Can I just say that Derek Yu is an indie god? I remember being blown away by Diabolika and Eternal Daughter a decade ago. And Spelunky (released last year) is a ridiculously good game, especially with friends. He got his start doing Klik 'n Play games and that's where I first got interested in programming (learning quite a bit about it without doing any actual coding) and pixel art.
I remember seeing this years ago, off tumblr, but for some reason didn't associate it with Derek Yu until now. Embarrassingly, the original that I would have seen back then (cached[1]) was not only plastered with his name, but lived at derekyu.com.
It makes me wonder what other blazingly obvious author connections my brain has failed to make over the years.
Sidenote: I'm pleasantly surprised this is so popular on HN! I'm curious if this was mostly upvoted for plain curiosity, or practical usefulness.
If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value.
I emphatically disagree, you just ruined Derek's pixel art. Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters?
Here's some way more pixelated, color-limited, and dithered artwork. Would you blur or median filter it? Would you paint over it, vectorize it, turn the dithering into generic gradients?
>Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters?
I play emulated games with those filters, and the reason is simple: it makes them look more how I remember them when I played them as a kid. After all, old CRT TVs caused the sprites to get smoothed back in the day, so it's not like perfectly blocky pixels are really the "original" form. Beyond that, playing SNES games unsmoothed makes my eyes water, and HQ*X looks better than other smoothing algorithms.
In any case, judging and mocking people for how they like to enjoy their games is pretty shitty.
But I also appreciate pixel art that is designed for modern displays, and I agree that the medianed version of the Lucha Lawyer looks horrendous.
>In any case, judging and mocking people for how they like to enjoy their games is pretty shitty.
Not at all. Who said all opinions could be equally respected? Some are just plain ignorant and stupid, even when they pertain to personal choices.
(I'm sure for example you'll find my opinion above stupid).
The thing is personal choices are never personal. They aggregate with the total number of persons and structure the society everyone has to live in.
Somebody enjoying "Scary Movie Story 3" is a personal choice. Until you get millions of people enjoying "Scary Movie 3", and suddenly you have to suffer from an avalanche of shitty movies like it coming from Hollywood in order to watch something decent. Shaming them beforehand ("it's a bad movie, and you should feel bad") might spare you...
>Who said all opinions could be equally respected?
Certainly not me. But there's a difference between criticizing an opinion and shaming someone for holding that opinion. I also think those sorts of movies are terrible, but shaming people for enjoying them is unnecessary and immature.
And please spare me your claims of "suffering" because Hollywood makes crappy movies. First of all, the suffering you will cause a single person by shaming them for enjoying a movie is probably greater than the net suffering you will endure from your awareness of every bad movie you hear about in your entire life. Secondly, no number of snotty assholes who shame people for their cinematic taste will ever make a dent in the number of bad movies produced in Hollywood. The most impact you would see would be that at some point everyone else might backlash against the snotty assholes and watch more crappy movies in defiance.
Finally, what analogy are you trying to draw, exactly, between bad movies and smoothing filters in emulators? What negative impact are 2xSaI users going to have on people who set their emulators on simpler scaling modes?
>Certainly not me. But there's a difference between criticizing an opinion and shaming someone for holding that opinion. I also think those sorts of movies are terrible, but shaming people for enjoying them is unnecessary and immature.
Not to sure. One of the basic ways to forge a better culture is to shame people for BS choices. For example, would you let a racist (even if he doesn't hurt anyone) without shaming him? Maybe you would, I wouldn't.
>And please spare me your claims of "suffering" because Hollywood makes crappy movies.
It was meant as a humorous example, but I can defend it if you insist.
>First of all, the suffering you will cause a single person by shaming them for enjoying a movie is probably greater than the net suffering you will endure from your awareness of every bad movie you hear about in your entire life.
This takes for granted that a bad movie just stops there (at the bad cinematic experience). That is not the case. Any kind of art and entertainment, and movies in particular, shape minds, opinions, tastes etc. Bad movies have many cultural, societal and even financial results. A movie can even justify war and hatred (as any state propaganda department can attest).
>For example, would you let a racist (even if he doesn't hurt anyone) without shaming him? Maybe you would, I wouldn't.
To his face? I would tell him why his specific views were racist and harmful. Telling someone that they're racist isn't helpful. Where do they go from there? The only self-identity preserving options you've given them are to ignore you and believe that their views aren't racist (which is what usually happens), or to embrace racism as good and correct. Whereas if you get someone to reëxamine their views, you might get them to change their mind.
In fact, this is exactly what has happened with well-intended but misguided racism education. We've taught people that racism is shameful, but we haven't really taught them how to identify their own racist views. As a result, people think "Well, racist people are bad, and I'm not a bad person, so I must not be racist." And that's how you get people saying things like "I'm not racist, but I think Asians are bad drivers."
And that's the whole thing: shaming people hurts them and doesn't work. I have never changed someone's mind by making them feel bad about what they thought. I've felt self righteous for doing so, but never actually made a difference. But I have changed people's minds by engaging them in discussion. It's hard, and it's not as fun, but it sometimes works.
In case you wonder, these screenshots come from games made for two revisions of the NEC PC-9801, a Japanese 8086 IBM PC-incompatible computer. To be fair, while I think they look good as is you've got to note that the PC-98 used a CRT monitor that would make http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif appear more like http://i.imgur.com/HNmUopH.jpg, hence the dithering.
The pixel art of the time, especially that in console video games, was designed with color bleeding, scan lines and other CRT TV artifacts in mind, which is why it can look "wrong" (oversaturated, overly sharp or lacking in detail) on a modern LCD screen. CRT scan lines are especially good at creating an illusion of detail since they add texture to large areas of flat color typical of NES-era graphics. For those reasons some console emulators today include so-called "NTSC filters" that simulate what a CRT TV would do to raw pixel data. See http://web.archive.org/web/20120313013017/http://www.slack.n... for what's probably the most popular implementation to date.
Which ran MS-DOS with a customized IO.SYS (equivalent to the CP/M BIOS). MS at first licensed MS-DOS by shipping the OEM adaptation kit which contained source code for the IBM PC IO.SYS and object code for MSDOS.SYS, and the OEM was supposed to customize IO.SYS for their hardware. MS did not shipped a packaged MS-DOS for IBM PC compatibles until 3.2.
That is fine but it's a completely different genre of work (probably done on paper). It is nonsense to (say) criticize an ANSI artist because his work does not look like it was airbrushed in Photoshop, it's just a different type and style of work.
Complete disagree with you here. Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. I much prefer the original to the filtered version. I can totally understand people not liking pixel art, but saying it has no artistic value seems ridiculous.
That's what they are pretending; not that it has none.
And this is for games where immersion is one of the priorities; those micro-squares just make think that my monitor may be using some low resolution settings and doesn't help a little bit to the credibility.
Resolution and all other superficial realism measures do not add anything to the immersion capacity of movies or games. Just take any black and white Hitchcock, and tell me you are not immersed in the story. But what can be further to realism than black and white?
I'm not old enough to have played these games when they were released. Nor am I likely to have played them if I were old enough. But I do understand that realism isn't necessarily the aim of art and find pixel art beautiful independent of its nostalgia. Perhaps age isn't the estimator you're looking for?
24 but that's not a honest question. I have played and completed hundreds of old adventure games (almost all of them look pixelated) including Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 and 4 in their original graphics using a DOS emulator; the first two are the more pixelated and are far better than any other of the following but there is a reason why they decades later recreated the first one using less pixelated graphics. Those were the best for the engaging characters, puzzles and comic situations and it has little to do with the low resolution they have.
It still means you grew up when pixel art was well past it's heyday. Yes, I'm sure you've seen lots of it, but when you give examples like Monkey Island as an example of "old adventure games" (which as a genre in itself is a bad place to look at to learn about pixel art), to me that explains why you do not appreciate it.
Monkey Island is cartoon-art constrained by low resolution, but with weak enough constraints that the art did not have to be tailored to the medium all that much any more. We saw that transition begin with the advent of the 16-bit machines, where though there are some outstanding examples of pixel art, is also a lot "just plain art" that just happens to be pixelated - the visual quality had gotten to a stage where a lot of art was no longer specifically made to exploit the constraints of the resolution and colour constraints.
And this is what pixel art is about, like chip tunes and 1K demos and what-not: Making art to constraints. A lot of art is made to artificial constraints, some more stringent than others.
Bach spent a huge amount of time and effort composing within the heavily stylized and specific constraints of the fugue, for example. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to: The constraints guides you towards certain types of solutions that you generally would not pick otherwise.
A lot of famous painters have done many of their most famous works within the confines of specific constraints (some defined by themselves, some by others) of style and form.
Pixel art is a form of art very distinct from "just" low resolution bitmap graphics.
It is generally easy to pick out vs. images that originated without the typical resolution and colour space constraints of the medium, and has been scaled down etc . Of course there is a blurry line in art made in low resolution, but straddling the line towards "just art" by not making use of the older techniques.
For many types of pixel art you can even identify the platform it originated on by visual cues that go beyond basic technical constraints like colour choices, constraints on colour changes and into indirect constraints such as specific shading techniques and archetypes that occur in the images because they work well within those constraints.
Your filtered version is objectively bad. It's the worst of both worlds: a blurry mess with jagged edges. The original version has style; you've traded that for some misguided belief that higher-res or more-realistic is inherently better.
Pixel art isn't just for games, and doesn't necessarily involve nearest-neighbor resampling up to ridiculous multipliers. Sometimes it's just the only way to make something identifiable at 16x16:
>If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value.
YOU will do that "if you want nostalgia". I, and many others, will happily play a modern pixel art based game.
And it's not even about the nostalgia. It's a stylistic choice all by itself, just as black and white photography is.
Today's pixel art is far more detailed and clean looking that any old low-res game -- to the point that it's not about mimicking low-res 80's games anymore at all.
This is irrelevant to your main point, but if you’re going to make the picture look more realistic with a filter, the HQX scaling filter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx) works a lot better on pixel art. Here’s the original picture scaled down and then scaled up again with HQ2x: http://i.imgur.com/w9RIK1p.png. I think that looks a lot better than your median-filtered version, though I’m not sure whether I like it more than the original.
Ugh? Isn't there too kinds of graphics currently used? Pixel art and vector art (whish is automatically converted to pixel art). Every jpg, png and gif image is pixel art. There's no way around it, unless you start using svg's.
Yes, I'm technical nerd. But who can say my opinion wouldn't be right one. Those basic pixel art concepts are also needed with higher resolutions to make great looking stuff.
Every game not using CGA graphics, does look too realistic and confuses people and blurs line between games and reality.
>Ugh? Isn't there too kinds of graphics currently used? Pixel art and vector art (whish is automatically converted to pixel art). Every jpg, png and gif image is pixel art.
If you're looking for a similar article, this is one of the best ones I recall: http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/