[udp]

Sorry that was poorly worded - I love the SNES aesthetic and of course hope it’s here to stay. I meant “moving on” as in chronologically to the styles that came afterwards. As though we gradually iterate through the past, marking each era as “retro vintage cool” instead of just “old”.

[chongli]

I think some periods have more lasting appeal than others. For example, the grainy low-polygon, low-colour, dithered look of early 3D PlayStation games has, to my mind, much less appeal than the 2D games of late SNES era (and PlayStation era, viz. Castlevania: SOTN).

Lots of people are nostalgic for Final Fantasy 7, for example, but I think most prefer the remake over the original.

Early 2D games have the same issue. I think very few people are fans of the Atari 2600 and its extremely crude graphics. To me, that machine is more interesting from the technical perspective than the visual or gameplay perspective.

[2muchcoffeeman]

There’s definitely a sweet spot for me that overlaps with when games became “really good” to my taste.

I was playing Civ6. And honestly, why the 3D and all the animations? It’s just slow and consumes power that it doesn’t need to. The Civ2, MOO2, MOM, X-Com era is still to my mind the best. I just want the quality of life improvements and some of the newer mechanics from the new games.

[int_19h]

It still depends very much on the game. For example, Battlezone (1998) on PC was from that early / awkward 3D era. But the visual design of the game was very conscious of hardware limitations at the time, making it look surprisingly well back then, and tolerable even today with some minor tweaks like resolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmHc_o9uoUI

(and then, of course, even if the graphics isn't great, the game mechanics might be so good that the graphics doesn't really matter)

[andy81]

Final Fantasy 3-4 is the big example for this.

Remade in 3d, then remade again in 2d to appeal to nostalgia for that style.