In my mid-30s but didn’t grow up with video games.
When I started playing them on my own PC, it was NFS, Half Life, Rise of Nations, and Call of Duty that got me hooked.
Now that I’m looking for games to play on my Deck, most of the games perfect for portable gaming appear to be with pixel art aesthetic.
Just why? Is this nostalgia? In the 90s, deveopers were using every trick possible to squeeze performance out of hardware (been watching videos about old games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Prince of Persia, Doom etc) and I can’t even get indie games with some eye candy?
Never have I been so disappointed to find out that Balatro and Vampire Survivors are pixel art games. My interest disappeared faster than a Lamborghini.
Whatever happened to other art styles? Why don’t we see games with vector or pseudo-3D (or 2.5D) art?
Anyway, that’s my unpopular opinion I guess.
That’s a bit fuzzy. Half-Life had a budget of around $1M back in 1998 under its original publisher Sierra On-Line. It had to be saved by Gabe Newell, who went out of pocket to keep it afloat.
This, compared to peer AAA titles like FF7 ($145M), Shenmu ($47M), and Wing Commander 4 ($12M) made it significantly underweight. Even Game Freak’s break out title “Pokemon” is estimated to cost north of $10M. As Sierra On-line was a historically famous publisher on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s debatable whether their dying gasp constitutes a “legit” indie title or not.
But whatever you can say about the original, the sandbox of second-tier mod games that it spawned - Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection - certainly qualify.