Millennial PC Gaming Aesthetics

Oh, that's pretty cool! I love it when Psygnosis gets some love.

Yeah, that one's pretty bad. The thing is I don't even think they've done a bad job overall, it's just that there's a maddening lack of attention to detail.

The pinup on the side of the seaplane in TR2 is a great example. Definitely upscaled, because the details of it have started to diverge kinda wildly (and nonsensically) from the source image. Like, genuinely, what is she holding...

I think there's probably a mixture of things going on, judging by some of the stuff I've seen. There's a bunch of textures that don't really make sense as AI upscales (the above gravel, for example), but for sure there's a bit of that going on.

Okay, I promise this is the last one. Here they clearly took some textures they already had and mirrored them to create a cobra head motif. The remaster repeats its trick of using a high res version of the original source, so instead of a cobra we get a jumble of arms and torso from a carved relief.

They really ought to have improved on the lighting, but consistently the remastered graphics are missing the lighting highlights that are supposed to guide you through the level architecture, making things more confusing than they ought to be.

Anyway, long story short, play with the OG visuals...

Here's the remastered lighting and it's just.. flatter? I won't argue that it's not more naturalistic, but it's definitely less interesting and does a worse job of showing off the level. The irony is that the techniques for lighting videogame levels HAVE improved significantly since 1998...

I realise that I'm risking being a bit "Old Man Yells at Cloud" here, but this is another example. The original graphics here have such great lighting, really evocative of vibe and place, and the mix of colours and brightness helping to pull your attention around the scene. It looks great.

It's like the famous instance of the 'Baldur's Gate' remaster, where once the original textures were in HD it was clear that some of the stone surfaces were actually greyscale images of coffee beans. The difference is that in that remaster the decided to make a new texture to solve the problem...

A scene from Tomb Raider III. Lara Croft stands on a surface of smooth river stones.

The same scene with the remastered graphics. The texture of the river stones is very clearly aquarium gravel and looks extremely weird.

Specifically there's some dodgy upscaled textures that fail to understand what the original graphics were going for, and then there's some odd instances of them unthinkingly using the same source images for the OG textures without asking whether that works. For example:

I have been enjoying the remaster of these games, although simply for the convenient packaging because I'm playing with OG graphics and controls. The remastered visuals seem to generally make smart choices, but there are some really rough patches that speak to a rushed job...

'Tomb Raider II' - 1997 (captured via Remaster)

and Alain de Botton's 'Religion for Atheists', to explain the importance for society of temples and having places to gather together.

Walter Bejamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', for an explaination on the value of physical pilgrimage and what it imbues art with.

Because I'm a specific kind of nerd, here's some things you should consider reading:

And, of course, all of this speaks to the ever growing problem with playing video games as a hobby: it's totally stripped of place. Where do we congregate other than online? Where is our community?

I remember buying 'Knights of the Old Republic' on one such trip (from an EB Games that was subsequently destroyed in the Christchurch Earthquake) and getting to spend the five hour drive home excited at the prospect of playing it. It's a strong, positive memory that now speaks to a dead age.

I think I'm sad that going and browsing games at a dedicated store is now functionally dead in Aotearoa. I spent my teenage years living in a small town, and trips to a big city with games shops ended up feeling like a pilgrimage because that was your opportunity to pick up the harder to find games.

In recent times they really seem to have almost entirely backed off from selling games (outside of being a place you pick up your pre-orders) and had instead pivoted to selling the all worst nerd-oriented collectable crap you could imagine.

Legitimately, I'm pretty sure I can pin down the last time I bought something from an EB Games, and it was over a decade ago. I remember feeling sad at the state of their PC games section at the time, as it had slowly but surely been relegated to a dwindling corner at the back of the shop.

All EB Games stores in NZ to close at end of month It is uncertain how many jobs would be lost, and the letter to NZ employees did not mention anything about the future of the Australian stores.

Upon seeing this news I rather ungenerously thought: "I'm surprised it took this long", which is unfair of me. This really sucks for the workers, but also highlights what a hollowed out shell these stores had become thanks to digital distribution.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

It's honestly not worth it. I'll probably post more fully about it in the next few days, but it has aged the least gracefully of all the series.

I did this once before years ago, but when I upgraded PC I forgot to bring it with me, so it's been a nice little afternoon task re-learning what I did. Plus, now I can play 'SimTower'.

I've been doing my holiday thing of trying to keep off screens and the Internet as much as possible, but now I'm back and feeling inspired! So today I took on a little project of installing Windows 3.1 through DOSBox (and then naturally installing a bunch of Maxis games on it... )

'SimCity 3000' - 1999

'Deus Ex' - 2000

Finally, a practical solution!

If it helps, I'm now in a full-blown crisis over where it can even go in my house because it's simply too big...

Guess who bought something deeply stupid...