Flashback HD & The terrible truth of remakes

[tim]

Hello Pixelation.
After seing the announcement of the new Flashback HD, I was so disappointed that I couldn't resist but share my thoughts about it.

You all remember what Flashback looked like ?



Brace yourself, this is the new one :



What the fuck is this shit ? I mean seriously ?

• The background is filled with elements. No more fog, less mystery.
• The jungle doesn't feel "out of this world" anymore. It looks like it's made of common leaves and trees.
• All the assets and plants are oversized (probably to fill empty space easily instead of detailing everything).
• Poor readibility between the playable foreground and the background : same colors, same lighting. The miserable post process blur doesn't help.
• Why the laser ? Why the BIG red spot ? Does it need to be that visible and this huge ? Are we stupid ?
• Why the HUD ? Do we need to have poorly designed (and hard to read) HUD to display infos we don't need ?
• The character doesn't stand out anymore. It blends into the forest.
• Everything looks very generic and bland. No more "handcrafted" feeling. No passion in this…

If I take two examples of what Flashback could look today and what it looks like in our memories :

Orioto's take : Tete de bug's paintover :



Feng Zhu's painting (+ one hour video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azP1im6SznA)



It's a lot closer to feeling the game left inside me. The colors, the composition, the details, everything is much better and it took not even 1/100th of the time needed to make all the 3D assets of this poor remake. And you know what ? This drop in quality is almost the same for all remakes.

Rayman Origins



Ok it's still 2D but there is basically no frames, everything is animated by rotating, moving, skewing and bending layers. It still looks good because it's not pixel art but smooth, antialised art.  It shows that everybody in this industry is getting lazy, even with huge budgets.


Sonic 4
Horrible 3D cell-shaded art that really destroyed the original look of Sonic II. Less work = worse results.



Pokemon BW
Horrible sprites, frames aren't fully drawn, you can see they're using terrible nearest neighbor rotations…



It looks as bad as our own animated edits on this forum, when we spent only 20 minutes to block out the feeling of the animation, when it's still heavily WIP and not production-ready.  Do you realize it's fucking Nintendo ? For one of their best selling franchise ever ? Don't they have the money to pay animators ? I wonder, why there is such a discrepancy between today's 2D games and our older traditionnal, hand drawn games. I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

I'm wondering. Can't we try together with a new challenge to do something like "bring back 2D pixel art games to life"… And show the world HOW it must be done ? By hand ? With a palette ? With many frames of animations ? With respect of the original art direction ? We should do something like this. Even just a few animated mock-ups. To show the world it's possible. And what it can look like if done correctly.

I'm going to bed now, and I know it's going to be a sad night. Flashback is my favorite game ever. Goodbye my old friend.

[rikfuzz]

It's interesting.  To be fair, the individual elements look well crafted.  I really can't imagine this game had a huge staff, development time or budget. Everyone's worked on stuff they had to make compromises on, it sucks.  Giving the background another pass was probably too low on the priority list unfortunately. 

The concept art and paint over both look excellent, but they're just pictures, it's tough to compare. 

Yeah it's not all it could've been, but it coulda been much worse I think.  I can't honestly offer the same excuses to SEGA/Sonic Team though. Now that's just embarrassing!

Rayman is a remake (essentially) as well, and they did a good job at least : )

[ptoing]

Rayman Origins has some really good animation in it as well as using rotation and such to good effect.
It is seriously well done and work. Plus it was done by a pretty small team AND it is a fucking solid game.

That FB HD thing looks horrible tho :/

[Ymedron]

Admittedly the fact that they bothered to animate the pokemon sprites at all is quite marvelous - In the second gen they only had about 250 characters to work with -> handmade animations. Each generation they add another hundred, so to keep costs down they have to invent new ways to make it cheaper to animate.
I can agree the rotation/stretching/whatever they use for the sprites is dreadful though.

[Cage]

That's... awful if you ask me

It's not that I'm against modern graphics in games (or in general) but it looks like they didn't even put the effort to follow the original style and mood.

It simply looks bland and generic. So generic it could pass as a game about dinosaurs or a commando stealth mission in a tropical country with WMDS CoD style.
Or WHATEVER taking a place in the jungle - on Earth. Not a familiar, yet alien, "where the hell am I?" jungle on another planet.

Maybe it's just me, but older games - heck, even just a few years older - where a lot more stylish and different from one-another. It's like almost all of them had a flavor of it's own and now it's just everything is more-or-less realistic and generic/utilitarian.

I've had a similar reaction to the idea of RoboCop remake - the new designs just look boring.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I feel that general creativeness in terms of designs of the characters/objects/locales in games/movies really went down during last few years (with exceptions of course). On the other hand - I love modern design as far websites, posters and printed media go.

PS. PokeMon - I've used rotations for parts of my animations too, but they didn't even bother to CLEAN IT UP 

[rikfuzz]

Sequels and remakes aren't really in a good position to be super original, since they're wholly derivative. Your best tallent is likely gonna be reserved for working on new IP, I guess, too. 

Not bashing the idea totally, I've worked on some little remakes for fun, and wouldn't say I'd never do it again.  It's fun to indulge now and then.    I guess you have to have low expectations with commercial stuff, since loving the original can set you up for a big fall. 

[Helm]

What the fuck is this shit ? I mean seriously ?

• The background is filled with elements. No more fog, less mystery.
• The jungle doesn't feel "out of this world" anymore. It looks like it's made of common leaves and trees.
• All the assets and plants are oversized (probably to fill empty space easily instead of detailing everything).
• Poor readibility between the playable foreground and the background : same colors, same lighting. The miserable post process blur doesn't help.
• Why the laser ? Why the BIG red spot ? Does it need to be that visible and this huge ? Are we stupid ?
• Why the HUD ? Do we need to have poorly designed (and hard to read) HUD to display infos we don't need ?
• The character doesn't stand out anymore. It blends into the forest.
• Everything looks very generic and bland. No more "handcrafted" feeling. No passion in this…

Calm down. First of all, the original game doesn't suffer in any way from this, how could it? Did it corrupt itself on your hard-drive because someone's making an HD version?

I agree the HD version doesn't look very good, but I don't understand the anger. Why care so much?

[YellowLime]

You blew my mind with the Pokemon thing, I've seen the blatant rotation in them but I had never consciously put it in the correct context. (a multimillion company producing a game for one of its most successful IPs) Maybe because I've never really played the latest Pokemon games.

Or maybe because of what Ymedron said: I only really played the first and second generations, and when Crystal Version came around, I was amazed and glad that they had taken the time to animate the 200-something pokemon (not to mention there wasn't any fugly rotation). Back then I thought of it as a boon, a very neat extra that took a lot of work that wasn't necessary. "Poor guys, working unnecesarily hard to please my eyes even further".

But that was back in the second generation. The producers don't deserve any "pity" anymore, nowadays. Pokemon hauls in the cash, even though it is now one of the most stale game series EVER (even more so than the zeldas or the 2d marios, which coincidentally also are incredibly lucrative). If they're gonna keep feeding consumers with the same old stuff, the least they could do is use some of their millions to make it pretty.

[Ashbad]

The Sonic 4 screencaps make me sad.  Green Hill Zone was always the ugliest Sonic zone, but they went and made it so the background doesn't even seem relevant to the foreground scenery at all.  The worst part is the large forest-ey tree layer in the background -- it looks flat and rushed.  Wouldn't stop me from getting the game, but it doesn't have much of the old Sonic feel left anymore.

[Cyangmou]

The new flashback looks indeed terrible in terms of impression. It seems like the developers don't tried to find the best new style, instead they just took the first one they came up with.
If it's a small team they most probably just skipped their concept design process because they thought the time for design is better spent with creating some more final assets.
As you remarked all the assets are terrible off seen as a whole, but each piece seen on it's own looks like adequate quality. For me it's more like everybody worked on his details, without keeping the big picture in mind.
The laser dot and the HUD also indicate that the artists don't really knew how their pieces would look built together.

Orioto's Piece has a by far lower quality BUT the big picture and the impression is right.

Feng Zhu's piece look great, but it's just a painting and the great atmosphere comes also from the depth of the picture which you won't have in a game. I bet if they'd have build up all their art assets after some concepts like this it'd look rather impressive.

A simple recolor more towards the original would help the screenshot a lot.


I don't know why you mentioned Rayman Origins though. I don't see a problem with just rotating some parts as long as it looks just fine. Redrawing each frame in another position would add very little to the general impression of the animations, because the timing and weight is also with simple rotated parts there. And I think this game has a really good quality in terms of design and a great color impression.

Sonic 4 looks sub-par indeed. The style of the trees and the style of the foreground elements clashes, there is a heavy lack of depth and the character art looks off. I think it mainly looks terrible because the background elements seems more detailled than the foreground characters and the stuff doesn't blend together very well.
It looks similar to the Flashback Remake (but the quality is by far lower) - there was not a single thought given to the complete impression.

I also don't know what's exactly going on with Pokemon. THe animations themself are looking ok but unfinished. I think It wouldn't cost that much to create polished animations compared to how well they series sell. The workload for this would probably be 5 hours per monster. I don't exactly know how many monsters are in the new games, but even 50.000$ are peanuts if you think that they sell millions of copies from each game.

I'm wondering. Can't we try together with a new challenge to do something like "bring back 2D pixel art games to life"… And show the world HOW it must be done ? By hand ? With a palette ? With many frames of animations ? With respect of the original art direction ? We should do something like this. Even just a few animated mock-ups. To show the world it's possible. And what it can look like if done correctly.

I think we can't. You say "even just a few animated mockups" but the level of quality have to be maintained through a whole game. A simple change of 5 minutes per frame/time multiplicates itself by the number of art assets and you end up that even the simplest change causes a shitload of hours just with editing. And hell, there is nothing more pointless to spend a lot of time with editing if your budget is tight and you have to get a game done. And if you edit things you see one time in a game it's even more senseless and just taking money.

Just lots of people underestimate or don't understand the design process of a game. A common thing I hear often from indie developers is "Why should I spent money with design if I could just spent this money for increasing the content." The thing is that a solid design saves you lots of editing time and sometimes cuts down the hours per asset remarkable.
But it's not just the developer, also some artists don't know how heavily the simplest change in design can affect the whole artistically workload.

The worst thing is if inexperienced game artists and inexperienced game producers work together and nobody knows how the budget is planned in best.

I think it would be more useful to compare and analyze the art and style of games and why the art was most probably done in the way they are. There are some Commercial Critique Threads which were written before my times in the forums - but I read some of those and they were great.

Even Flashback doesn't look good on the pixel level nowadays. If we would do the same thing with the background like we did in last two cluster studies there woul dmost probably be surprisingly good results - but I doubt anybody would recreate a whole background, because it would take by far too long.

All in all I really liked this post 

[Helm]

It is really startling, indeed. Flashback is one of my favourite games and the jungles of titan tileset once looked to me to be impossible to reach in terms of pixel quality and now I see sloppy stuff everywhere. It doesn't diminish the aesthetic result too much, but it's not super-well pixelled.

[Arne]

Kind of sad to see that no one took the opportunity to play with those Giger'esque jungle organics. I actually didn't like the game graphically back in the day because it was a gritty departure from Another World's abstract flatness. Looks pretty neat when I see it now though, as a standalone expression.

But, you, OP, picked a flashback screenshot with uneven pixel scaling, and then had the gall to complain about the Pokιmon sprites, which, mind, are animated real-time from chopped up pieces by the engine, not sloppily by hand, if anyone thought that. It's a cheap way to liven things up and sometimes just having a feature at all is more important than the fidelity, which is subject to diminishing returns.

[ptoing]

Another World and Flashback have got nothing to do with each other, apart from the same Publishers. It was totally different devs (seeing as AW was more or less done by Eric Chahi himself).

[Conzeit]

wow. I just read that the original creator of Flashback may be in charge of the company Vector Cell which is making "Flashback Origins" so this whole mess is more of a George Lucas thing where the creator ruins his own franchise by remaking it and 'not getting it'

Honestly, I think that 2D graphics just arent the focus for quality anymore, when they're done it's mostly for nostalgia value. I think part of it may be because 3D allows for animating on the fly and is more conducive to interactivity, so that limits gameplay options.

Super Ghouls n Ghosts and Bionic Commando Rearmed and the upcoming Oddworld Oddyssey New 'n Tasy are good examples of 2D games updated each in their own way, but they were made in 3D, not 2D.

Not to say I wouldnt love to see some kind of Punchout styled game with art worthy of the lastest shonen anime craze, but there's just a limited amount of interactions for which 2D art is really the highest quality option.


Lately I've been thinking the natural media that most reasembles the thinking of pixelart is linocut, I was just struck by the work of  Sherrie York, and while reading this it just struck me how flashbackish the mood is on this particular piece

Now the idea of drawing hi tech and dudes shooting lasers  instead her usual birds wouldnt have appealed to Sherrie, but the idea of linocut concept art for pixelart remakes still seems quite appealing

[Arne]

That's peculiar. I recall it being touted as a sequel, perhaps because of the shared mechanics, but back then there wasn't a whole lot of information sources and I haven't thought of it since. Oh well. Looks like there was an actual sequel called Heart of the Alien though (made without Chahi's involvement) (Edit: Oh lord, it looks painful to play).

[ptoing]

Yep, Heart of the Alien is pretty meh tho.

Flashback also has a sequel, called Fade to Black, which is lowpoly 3D with super low res textures in places. Not that great either.

[Ymedron]

You blew my mind with the Pokemon thing, I've seen the blatant rotation in them but I had never consciously put it in the correct context. (a multimillion company producing a game for one of its most successful IPs) Maybe because I've never really played the latest Pokemon games.

Or maybe because of what Ymedron said: I only really played the first and second generations, and when Crystal Version came around, I was amazed and glad that they had taken the time to animate the 200-something pokemon (not to mention there wasn't any fugly rotation). Back then I thought of it as a boon, a very neat extra that took a lot of work that wasn't necessary. "Poor guys, working unnecesarily hard to please my eyes even further".

But that was back in the second generation. The producers don't deserve any "pity" anymore, nowadays. Pokemon hauls in the cash, even though it is now one of the most stale game series EVER (even more so than the zeldas or the 2d marios, which coincidentally also are incredibly lucrative). If they're gonna keep feeding consumers with the same old stuff, the least they could do is use some of their millions to make it pretty.

Well, seeing how they made the jump to 3d in their upcoming games, it seems they are in fact doing this? Im not sure about the costs of 2d vs 3d animation.

[yrizoud]

Older games were typically made by small teams, often one graphist for the whole ingame stuff. Either he was bad and the game was promptly forgotten, or he was good and everything was consistently good. (What's the word? art direction?)

[tim]

Sorry guys. I know my first post yesterday may have sounded childish and angry.

It's just that the original creator is destroying is own IP, and this simple screen is a compilation of all the "best practices" I dislike in videogames since a few years… This is why on this generation (PS3 & Xbox) you don't have a lot of games you will remind deeply : they are generic. You can almost replace assets from one game another. Try to do this on 2D games. No. They all looked unique. They all left a stamp in our visual memory.

Here on pixelation, we are some of the last guys who cares about this medium and want to share the secrets of making quality pixels. We are like these old guys whose their jobs disappeared slowly. I just wanted to… I don't know. Make people wake up. I'm living in Paris as an Art Director, I'm even wondering if I shouldn't go to Vectorcell (which is in France) to be hired as an art director and try to save this remake.

About Rayman : You are true, the game looks extremely smooth & good. I just used it as a proof of today's laziness. Nobody wants to draw frames tediously. Everybody want the shortest path to achieve the "ok it looks good it's enough". This is the same for 2D Dreamworks / Disney Movies. I rewatched The Prince of Egypt a few days ago, and the animation is astounding. You can feel the volumes, the weight, the physics, the intention of each character, each move, this is incredible. This is the same for some good old 2D anime like Akira or Ghost in the shell. I'm sad we don't have anything like this today. There is only a few japanese like Ghibli because these people are hard worker. But overall, the production shrank so much it's really depressing.

[Seiseki]

I think it's important to consider that the only reason these games were pixel art in the first place was because of technical limitations.
The games creator probably had a different image of the game all along and as such, he can't see how problematic it is to remake the game in this fashion.
That's no excuse for doing a poor job though, this looks very uninspired and dull. There's nothing unique or special about it at all.
And I really don't think the game benefits from having depth, which just makes it confusing and unclear when it comes to gameplay.

The thing that bothers me the most with sonic 4 is how detailed the backgrounds are.. It looks so strange and off.

And if you really care about this game, you should mail the current studio with a link to this thread.
This forum is filled with industry professionals and high level artists, so they would do well in listening to the critique.

Edit: The saddest thing is how people undervalue good and atmospheric 2D art. It makes me about as angry as you Tim, because you can do fantastic things with 2D but everyone is so obsessed with 3D that no one tries to do innovative technical things with 2D, like dynamic shadows in 2D or bump mapping which were first used by indie developers.

As for art direction - look at Borderlands, their original art direction was a typical dull realistic 3D style and they realized that their concept art looked much better than their game. So they started making the game just like their concept art.

[Dusty]

About Rayman : You are true, the game looks extremely smooth & good. I just used it as a proof of today's laziness. Nobody wants to draw frames tediously. Everybody want the shortest path to achieve the "ok it looks good it's enough". This is the same for 2D Dreamworks / Disney Movies. I rewatched The Prince of Egypt a few days ago, and the animation is astounding. You can feel the volumes, the weight, the physics, the intention of each character, each move, this is incredible. This is the same for some good old 2D anime like Akira or Ghost in the shell. I'm sad we don't have anything like this today. There is only a few japanese like Ghibli because these people are hard worker. But overall, the production shrank so much it's really depressing.

Nothing about Rayman Origins ever game me the impression of "lazy" when I played it.

Also, multi-million dollar top IP or not, Pokemon B/W had nearly 700 Pokemon... now I won't get into a discussion about what's wrong with that, but rotation seems like the only viable method to animate 650 sprites; even if they paid someone to sit and neatly clean up thousands of frames the DS cartridges do have space limits. Probably the biggest flaw is the DS hardware doesn't have anti-aliasing.

[Facet]

The Flashback shot does look pretty bland and strangely disproportionate but it's not actually confirmed as being representative yet.

Sonic though! have a look at the official site, I'm getting shades of Sonic 3D.

Neither are really 2D/3D/whatever process or medium problems directly, just art direction. It can be hard to see past the technological gulf to inherent pictorial qualities if you're not particularly interested in art, which I can sympathise with; I remember scoffing a bit at some stuff which I actually still cherish today in favour of some early 3D that is pretty unplayable now.

Rayman is all-round lovely imo

Edit: Delphine previously worked on an unreleased 2D Flashback sequel for the GBA: Flashback Legends which looks dramatically removed stylistically; incongruously Rayman-like actually.

[Arne]

Those jungle bits almost have Psygnosian qualities, though not the drab palette.

[tim]

I met one of the guys working on the remake.
He told me himself the game "is gonna be shit".

Animations & gameplay aren't precise like the old one, there is a lot of playability issues. Freedom vs Quality.
No more grid, no more areas, just smooth camera on the entire level… That's also why we have free aiming now.
You can also see the problems just from the screens : the character is not "aligned" on any grid, hence the feet floating
instead of touching the ground.

I'm good to make the next-gen retro cyberpunk game of my dreams myself.

[Helm]

What's interesting is that even on the indie arena, the games inspired by Flashback like Deadlight or that Rocket Chicken game misunderstand the valuable lessons of their source material. Some set their games to the grid, but the grid by itself isn't what makes Flashback Flashback. It's lush animation and movement flow, keeping momentum. The best new-school take on Flashback was Mirror's Edge and those 3d Prince of Persia games, really. If someone wants to make a new Flashbackesque game set on a grid, they should really look into how Flashback handled invinsibility frames, why it automated its ledge-grab on the full run, why and how the duck-roll worked, why you could queue in pulling out your gun while you were still falling or rolling, why there's a fast pull animation when you land, why you can turn while dropping from a ledgegrab, those sorts of things.

Most people who love Flashback can't play it very well, which goes for the developers that take from it. Flashback looks pretty and has rotoscoped animations, but those are not what made the subconscious impression alone, it's about movement flow.

Let's face it, it's very difficult for today's gamers to accept a game where the animation has such deliberate priorty where you press left and the character has moved left a full second later. But the lessons of Flashback can be kept and utilized in a game that is fluid at a higher pace than it. In fact, it would be great to give a good player more to think about while still keeping flow.

And some of that flow I am certain Delphine didn't think about themselves consciously because their level design at many places hurts the flow or ruins it completely. Flashback would work MUCH better without screen whipes but with some controlled scrolling. In that you think Flashback is about flip-screen, you show you don't understand the game you love that well either, see what I am saying? This is why nobody has made a very good spiritual follow-up to this game. Hard to play, hard to explain, hard to master, even when you master it, it flows only for a few seconds at a time and only on a few screens per level. The aesthetics are fine and there's a million games with that european sci-fi Moebius influence to them. The gameplay mechanics are mostly still untouched upon.

If you want a better future for the Flashback influence, understand it better and communicate it better as well!

[tim]

Despite what you think, I'm actually an excellent player of Flashback and well aware of the subtleties of his gameplay.

I'm coding myself a 2D game since a few months now, and I understand very well the issues of responsiveness vs prioritizing animation. But games like Abe's oddysee showed that it's possible to manage these two in a way you don't have to sacrifice any of them. For my own game, I ended up with a system without any grid, which really helps to shorten the general responsiveness but I still finish the current animation before launching the next-one. Actually it works really well even if it's not as instant as Sonic or Mario, it's still a lot better than Flashback while retaining the animation flow and the overall feeling of quality.

Anyway. I will post soon about it with all the artistic choices and technical details to discuss all together, because it's kind of overwhelming to make all the choices alone without feedback. And I think I need people like you with a deep technical understanding of these old games, their playability, what made them so good and where they're outdated now.

[Helm]

I am much looking forward to seeing your game.

[tim]

First video of the game : as I expected, it's hideous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eqdGLJly1wY

The Art direction is poor, the colors are terrible, the animation makes me cry, and I don't even talk about character design…

[Carnivac]

Eh I dunno.  Compared to some other HD remakes of 2D games it looks alright to me.  But maybe I'd feel different if the original was 'my favourite game ever' and I had my own ideas about how it could be redone.  I was never a big fan of the original game.  I owned it on Amiga, completed it, but apart from a couple scenes and a bit of music it never really stayed in my mind and I always found the character extremely frustrating to control and not particularly interesting to look at (smooth animation yeah but I never cared for the flat undetailed, unshaded paper-like look of the sprites against some nicely detailed backdrops).  Also while I felt the cutscenes were kinda interesting because it had rarely been done at the time I still found them pretty ugly and impossible for me to feel attached to the character when he looked so terrible.  I let it slide at the time because cutscenes were still a pretty new thing at the time and it was cool to attempts at some fullscreen animation going on (although I hate how they've come to pretty much dominated games.  If there's no 'skip' button I ain't playing the game).  So yes in those ways at least I do find the remake somewhat more appealing graphically even if I'm not a big fan of 3D graphics usually.  And maybe I find some bits hard to see in the video with the contrast and shadows a bit overdone but perhaps that's just cos it's a youtube video and I'd probably find it easier to see the actual game on my big HDTV with a brightness setting adjusted.  I do agree about some games looking quite generic and like you can swap assetts between them but that's not a new thing either.  I found a lot of 2D RPG's to often look quite similar and particularly the masses and masses of 2D beat 'em ups that came out after Street Fighter II.  Same goes for a lot of shoot 'em ups particularly of the spacey kind.  I remember finding a game like UN Squadron refreshing at the time cos it wasn't set in space at all and had more military sprites rather than alien and spacecraft. 

Anyways I far more dislike the HD remakes done still in 2D but not in pixel art.  I still think Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is one of the most godawful looking things in recent memory.  Wasted £11.99 on that and can't even turn it completely back into the classic pixels.  Only lets you do the character sprites and then they clash with the HD backdrops and the shadows go funky...   Not fond of Rayman up there either but then that could be that I've never ever liked the detached hands and feet thing.  It's cheap, looks bloody awful and I find the effect totally unconvincing.  That run cycle just looks like a mess to me...

But hey that's my opinion or taste or view or whatever the heck you wanna call it...

[Helm]

lol what have you done Agent Conrad B. Heart?

Well, that looks uninspiring.

[KAT]

This is... CRAP!

In my opinion the best HD game remake is... Another World. Even port on Android is very good.

[Arne]

It looks constrained to blandness by the aim to do fancy 3D with a probably low budget. The... uh quanta manipulation mechanics of the original would probably have been more rewarding to expand upon.

[Seiseki]

So extremely generic... 

[PypeBros]

you can see they're using terrible nearest neighbor rotations…

They're not nice, for sure. But they are what the DS and GBA hardware can offer. I mean, the GPU does that alone, without requiring that some of the 33/66MHz cycles are used to adapt or render curves, and there is no need for extra room in the ROM to store additional images.

The same kind of aliasing occur to textures of a low-poly 3D game, so there's definitely constraints that apply here that you'd never see in a flash-capable or CDROM-powered device.

[tim]

I don't care about hardware limitation. We don't need nice rotation algorythms on powerful hardware. I want carefully hand-drawn rotations. That's all. Nintendo has the money to pay 20 artists in order to animate a few pokemon.

[ptoing]

Obviously Nintendo does not care, and it makes business sense. There are a lot of pokemon now. And the fact is that most people, especially those who are not artists or even pixelartist, do not care or even realise this. So why should Nintendo throw out money on something that will be noted by less than 1% of their userbase as something that improves the game?

[Ymedron]

As they have moved over to 3d models, I think the rotation was in fact a signal that there were too many pokemon to do hand-drawn stuff for.
In Crystal they had like five different frames for each pokemon at best (Espeon comes to mind as an example) but in Emerald it dropped down to two with already using stretching and squashing to make them more animated. Black and White did a good job with making the pokemon modular and thus being able to make them really mobile, rather than having a single sprite to stretch and squash. If they had hand-drawn them, they would probably only have given the most popular pokemon animations.

[tim]

You're telling me that a company making hundred of millions, on one of their biggest franchise, can't animate 2 or 3 seconds of a few hundred small sprites because it's not humanly possible ? Don't tell me an artist can't do these very simple animations, at least one pokemon a day, and don't tell me they can't hire 20 artists. It's very doable. It's even easy I would say. They are no excuses. Nintendo simply sucks these days, that's all. They're lazy. They also could have done a real pokemon game on Gamecube, they never did anything like this. "Too much work" you say. "Lazy people, and easy money" I say.

I don't care about their business. I care about quality and customer satisfaction. When you have the power to do it well, then you have to do it well. If you don't, it shows that you really don't care. Animating pokemons a lot better would not cost that much for such an important license. Also, if you need an example, the sprite work done on the last King of Fighter is outstanding. It show that some people care and they found a way to have a better cost efficiency by animating 3D models first before pixelling. Don't tell me people can't tell the difference. There's a reason everybody loves Prince of Persia, Another World, or Flashback : the quality of their animation.

I can't believe how people like you, who are customers, are trying to defend a company's interest instead of the artists interests & the final customer interests. If you don't fight for quality, if you don't blame companies when they cut big corners to reduce costs and quality, then don't complain that beautiful 2D and well animated pixels are disappearing over time. Both as a customer and as an artist, I don't want that.

[Ymedron]

It's possible to spend that much time, it's just not business-possible.
I'd ask you to hire a team to draw 2 to 3 hand-drawn frames of 649 pokemon, all with an unique bodyform and in addition to that, animate about 50 different trainer sprites with two to three frames, and try to have the game not take ages to complete. Plus there -might- be space constraints to consider, as they probably want other gameplay than just pokemon battles. But I can't attest to that since I'm not a programmer or a ds game designer.

I'm defending them because I can understand that they need to keep costs down while trying to give the best game they can. Also I'm defending the people who were making that game, and my opinion that the decisions they made were a lot better than what could have been done.
I see you have also forgotten about pokemon Colosseum and the sequel to it (I can't remember if it's XP or XD) which were pretty legit pokemon games, though I assume you don't like them because you couldn't catch wild pokemon in Colosseum.

I was absolutely delighted to get battle screens that have a full pokemon backsprite, with the pokemon moving the whole battle than just the start. That wouldn't be possible if they drew each sprite by hand, as they'd have had to add a ton of new sprites just for the breathing. (also notice that they animated segments of the pokemon more, depending on how they moved. For example a flying pokemon has a fully animated wingflap, they don't just twist and warp it.)

Anyway, I'd appreciate if you didn't get so personal about this. I can have an opinion, and I can stand behind it. I don't have any high hopes about being able to make a game entirely based on pretty graphics and no concerns for how long it takes to make. Especially if you are working in a sub-company to a big one that expects you to pull your weight.

[PypeBros]

Don't tell me an artist can't do these very simple animations, at least one pokemon a day, and don't tell me they can't hire 20 artists. It's very doable. It's even easy I would say.

Sure. The question is "can we ship that in a ROM that is cheap enough to accomodate the estimated christmas gift budget of the average japanese family (rest of the world set apart)". I think they *did* animate a set of pokemon as they used to, and the same set with rotation technique. With as much frames as the storage technology would support. I think they then tested those sets on their intended audience (kids) and kids prefered the one that looked "more alive", artistic considerations set aside.
I think managers then said to the artists and coders "do what kids prefered" and the others nodded politely.

Both as a customer and as an artist, I don't want that.

Me neither. I prefer the crafted work of Nieborg et al. on Shantae, for instance. But Shantae is far from being a cash cow.
All I've found I could do about it is to play Shantae rather than the ugly Phantom Hourglass when my 3-year-old wants to watch me playing. I can (and do) suggest her to watch Disney's masterpiece like Fantasia rather than Toy Story Ό. But basically that's all.

As an artist, you can refuse to commission under such terms and go indie. And face the financial risks on your own.

I do, however, defend Ubisoft and the UbiArt framework. They bring back the ability to work in small teams, and free artists from technical considerations such as polygons or pixels. Yet, animation is fluid and works well. Levels are appealing and diverse. There is no realism clash. I think that's indeed great. That allows more focus on the fun, imho.

[r1k]

Hmm I just saw this :http://i.imgur.com/CYzFCL0.jpg

apparently its for a new 3DS zelda game, moddelled off of Link to the past, but using 3D graphics.

[Corinthian Baby]

I was going to post that as well. Here's the gameplay trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNKg1lzeykY
I guess it's supposed to be a sequel to LttP.

I think the graphics are terrible. It looks like someone took the beautius pixels of the original and shred them through several photoshop filters, mainly blur. The pseduo 3D style seems to be popular these days. I get it, it's less labour intensive than traditional pixel art. Pixel art doesn't facilitate high res particularly well. I still think that if you're connecting something to a game as cherished as zelda 3, then it deserves to look revel in the medium. I think the 4 swords gamecube game really pulled the style off, that is pushing the pixels into something beyond the scope of pixels while still retaining the magic that made them marvelous to begin with. They were still psedo 3D but still looked like care, love and attention had been painted into the tiles. This looks like a knock-off.

Painted tiles are a style I am less opposed to. For example, the new Shadowrun Returns looks like a game that gives justice to the classic, rather than glossing over it to cash in on fan hype. Now, Shadowrun Returns also has the creator of the franchise at its helm, along with many others involved in making the originals, but then again so does Flashback, and look how well that's turning out. The sad reality is, is that some artists develop George Lucas syndrome and ruin the very works/masterpieces that catapulted them to where they are today.

[Seiseki]

How is that psuedo 3D? That's full 3D..

[PypeBros]

pseudo-3D in that it's (mostly?) 2D gameplay with 3D models, just like e.g. Donkey Kong Returns.

It may be ages away from the quality of Minish Cap's pixel art, but imho, it's much better looking than the DS episodes.

[tyrannotorus]

The most horriblest aspect of this Flashback HD abomination is its complete erasure of the art style that makes Flashback and Heart of an Alien unique, in favour of an art style so utterly generic I've mercifully already forgotten its existence.

There's no way that the lead artist sleeps at night. His hands are totally tied by the people writing his paycheck.

[PypeBros]

in favour of an art style so utterly generic I've mercifully already forgotten its existence.

Yup. It's not even art any longer. It's virtual actors in a virtual world. Period. To some extent, it's a process that has started long ago with 3D games showing generic action mans as in Far Cry. Although I haven't played any of the games, the avatar just lacks any distinguishable feature, imvho -- no more than Bruce Willis would have in a red shirt.

[PypeBros]

I just found this video where a Metroοd screenshot is temptatively converted into some HD render. I find it pretty disturbing that we don't see him/her *drawing* or *painting* in the process. He's mostly using stock pictures of material and overload them with highlights and shadow to populate the screen ...

With such a process, how can one offer the kind of uniformity that used to bring virtual reality to old-school games?

[Helm]

Yes this looks flat and literal, quite a shame.

[Mathias]

yeah . . . hadn't see that yet, quite a find, quite a find . . .


It's not a game, though. Just fan art - an homage to one of the most classic NES moments ever beheld - The MOTHER BRAIN. Remember that moment?
I think it's great.  And that dude's PS skills are amazing. Look at him go.
"Disturbing"? Hehe, why?




More on-topic with this thread, though - I agree: this Flashback remake is pretty subpar, underwhelming and disappointing. How many classic 2D's must be desecrated in the name of monetization through "contemporary" remakes? HOW MANY
I think, in a 3D game, there's a more obvious sensation of computer-handled gameplay - procedural, automatic stuff, but in a 2D game, they feel more artistic and earnest because there's less obvious computer-handled elements, you're greeted with more "hand-crafted" content and you thus appreciate the dev's efforts more. (a rather flawed blanket statement, but you see where I'm going)

[Helm]

Watched the whole video. Someone who is friends with the artist should tell them in a discrete way that light is not pure white and shadows are not pure black, it's the #1 thing that would help his art.

[Crow]

I realize this has its flaws, but I absolutely love it. Is that bad?

[Reo]

The overuse of different filters and stock textures is really what stops a lot of digital art from being enjoyable to me, I realise they are massive time savers and a quick way to make something look presentable but it often looks souless IMO. Digital art does not have to look like an oil painting but it shows when actual work has gone into it.

[Conzeit]

Crow, that isnt bad but there is no way in hell this would be well recieved in a board like this :p

what this guys does is like what so many "custom" spriters do where they just frankenstenize and graft together a bunch of things to kind of "fill" the shapes, instead of drawing or creating volume. Funny how he gets all the praise for the same thing just because this looks so much more like current AAA 3D games

What I dislike most about this is that everything has the same amount of depth, which makes it all just fall flat...there's no ambience anywhere. I'd like to see what he'd do if he were challenged to make an image with only pure white and pure black. He'd probably go looking for dore engravings and then graft a bunch of them together :p

[Crow]

What I dislike most about this is that everything has the same amount of depth, which makes it all just fall flat...there's no ambience anywhere.

Yes, I agree. I like the general style, though, and if you would get some serious depth in there, I'm sure it'd be rather good.

[PypeBros]

there's a depth problem, there's the light problem ... and then there's that odd feel that this level of detail is miss-matching with the content of the scene. As if "we shouldn't be able to see all that detail". To some extent, I found the swapper, which is claymodel scanned and converted into volumetric textures (or something alike) to bring more atmosphere and a more believable virtual reality.

[Mathias]

The mother brain chamber re-do is just an amusing novetly, to me. Fun to look at, buy yeah I agree with the general opinions. Composition. It is a tad boring. Helm's "too literal" comment is a good way to put it. But . . . I think that's just the way he decided to HD interpret the scene - preserving certain attributes, while taking others up a notch. He didn't get real creative, probably not seeing the forest from the trees. Been there done that.


WOW. The Swapper looks sooo beautiful. Geeze . . .
I used to be obsessed with clay. My fingers would stay waxy for days. I could get back into it, easily . . .
Thanks for the link. (Hah, I love the guy's accent. And he gets pretty emotional about the gameplay hehe . . .)

[junkboy]

I've gotta say I admire the craftmanship of that dude. The way he cobbled together Samus' armor from a bunch of photos of scooters was pretty damn impressive. Very unique way of working. I wonder how he would've channeled that creativity pre-Google Image Search.

[Helm]

I guess he would have buckled up and put the work towards learning to represent volumes and forms like most illustrators / designers.

[RAV]

Tools based productivity, like this photo-sourcing style, is not an expression of laziness but a shift of creative focus. Tools free up spontaneous creativity, and tools empower unlikely people to care for something else than was possible for them to care for before, in a transcendental effort.

So it is not fair to judge the quality of what the tool did for him, but what else he could afford to accomplish instead. For example, Mathias, you would not want your little-dude animation to be judged in terms of pixel quality, but the effort you put into many fun animations you could come up with and implement pretty much because you did not have to care about pixel quality.

Of course, this video of a literal remake is not a good example, it's the worst case that looks lazy. He showcases an impressive skill though nontheless, in how something can be created non-traditional; I think he should not so much be criticised for lacking classic skills but watched for cleverness in what he does. Other than that there is nothing else to criticise but resulted pixel work in direct comparison. And this is a board of pixel specialists after all. But I thought I'd mention this in the larger scope of this thread. Games are very complex amalgamations of disciplines. Developers have to cover an overwhelming number of aspects -- and they excel in that one specifically which is their dearest interest in taking on all the other trouble. Their work should be held towards what was important for them to realize.

Good 3d assets can be costly to produce. But their advantage is that when done they are immensely flexible in employment, and polishing gameplay needs flexibility above all, as does the creative process toying around for new gameplay in the first place. That is how such a game should be judged for then. But again, that Flashback remake is not a good example of this either.

I'm always excited to see people find new ways of expressing creativity, even or especially when they put care into something else than I do.

[Helm]

I follow your reasoning but I would find more cause to be excited if I didn't have to be potentially excited. I'd have to see something awe-inspiring made in this method to celebrate how new tools have helped actify unlikely artists etc etc. This has occured, for example, with the use of photo texture in concept art.  I am of an essentialist mindset, generally, when it comes both to new and old art. Great art = I am paying attention. Potentially great art down the line = not so much.

[RAV]

What is astounding and inspiring artistically about this technique is the fluent reinterpretation and repurpose of objects as something else entirely--the greatest skill of modding.
Maybe if you watch some in this gallery of videos to such mindset you can find something that impresses you creatively?
Other than that it is the natural order that potential has to be created first, and the artistic soul is ever so curious to explore.




Another example I'd like to provide in general is this movie.

The guy who made it put so much sweating effort and heart blood into it, yet when you watch it as an experienced pixel and classic artist, you find obvious flaws in its visuals presentation, you might say it looks cheap and lazy. He didn't make any of the models and textures, he just arbitrarily took them all from the net, you might criticise him for not learning to create it all himself to match, and failures of aesthetic sense, so much that you'd blind yourself for what great he did accomplish. What he did was animating and directing the movie, producing one of the most badass fighting choreographies I've ever seen in my life, even though his animation is not perfectly spot on in execution and there's some bad melodramatic writing at times. If we lived in a world of only classic and pixel art, without the flexibility of modern 3d tools, he could have never made that movie, just because he can't even draw a straight line and knows jackshit about color. And even though there are so many flaws to criticise, we would have been all the poorer without it, we had missed the pleasure of some fantastic ideas--his ideas, no one else's, no matter how much more talented on this or that. These tools don't replace artistic ability--not everyone getting a hand on it will suddenly produce anywhere near something impressive as those guys--but it unearths hidden ability, gives it a chance--he's not good at this or that, but he's good at something--and outstanding results will always be rare.


Posts merged, please refrain from double posting - Crow

[Phlakes]

I don't have anything too intelligent to add since I'm way on the hobbyist side of the artist spectrum, but criticizing things for not being done the "right" way is a very slippery slope. There are a lot of communities out there that take their rules/norms to a very hostile level, even if they have good intentions. Not that you (PypeBros et al) don't have a point. Both the Metroid thing and the video above have some serious issues, and could definitely be better if they were done differently, but they're still pretty great for what they are.

EDIT: Like, I don't mean to make too a big a deal of this but a lot of posts in this thread are worrying to someone who's left some good internet homes after they got too toxic.

[RAV]

Concrete critique on visual result is very valuable, considering in which place we are here and what we are here for to learn. The only caution would be about fundamental critique on anything unlike pixel art; it's not that other kind of artists are too stupid and untalented, there are often many good reasons for what they do, reasons other than in the pixel artist's immediate interest, non obvious reasons, maybe in other ways indirectly beneficial in how decisions have to do with other parts of the product.

[Conzeit]

thing is, in that video clearly the draw of the thing is the choreography which the guy did. in the picture it's the hi def textures, which he didnt do.

Not saying he's bad at it, but it's not my cup of tea :p I never did really want to see in full hd how much rust mother brain's lair had or how many veins she had on her head or whatever.

[Helm]

RAV, your argument hinges on that the links you provided would impress me more, but they did not. Again, I see the merit in your argument, but I can't say I've seen this great art that the world would have missed were these new tools to not be available.

Of course it doesn't matter what I think as a single person, if these people have audiences, the point you're making is self-evidently true.

The opposite concern - and it is a real concern - is about how to set one's standards and filter through the deluge of artistic content in the modern world, and it is under that lens that celebrating alternate new ways to make art and to see people who couldn't draw a straight line make something doesn't seem as important as it would. After some point I've felt, the older I get, the more I have to shield myself from information overload. One of my foremost concerns when it comes to experiencing new art is 'is this worth the time?'. Not to say that I only spend my time on things that are formally worthwhile but that sense of 'why am I doing this? Shouldn't I be doing something better with my time?' becomes so much more urgent as I go on. At this point if I sit and play a videogame or listen to a new record or watch a new movie, I must either set my expectations according to that I want to blow off some steam with well-made nonsense, or that I am going to be experiencing great art with all that such an experience entails. One or the other. The in-between these two ends is really frustrating and disappointing.

So I'm not interested in fight choreography and reappropriating textures from photographs unless the end result is stellar; From an ethnographic standpoint, I am more interested in the phenomenon of new art via new tools and new, unlikely artists in itself than I am interested in their art.

Phlakes, I am not going ass-backwards here. I do not think doing things the 'right' way will result in great art. I am thinking that great art sets what the 'right' way is. All these new tools, if they lead to great art my jaw will drop like everybody else's jaw drops. This isn't about purism or classical hangups, I do not see anything classical about pixel art to begin with and last time I checked there were very few formally trained artists around here.

[PixelPiledriver]

I wonder how he would've channeled that creativity pre-Google Image Search.

It used to be you had to go out into the world with a camera.
Finding interesting textures isn't too much trouble, especially within a densely populated area.
Great contrast between new, old, damaged, and decayed exists within close proximity in a city.

Another example I'd like to provide in general is this movie.

Reminds me of Haloid from back in the day.
Also re-purposed assets.
Lacking in a lot of ways.
But entertaining in design and execution.

This conversation also reminds me of images ptoing used to send me of a shooter.
Can't remember the name.
He would point out stuff they had chopped up from older games and cobbled into something else.
A lot of it also appeared to be from photos and random noise textures blended together.

in the picture it's the hi def textures, which he didnt do.

An interesting line to draw, and discuss, for sure.
It can be comparable to the difference between covering a song and record scratching.
In the cover the song is played as it was written, nothing or very little is added.
In the record scratch many sounds from many songs are chopped up and tweaked to make something new.
The line seems to be based on personal preference/experience.
I've had people to me that using a light table is cheating.

[Helm]

I think the only way the argument 'this is cheating!' has some merit to it is if it is to suggest that not taking such shortcuts and really putting in the effort is more likely to arrive at great art. if it's an appeal to 'authenticity' then I think that's kind of nonsensical in a post-modern era where the concept of authenticity is overwhelmingly considered passe.

In the case of the Metroid HD image, 50-60 hours were reported by the artist, which should be enough effort in most modern visual art disciplines (even something as messy and time-consuming as trad oil painting) to arrive at something that has 'great art potential'. So I think more than anything it's maddening to me how underwhelming the result of 50 hours of work looks using this methodology. The precise emotion I am feeling is 'Don't I have something better to do with my time?' but not with me as the subject, but the artist. I feel bad for *them*. I realise this is not what most people, esp. not artists will feel when they watch this, and there's merit to the approach that anything people pour their love and time into is worthwhile in itself, but this is not an emotion I can help myself to not feel. Some of the feeling would dissipate if I were told that the artist in question is employed and this method to making art has lead to his employment and a financially secure life. If that's achieved, then aesthetics are really beyond comment.

[RAV]

@conceit
But maybe it has some fun composition, or just presents a cool scenario, that is an aspect too. At the least the technique represents an interesting idea in general and cleverness in applied utility. Maybe you shouldn't look at that so much as painterly artistic in critique but creatively opportunistic. It's cool and funny to see a scooter wrangled into samus armor. Now that's something you don't see everyday.


@Helm
While I agree that filtering for your time is important, I also try to find the good aspects in what I happen to observe. There is often something little to be learned still.

Really, most of all I find it simply amusing and amazing that it is possible at all to produce content good enough this weird way -- it's almost performance art to watch, like some street juggler -- than I could concentrate too seriously on why this good enough is not great enough.

I understand your motive, but think about this scenario, if I were to take up on your attitude from my point of view:

As a machine coder I have my own standards what quality software is. I could go around and make fun of people writing scripts in simplified high level language environments, not take their work serious and filter it out to save my time. But I don't. I have seen people do surprisingly clever stuff on all kinds of level, that I can respect. And whenever I saw just another trendy tool come in with roll-eyes, it wasn't long I saw to my surprise someone figure out a creative way to make good use of it anyway. Not shockingly world shattering from my perspective, not even useful for myself directly, but little neat things that gave me joy to the craft and maybe indirectly affected some ways I think about my own work. I also realize that for certain types of work certain tools and environments are very effective, more than others, a time saver when shit hits the fan, so it can't hurt to expand the horizon.

From a coding and higher mathematics perspective there is nothing -- nothing at all-- thrilling about pixel art games, least of all games made with tools like GameMaker, etc. It's a waste of time from that perspective. But it would be pretty dumb on my part to ignore your work, which has other obvious qualities, on the sole merit that it is not furthering my own professional interest immediately, that it's a waste of time since it's not blowing my mind on every possible aspect and especially not in the one I'm most interested in. That would be hysteric.

Rather I just lay back and enjoy the show, with the relaxed expectation it will have a good influence on me in another way. Progress in self-development not only comes forcefully, but also just how it happens. Like we can't always be awake, we have to sleep too, but that sleep is not a waste of time actually, important processes of understanding happen in it too, which improve the next phase of being awake. I don't believe much in waste of time, if its not always the same kind of time. It could very much be a waste of time to stick to your sole interest, and exposing yourself to some "crap" might suddenly give you a leap as the best thing you ever did. Or not. You never know. There is no solution to the problem, things happen.

So yeah, that smart asset reinterpretation technique and that great choreography I can very much appreciate as such even if the package as a whole has flaws elsewhere, I'll easily ignore those if that which it is about is great on its own, I feel enriched about having seen it, as I would looking at your game even though I don't care technically at all.

[Helm]

The bottom line is that I feel artistry has been trivialized enough in the current market climate and clever tricks - no matter how they enrich our perspective as creatives - also deserve critique. Not mocking but certainly critique.

[RAV]

Yeah, I think on that we very much agree all along. Critical thinking includes pro as much as contra, and I think our critical dialogue was a productive analysis, I know I learned something.

[Conzeit]

Guys, there's a game that recently came out, which is about a bond-like spy going after a bond-like villian, plays roughly like canabalt and the aesthethic is of flat shading emphasizing sillouethes. supposedly 50's or 60's poster art is an inspiration. I cant for the life of me remember the name of the game. I search for it and I keep getting usng keywords like "spy canabalt hi def vector" and I keep getting gunpoint (the fully fleshed game version of trilby) I dont mean gunpoint....anybody know what I mean? something like THAT would've been a better option for Flashback, even if some modifications for extra detail would be necesary

The thing with these HD remakes is using pixelart is like inherently putting a veil over your art to hide certain details and keep things unspecified. When they specify the detail it's like removing that veil, so more ambience another form of obfuscation that feels organic must be used so the veil is pushed into the background rather than removed. I like gestural styles and natural media looking artifacts, there should be enough that they fit each series.

[rikfuzz]

Guys, there's a game that recently came out, which is about a bond-like spy going after a bond-like villian, plays roughly like canabalt and the aesthethic is of flat shading emphasizing sillouethes. supposedly 50's or 60's poster art is an inspiration. I cant for the life of me remember the name of the game. I search for it and I keep getting usng keywords like "spy canabalt hi def vector" and I keep getting gunpoint (the fully fleshed game version of trilby) I dont mean gunpoint....anybody know what I mean? something like THAT would've been a better option for Flashback, even if some modifications for extra detail would be necesary

I believe it was just called Vector.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF97oUDPFCw

Feel a little uncomfortable how close it is to their obvious inspiration. 

[PypeBros]

I believe it was just called Vector.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF97oUDPFCw

Some feeling of dejavu ... And my brain almost immediately linked the kind of action to a Tintin story

[PixelPiledriver]

Played around with this a bit just for fun.





Added bigger areas of darkness.
More interplay of color. 
Used a sharpen filter since half size was a little soft.
And generally made a mess everywhere.
Did everything with blending modes so it doesn't change as much as it could.

[Corinthian Baby]

I'm curious about how this HD/remake phenomenon affects indies. For example WaterMelon co. (who has done some recruiting here I believe) made Pier Solar with legit megadrive specs, had some nice pixels, and was well received. They then launched a subsequent successful kickstarter to fund an HD version:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/573261866/pier-solar-hd-an-rpg-for-xbox360-pc-mac-linux-and

The art director talks about having to work within the restrictions of genesis for the original homebrew version, vs. the freedoms/limitless colors/tiles/layers for the HD version. If you ask me the pixel version looks much better/cleaner, and I'm sure the others here would agree. The limitations create a much more focused and precise look while the painted tiles are bit harder to read, they're a more cluttered and filtered skewing the priorities.

I think both styles have merit, as I said before painted tiles can be done well, but I think conceit is right on the money when it comes to translating pixels to high res, that there is something lost in the translation of seeing more.

If there are any lessons to be learned from remakes, they're surely taken from nintendo. (All they do is remake/redux their old games, and usually successfully.) Look at metroid zero mission vs. the NES original. One has a lot less limitations, but the same spirit is charged through the tiles. (Both are still pixelart but the comparison is exemplar of higher res/capabilities and how you use them. They still had to reinterpret some of the more vague lowres stuff, but did so creatively/compellingly.)

That Vector game looks interesting. Reminds me of mirror's edge for obvious reasons, but does have the bond edge to it. Stylish too.

@pixelpiledriver:
Certainly looks juicer with the color edits, brings some of that depth back. One of the problems I have with the orig are the specular glows emanating from those fire donuts.

[rikfuzz]

Personally I'd really love to make a HD game - it's much harder to get right though for sure (not to mention more work).

As much as I love pixels they're not perfect for everything. We have to be honest - marketing wise, there's an ever widening age-group behind us that didn't grow up with it, and potentially doesn't get it.  Not going to stop us, of course, but sometimes it feels like it's getting increasingly niche and self-indulgent. (I hope this isn't too inflammatory, I certainly don't want to discourage any of us dedicating a lot of time perfecting the art, all I mean is it's not all there is to know). 

(2D) HD games are still relatively virgin territory, there's plenty that hasn't been done or fully explored.  Style wise you can look exactly like any saturday morning cartoon, classical painting, modern art, collage, anime, claymation - whatever your personal style it can be right there with no disguise.  I find that pretty exciting.  With pixels you can look exactly like a game from whichever era you find most nostalgic, certainly with unique personal style, but the style is confined (with both benefits and detriment). 

[RAV]

like(1) this(2)?

That "smudging"-technique looks relatively fast in the hands of a very talented expert, considering the high resolution.
For a HD technique, it looks more artistic than photo-sourcing and more detailed than vector art.

[tim]

I'm currently working on my own HD game.
What I found, over the first year working on it, is that you HAVE to restrict the colors if you want to keep this retro feel,
(don't be limitated by the numbers, but try to stick to a palette, just like painters did in the past). Also paint using clumps
of colors instead of smooth gradients (just like pixel art did), and you have to animate by hand frame by frame instead of
animating layers.

[Conzeit]

Guys, there's a game that recently came out, which is about a bond-like spy going after a bond-like villian, plays roughly like canabalt and the aesthethic is of flat shading emphasizing sillouethes. supposedly 50's or 60's poster art is an inspiration. I cant for the life of me remember the name of the game. I search for it and I keep getting usng keywords like "spy canabalt hi def vector" and I keep getting gunpoint (the fully fleshed game version of trilby) I dont mean gunpoint....anybody know what I mean? something like THAT would've been a better option for Flashback, even if some modifications for extra detail would be necesary

I believe it was just called Vector.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF97oUDPFCw

Feel a little uncomfortable how close it is to their obvious inspiration.

Thx, but no that isnt the one. this one didnt have black sillouethes. everything was flat colors but it wasnt just sillouethes, I think the spy had a white suit. The enviroments were actually not like canabalt, it was very fancy bond-like rooms. it also had cutscenes where you could see the characters had no face features. The protagonist might actually be the bondlike villian not the bondlike character.

@TIM: That's really interesting. I think part of it might be that pixelart forces some cohesion, so when the limits  are removed someone who isnt observant as you are might just try to solve things by adding more colors/gradients/filters/whatever instead of improving the aesthetics

[Mathias]

I'm currently working on my own HD game.

Where's our sneak peek!?


*EDIT   Because I'm doing one, too. And mine's gonna be betterest.

[tim]

The game is out on Xbox.

Everything is looking terrible, as expected. The animations are worse than 20 years ago. The colors, the mood, are totally off. The art direction is totally generic & bland.

Take a look by yourself :

http://youtu.be/fjuCebmbXK4?t=5m21s

Matthias :
I made a little landing page of my project here : www.behindnowhere.com

[Helm]

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-flashback-hd/2300-7868/

Really now. Include the original in an ARCADE VIGNIETTE when the game was never in arcades. AND MAKE IT MANDATORY. No fullscreen.

[ptoing]

Wow, that is some seriously lame shit. What were they thinking?

[ErekT]

The animations are so very sloppy. What the hell is this? Heh, shee-it...

@tim
I like the atmosphere in that. Will be cool to see more

[Seiseki]

Wow, that is some seriously lame shit. What were they thinking?

That they could get away with it, and maybe they can?
We're quite a special bunch here on these forums and the game was obviously not targeted at us..

[ptoing]

So you think the average user would not like to have the option to play without the arcade can taking up half the screen, having a vigniette going on which darkens the borders of the screen, and instead play it fullscreen? No, surely not, people love to have no options and being forced to play something with filters or bullshit they can not turn off.

[Seiseki]

Oh, I just thought you meant the remake in general..

Looking at the comments though, people still buy the game, even if they complain about the it..

[ptoing]

Because people love to complain. Anyone knowing the original and getting the remake has too much money to burn.
But I guess it is more convenient than downloading DOSBox or an Amiga/Genesis Emulator or something. The original is not on GoG either it seems. For shame.

[Helm]

This is my only problem with this thing so far. I don't care about the remake, it's not harming the original. But the way they've packaged the original in here, and that it's the only legal way to have it on modern systems is completely insane.

[ErekT]

Little tricko to make their dodgy remake compare favorably maybe? That thing needs all the help it can get 

[ptoing]

...only legal way...

Another legal way would be owning the original, which I am sure you can still get on Ebay, and then run it in DOSBox.

[Reo]

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-flashback-hd/2300-7868/

Really now. Include the original in an ARCADE VIGNIETTE when the game was never in arcades. AND MAKE IT MANDATORY. No fullscreen.

From the review I saw it seems the ''arcade'' version doesn't even have sound? That's pretty shitty.

[tim]

They don't have the rights for the original music. Hence there is not even remixed soundtrack in the remake.