There's a phenomenon that I often found both interesting and curious. Have you ever seen a new generation of graphics that completely blow you away at their inception and yet with time make you wonder how you were ever impressed by them?
I recall in my youth when I got my PS1 for the first time with the games Oddworld Abe's Oddysee, and Final Fantasy VII thinking that these graphics were incredible, they took my breath away with how much they popped, and they truly seemed high definition back on my old tube television.
Don't even get me started on the sheer amazingness of Donkey Kong Country's look.
Nowadays it's hard to look back at that era and not snicker at how they could possibly try to pass off a literal geometric cube for someone's hand. Final Fantasy VII, despite still being a much beloved (or overrated if you're in that camp) game, is loaded with cheap polygonal trash that often makes it hard to tell what certain objects even are. Oddworld on the other hand, while modern resolutions have done no favors to the old game, still retains some of it's graphic crispness thanks in no small part to it's fixed side-scroller perspective, at least until you do side by side comparisons with it's reboot New N' Tasty.
It often seems that the same tech that completely wows us when first seen also seems to age the fastest, with each subsequent generation of technology making it less and less eye candy. It's often the reason I find the more exotic graphic styles to be more interesting as they often age better. The best looking game on the PS1 now I often think is Legend of Mana, though back then it was just one of many great looking games, it now has the distinction in my mind for the game whose graphics have aged the best. In the Playstation 2 era, I have a special love for cel-shaded games like Dragon Quest VIII which at the time was certainly great, but graphically dwarfed by the likes of Square's other flagship entry, Final Fantasy XII, whereas looking back now, DQVIII seems far easier on the eyes.
Aging graphics can often hold a sense of nostalgic charm for many, and in many cases there's preferences for a certain style of nostalgic graphics. That being said, as a whole we tend to enter each generation with a sense of awe about the graphical fidelity of the new games, and while we may be tangentially aware that there will be games with better graphics in the future, existing in the now, it's hard to picture anything looking better than this... until it does and our perspective is forced to shift to acknowledge the technical limitations and/or low graphical quality of a game we at one time found remarkable.
I've often wondered at the psychology of this, though it could just be a symptom of "overthinking the issue" that could be hand-waved away by saying "new graphics make old graphics old. full stop." Yet there is an inevitable curiosity about the switch in our brains that make us do that 360 from being able to truly appreciate the bulk of a generation's graphics, and in retrospect never being able to fully encapsulate that same experience again.
I recall in my youth when I got my PS1 for the first time with the games Oddworld Abe's Oddysee, and Final Fantasy VII thinking that these graphics were incredible, they took my breath away with how much they popped, and they truly seemed high definition back on my old tube television.
Don't even get me started on the sheer amazingness of Donkey Kong Country's look.
Nowadays it's hard to look back at that era and not snicker at how they could possibly try to pass off a literal geometric cube for someone's hand. Final Fantasy VII, despite still being a much beloved (or overrated if you're in that camp) game, is loaded with cheap polygonal trash that often makes it hard to tell what certain objects even are. Oddworld on the other hand, while modern resolutions have done no favors to the old game, still retains some of it's graphic crispness thanks in no small part to it's fixed side-scroller perspective, at least until you do side by side comparisons with it's reboot New N' Tasty.
It often seems that the same tech that completely wows us when first seen also seems to age the fastest, with each subsequent generation of technology making it less and less eye candy. It's often the reason I find the more exotic graphic styles to be more interesting as they often age better. The best looking game on the PS1 now I often think is Legend of Mana, though back then it was just one of many great looking games, it now has the distinction in my mind for the game whose graphics have aged the best. In the Playstation 2 era, I have a special love for cel-shaded games like Dragon Quest VIII which at the time was certainly great, but graphically dwarfed by the likes of Square's other flagship entry, Final Fantasy XII, whereas looking back now, DQVIII seems far easier on the eyes.
Aging graphics can often hold a sense of nostalgic charm for many, and in many cases there's preferences for a certain style of nostalgic graphics. That being said, as a whole we tend to enter each generation with a sense of awe about the graphical fidelity of the new games, and while we may be tangentially aware that there will be games with better graphics in the future, existing in the now, it's hard to picture anything looking better than this... until it does and our perspective is forced to shift to acknowledge the technical limitations and/or low graphical quality of a game we at one time found remarkable.
I've often wondered at the psychology of this, though it could just be a symptom of "overthinking the issue" that could be hand-waved away by saying "new graphics make old graphics old. full stop." Yet there is an inevitable curiosity about the switch in our brains that make us do that 360 from being able to truly appreciate the bulk of a generation's graphics, and in retrospect never being able to fully encapsulate that same experience again.
