>NES and Genesis could have had double or more the color palettes and it would have added less than 1% to their initial manufacturing costs
>>12875441Proof?
>>12875441Less is more, chud
>>12875441How did this affect you personally? most of the gripes people have about old systems are modern worries retrofit into the past. Did you just watch a youtube who told you to feel BAD? Because I wasn't thinking about limited palettes when I was playing the games. Thank God even, as NES/Genesis games looked striking.
Working with limitations is what made games what they were. Do you wanna know why the NES Mega Man games are so much more platform focused than the SNES ones? Because they had to because of the sprite limit. The reason why there are so many height differences, going from a platform from another level to another, enemies being placed higher or lower than Mega Man, was because of the sprite limit and avoiding having too much flicker; and in the end this is precisely what made gameplay so dynamic. By comparison gameplay in the SNES MMs tended to be a lot more flat, because they could. Fast forward to Mega Man 8 on PSX and again they throw 12-20 enemies on the screen at once, because they can, and it's shit.
>>12875441Unlikely. Increasing the bitdepth implies an increase of VRAM & ROM storage as well as extra processing costs for moving larger datasets around.
>>12875461If you have unlimited colors and tiles don't you just end up with pretty ugly flash type games. To a lesser extend some of those pc vga games looked too garish.Yeah pretty glaring limitation, one of the few times I can think where there was minimal compromise was the 3dfx cards.>>12875441Atari 2600 and 5200/8 bit computer had almost 128/256, not appreciated much back then but looks good now for homebrew. Amiga too. Its like how texture filtering ruined texture pixel art but people didn't care at the time.In the early days it didn't seem like people noticed the extra palletes on the pc engine vs genesis that much.
The only time I complain about color palettes is pre-VGA PC games, holy shit CGA lolks awful.
>>12875441That wouldn't have improved the games
>>12875684The problem is the colors they chose, game boy has four colors (or shades) and it looks comfy
>>12875441Even gay palette?
>>12875684EGA can look quite nice with the right artistry. CGA is less awful when they use composite artifacts, not too common though.>>12875691>colors they choseIt wasn't so much a choice but the cheapest and most straightforward way of encoding 4bpp color (RGBI, similar to how the ZX Spectrum did it).
>>12875517>If you have unlimited colors and tiles don't you just end up with pretty ugly flash type gamesAnd if you don't have enough, you end up with ugly ass spectrum type games or CGA graphics like this wheel of fortune dos game I used to play when I was 4.
>>12875684>>12875726Well next time I'll read the thread before posting, but both you guys really nailed it.
>>12875461What is this schizo rant? If anything the level design evolved throughout the years. Picrel is a random mm4 level against a random mm7 level. The only reason I won't do it with every stage is because it would take a while to put it together, go actually play the games and see by yourself.
>>12875517>To a lesser extend some of those pc vga games looked too garishI remember well. Ita like the windows "pipes" screensaver turned into a game. Some shareware was especially bad and company logo screens were the worst color offenders.
>>12875746That secret where you fall down was pretty sick tho
I think the muted nes coloring was an iconic aspect of the system but genesis's greater capability just ended up making it look dingy instead of a distinct style.
>>12875746Way to completely miss the point and talk about something else entirely
>>12876058He was talking about the complexity of level design no? What am I missing? Uneven enemy placement is a thing they do on every mega man game.
>>12875450>I wasn't thinking about limited palettes when I was playing the gamesIt was talked a lot in gaming magazines from the era, specially for comparing multiplatform games.
>>12876271I'm not a magazine.
>>12876281Me neither but I remember to this day that Genesis can have 64 simultaneous colours and the SNES 256, imagine how often I thought about that when I was playing.
>>12875732>>12875684I actually don't mind CGA graphics.
>>12875441Who cares
Why bother? The games looked completely fine even with drastically fewer colors.
>>12876740
>>12876740There are plenty of MD/Genesis games like Comix Zone, LandStalker, Phantasy Star 4, Shinobi (all of them), Crusader of Centy, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Beyond Oasis/Story of Thor, Monster World 4, both Shining Force games, Shadowrun and many others would have looked much better with twice as many colors rather than having a washed-out look that a lot of great games for the system have.
>>12876750>washed-outHuh? I'd think you'd consider them over-saturated, not washed out. Fewer colors generally means more contrast, more vibrancy.
>>12875441limitations breed creativity
>>12876752In a lot of games, like SF2 above and sunset riders, the genesis is often darker and the lack of colors is really evident in some titles.
>>12876772That's an issue with art direction, not palette. Genesis Outrun (bottom-right) has only 32 colors, and looks much better than PCE (bottom left) with 68 colors.
>>12875691>The problem is the colors they chose, game boy has four colors (or shades) and it looks comfyBecause when you have a relatively small palette, it's better to have softer, more muted colorsHell, the Amstrad CPC (right) palette is almost twice as big as the C64 (left), and a lot of times the C64 looks better because each of the 16 colors was hand picked and they intentionally didn't choose garish colors. Meanwhile the CPC palette isn't curated, it's literally just red, green and blue set to off, half brightness or full brightness, so you get 27 colors, but it often looks too harsh and primary color focused
>>12875684I don't mind it too much when they use the other common palette, the green/orange one, that is. The cyan/magenta one is eye-searingly awful and I have no idea why do many goddamn games used it
>>12875450>How did this aACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK>Neck Breaks!You actually fucking went there and became the meme you stupid motherfucker!
>>12876796>>12876772Hey nigger, there's like 4 color corrected versions of SF2 for the Sega Genesis
>>12876838and ?stay mad
>>12875517>If you have unlimited colors and tiles don't you just end up with pretty ugly flash type games. To a lesser extend some of those pc vga games looked too garish.I always thought Space Quest 3 looked 1000x better than 4 and 5
>>12875517>shitting on vgawith what it's sandwiched between this is pretty rich.
>>12876772Well that isn't necessarily washed out. Washed out colors would be more muted colors, like if water was taking the pigment away.
>>12876772There's two compounded issuesThe overall number of colors you can use in a scene is just 64 characters when the PC Engine (also released early) let alone SNES had much moreANDThe colors you can choose from are limited because the megadrive just ignores 2 bits from the character values leading to everything looking drab and muted unless some very creative art direction is at playwhich they solved on arcadeSega's hardware engineers had no taste and just designed it to show games like alex kidd and altered beast just fine and the public thought that was ugly, I would go as far as say they never recovered in japan just from this alone
>>12876796NTA, but I imagine Sega deliberately made the versions for the competition worse to make their own console look better
>>12876951Genesis with its fast processor, but with sound that doesn't default to chainsaw and a good (and somewhat larger) set of colors, would have been a pretty amazing console
>>12875684sovl
>>12877442>sovlit's the bilinear filtering and the 16:9 stretching that does it, innit?
>>12875441>me and the voices in my head could have had double or more the age and we still wouldnt be old enough for the 4chinYup
