I’m going to start using this for introversion-recharge days. Much more efficient than giving a bullet point list to people who inquire why I’d rather be at home alone this or some night.
reblogged from heheheheheheheeheheheehehe
Probably Unoriginal Theory #2,497
The hardware limitations of the SNES era resulted in the need for very dense portrayals of larges amounts of information. Because of this, games with simpler graphics leveraged your imagination through just enough detail, which resulted in a more emotionally impacting game experience than those found in modern day titles.
Lukas Mathis inadvertently touches on this in his discussion on realism in icon and UI design, though I think the same principles can be applied to game design.
If something is too bland, too sparse in identifying details, then it loses its form and, subsequently, its emotional impact: it’s very difficult to anthropomorphize squares and lines. With limited processing power, artists were restricted to a smaller vocabulary of visual cues, and this made the player responsible for filling in the gaps themselves. Consider Miyamoto’s discussion on Mario’s original design choices:
We had to draw Mario as a small character and at the same time, we had to make him look human. To do that, we needed to draw a distinctive feature for him, such as giving him a big nose. We gave him a moustache so that we didn’t need to draw a mouth. It is difficult to show facial expressions with small characters.
