Fake Scan Lines: We Make Things Look Worse ™
WHY?!
[quote]Fake Scan Lines: We Make Things Look Worse ™
WHY?!
[/quote]
Haha, I thought I’d get that. For old games though, the limitations of delivery were definitely there, and did contribute. I tried playing Castlevania - Symphony of the Night on XBOX 360, and had to quit early, not only for the overly compressed audio, but because graphically it looked like garbage, so I fired it up on my old PSX on a CRT. Some people like the noise. I like the noise; I like listening to LPs. To each their own. I was just providing options. If you want to evoke the same mood of what you would see back when people used CRTs, scanlines can help. In the US lots of hipsters like to drink PBR, not because it is good, but because they are douche bags. I’m not scoring myself any points here. I agree, for the most part, scanlines look like ass; so does playing Kid Icarus or Symphony of the Night on anything other than a CRT.
Nostalgia, probably. I’ve seen pixel artists do cool things with scan lines. Currently can’t find any of the pieces I’ve seen, but.
I promise, in 50 years people will be playing today’s games with the stupid limitations that we have today simulated. Artificial aliasing, LoD switch popping, screen tearing, stuttering, hour long input delay, 60 second loading screens. I hate you. T____T
I’m not sure any of the low fidelity of the games from the last 15 years to today are going to become as iconic as the pixels and beep-boop-beep 8-bit music of yesteryear. Nostalgic references to the low-fi of yesteryear will sometimes skip decades: Bioshock evokes the scratchiness of an old gramaphone, Fallout3 the tinny speakers of a console wireless, but even as every episode of Supernatural plays tunes that belong on an 8-track, no one really cares to hear their so-so sound or the ch-chunk of changing the tracks.
I think the basic problem is that it’s on the upward slope of the uncanny valley: by being representational, but doing a poor job at it (by today’s standards, not the ones in effect back then), there’s not a lot of aesthetic gain over being even more representational until one hits a peak of that curve, before hitting the downward slope (wherein you go from “stylized” to “plasticky and creepy”).