Atari 2600 as a style

[Keatah]

Not only is the 2600 a style it is a way of life.

 

But. To maybe clarify or add to what I said earlier. 2600 as a style.. Well.. There's really only two ways to get that authentic look. The original console hardware or Emulator Stella. Simply having blocky graphics on modern platforms isn't enough - for they inevitably end up being restyled in a modern pixel-art fashion. Developers of modern games cannot restrain themselves and absolutely must do more because they believe they're improving upon the original. And that doesn't look "2600" at all. Sofake.

 

To make an authentic 2600 game you need to work within the framework of the console itself. Once you go beyond that, you're simply aspiring to the original. Not actually achieving the look and feel. Especially the feel, because the original enforces a frame rate and an instant unclogged feel. Not bogged down.

 

Don't forget the sound. It's part of the style too. The crudeness of it compared to the mainstream perfection of today only enhances its uniqueness. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

 

Blockiness in RF NTSC is all-in appealing and charming in that vintage way. The fuzziness, the palette with distinct colors, the color bleeding and fringing. It's all good. And modern pixel-art is a farce!

 

I also wish to add that Intellivision, Colecovision, C64, Apple II, Astrocade, Atari 8-bit,  and Odyssey², all have uniquely different flavors. Once NES and Genesis got underway everything became stale. One console started looking like another. Some may argue that that problem didn't start till SNES or PS1, and I'll grant that. Once consoles started using PC parts all hope was lost.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

Most of the "retro" styled games I've seen are idealized versions of an 8-bit game.   They don't seem to constrain themselves by color placement limits, sprite limits, memory limits or even low-res CRT artifacts that real 8-bit games had to deal with.   The end result is "8-bit" games that no 8-bit system could hope to handle.

 

So because of this, I don't see many developers wanting to take on 2600 style in their games, it's one of the most constraining of all.   And I don't think we need it anyway, the 2600 homebrew scene is very active.

[Keatah]

This constraint is a barrier to entry. A filter. Seems to me a developer has to know his or her stuff at the hardware level more than devs using unity and other game engines do.

  

11 minutes ago, zzip said:

So because of this, I don't see many developers wanting to take on 2600 style in their games, it's one of the most constraining of all.   And I don't think we need it anyway, the 2600 homebrew scene is very active.

I always look forward to seeing what new 2600 homebrews are around the corner. There are less than 10 entertainment titles on the PC that currently excite me. Not so with 2600.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

2 hours ago, Keatah said:

This constraint is a barrier to entry. A filter. Seems to me a developer has to know his or her stuff at the hardware level more than devs using unity and other game engines do.

There's that.    But one side effect was the back then developers were often one person teams and needed to be jacks of all trades-   know the hardware inside and out, be a graphics artist, and a musician,  implement game physics.

 

Problem is there's relatively few people who excel at all that.   One reason many 8-bit games looked bad isn't just the machine limitations, but graphics were designed by someone who wasn't an artist,  jumping was weird because they didn't know how to implement the physics.   There's been so many game hacks where someone simply replaced the original sprites with something much better and showed what could have been.

 

So one nice thing about engines like Unity is if you want to design a game, you don't have to know how to implement a 3D rendering engine,  or physics,  someone much more knowledgeable about those things has already done it for you.   You can simply focus your time on your gameplay, graphics and story.

 

[Keatah]

I believe that the iterative testing Atari did in-house make a significant contribution the to quality of its first titles. A programmer would make one change, and others in the office would test and provide feedback. As I understand it, this was a process that happened multiple times a day on an ad-hoc schedule. Very realtime.

 

Pretty sure today a lot of work is done before feedback is provided. Less fluid. Less granular.

[JasperAK]

Fuck yes for the necro on this!

 

My son has been hounding me for this game on the Switch. It's 'They Came From the Sky'. He thinks it would be fun for us to play against each other and since it is up to four players, his sister could join in.

 

I don't know, the gameplay resembles the Atari 2600 and visuals are not much more advanced. I mean this doesn't remind me of the fidelity of the NES with its more pixels per screen or far more colors. Maybe it's not the 2600, but it's something. What is it?

 

This post might look like poop because I can't figure how to add inline images.