I was recently looking through the official OG Japanese Darkstalkers guide. All the screens were photographed from an arcade monitor, reflecting how Capcom meant for the game to be displayed. These sprites were optimized for CRT monitors! 
It's become a running joke that Morrigan's unchanged sprite looks so out of place in all the VS games. But when you look at her sprite as it was meant to be displayed, in Darkstalkers, on an arcade monitor with scanlines, it looks great!
Something that will be very difficult for future generations to understand (because it just can't be emulated properly and even photos are misleading) is that older console and arcade games didn't look low res upon release.
Older games were optimized for the CRT monitors of the time. The scanlines that the monitors naturally had, blended the pixels in a way similar to the texture of a convas coming through a painting. It was naturalistic and didn't draw attention to itself.
Another example from the OG Darkstalkers official guide.
LEFT: photograph (of a photograph) of how it looked back in the day.
RIGHT: Naked dot art with super sharp pixels. Still beautiful, but very different! (also overly wide since CPS2 board had non square pixels!)
LEFT: photograph (of a photograph) of how it looked back in the day.
RIGHT: Naked dot art with super sharp pixels. Still beautiful, but very different! (also overly wide since CPS2 board had non square pixels!)
Previously posted shots were from this beauty. You can read more about it here:
darkstalkers.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_(…
darkstalkers.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_(…
Thanks to @Majora__Z for sending me these amazing comparisons! Look at how much detail you're missing when youre only looking at the raw pixels. Richter's hair is barely visible! Look at how much clearer his boots read as leather on the right!
People typically extol the virtues of scanlines/old school monitors in relation to 2d pixel art games. But my god they make such a HUGE difference for PSOne games as well! (Please view at 💯% zoom to see what I mean!) The image on the right looks so much richer and warmer!
This is perhaps the best case I've ever seen for emulating old monitor effects vs sharp raw pixels. The image on the left looks noticably compressed. But on the right all the shading and blending works perfectly. It looks rich and painterly! The skin suddenly feels alive!
Holy cow, look at the differences in the sky and the ground here! I remember DKC looking like it had an impossible amount of colors originally! Never looked the same on re-releases to me. Now I know why! The game is not meant to be viewed as raw pixels!
Please thank @Majora__Z for capturing all these comparisons! These are all such amazing examples of how much information retro games are missing when you don't simulate the monitors they were meant for!
I see a lot of new folks on this thread. Nice to e-meet ya! Please follow me for more scanline related hijinks!
Just to be clear I don't think scanlines are a requisite for good sprite art. Older games benefit from them because they were designed specifically for older monitors. But especially in the HD era, there are so many sprite games that embrace raw pixels and they look wonderful!
In fact, if you enjoyed this thread, please check out "Battle Axe" from @pixelhenk! He's a LEGENDARY pixel artist! Less than 24 hours left on his Kickstarter Campaign. Please support this game, it looks RAD!!
Also please check out @RiskSystem_Game! A true blue indie made by two very hard working devs. It's a sprite based shmup with beautiful 2d animation and very original gameplay. And somehow their lone artist even did an amazing anime OP!
#IndieGameDev
#IndieGameDev
