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Comment by presidentender | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting application of human thought, certainly, and aesthetically necessary for a lot of old games run on new emulators.

However, I often find art composed of unnecessarily-large pixels appealing: see, for instance, the favicon of bravemule.com, or the sprites from Spelunky.

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Totally. The pixels were carefully composed that way on purpose. Don't mess with them.

I've always been a "pixel art" purist. It even bugs me when games try to use pixel art but get it subtly wrong. For instance, a game might use sprites that are scaled up at different scales at the same time and/or rotated in high resolution. This just ruins it for me.

Agreed. I think 'The Incident' [1] for iOS does it just perfectly. And it's a really fun game.

[1]: http://bigbucketsoftware.com/theincident/

Yes! They got it right! Amazing. Thanks for this, I can use it as an example next time I am discussing with game developers that don't understand what I am talking about.

I thought the same until I looked closely at the rotated objects as they landed. Not -quite- right.

Still. Lovely game and very charming and thoughtful artwork.

The artwork is nice, but the game is very hard to play (at least on an iPad...)

I've loosened up on my pixel-tolerance. Remember that a lot of old hardware will support multiple resolutions and sprite scales simultaneously. So while sticking to a single scale for all manipulation has a certain aesthetic usage, it isn't the one true way. It's just "whatever the platform can do."

The problem is that, oftentimes, you have to mess quite a bit with the pixels to make them look the way the pixels looked on the original hardware: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886

I often find that when I'm playing an old game in an emulator that supports these filters I don't use them...even if they look stunning with the filters on, they games look "wrong" somehow (perhaps they don't fit my grainy memory of them so they don't ping the nostalgia button the same way). Inevitably I feel like I'm playing a vector art/flash remake.

Agreed. http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ wouldn't be the same without an "8-bit feel".

I actually really enjoy playing old NES and SNES games in 2xSAL. It adds a Braid-like artsy aesthetic that I really like.

Pixel art is also my favorite art style. However I worry if it is good for use in casual games made for an audience which might have not been exposed to retro gaming? Or is it a part of our culture that everyone now understands?

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