's sister, is now the adopted daughter of the big bad guy instead of just a police officer, and everyone behaves like anime characters. They also changed Faith's VA (probably at the request of Anita Sakreesian since the new one is Chinese-Irish and the old one was American) and she's awful. Boring, flat delivery on every line.

>>15573404

I liked Trine's artstyle a whole lot.

>super colorful and beautiful

>the whole series felt like a whimsical fairtytale storybook

>>15573927

>gears of war

>the game that epitomized brown and bloom cover shooter manshoots

The fuck outta here with that gay shit.

Batman for the NES had really strange art direction. It obscured a lot of the background in shadow and often had ugly color palettes but they put in a lot of work to make it representative of the movie.

>>15573404

I love them both. It'd be great to have a Battle of Olympus remake in Apotheon's artstyle and I find Dream Land 3 to have a more beautiful art style (and soundtrack) compared to Super Star.

Killer7 has my favorite use of cel-shading. It's low detail/low poly but it's not bright like other cel shade types.

>>15573690

Well if we're going to go there it would be a crime not to mention Wolf Among Us.

>>15574555 (checked)

Like this, apparently. It doesn't make any sense, the magazine clips right into the chain.

>>15573659

I would call it "retro-industrialism"

Wildlands was a pretty bland copypaste game, but it still has some amazing sights at night.

If only they took enough time to fill this open world with some meaningful content instead of repeating the same 3-4 sidemissions 100 times.

>>15573659

I'm still mad they changed the lighting engine and altered textures just for optimization, the game shouldn't have become so bloated with cosmetics and gear in the first place

Pretty much every 2D Sonic besides the Sonic 4 pieces of shit look great with a neat industrialized-nature aesthetic.

>>15573491

>good-looking shitty games

The aesthetics of Vanillaware are debatable anyway.

>>15575747

>Animated .png

>>15575819

Where have you been the past 10 years?

>>15576294

behold, with the aid of the dark arts and my wizard powers I can animate anything!

>>15573982

You got a point. It was dark, depressing, and it really hasn't waned. Everything is stylized and not based on realisticness.

White Night, a survival horror with a stark white/black aesthetic. It even incorporates the complete absence of nuance in the lighting into the gameplay, as it revolves around having few light sources that immediately feel like small havens in complete darkness.