Which game has the best blue skies? Also bonus; why were games so sunny before?
The original Sonic games and Jet Set Radio. And After Burner.
Fuck, pretty much every old SEGA game.
>>2857258
Maybe to not have something so graphically intensive like rain? Rain can be literal sprites but can still make older games chug. Also pic related I used to play. Played it with the ps1 steering wheel and it was hard but fun.
>best blue skies?
My vote goes to Outrun
>why were games so sunny?
Games were more about having fun and nothing has dat comfy feel like a beautiful sunny summer day!pulled that out of my ass. How did I do?
Anyone remember UK Resistance's 'Blue skies in gaming" campaign http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/11/blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched.html
Obligatory link to that old page
http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/11/blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched.html
Sega knew how to make them
Is the DC Daytona any good? I heard the controls ruin it.
>>2857258
deep blue sunny skies seem to be a very 90's - early 00's thing not quite sure why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3PlyYWhhZE
though
>>2857280
out of your ass or not, i'd say there is actually something to that. Racing games were more about fun, and not entirely realistic. nowadays they are all trying to be racing sims.
>>2857323
It doesn't control like the arcade game. It's pretty much it's own game with a Daytona coat of paint. It is fun once you get the hang of the controls though.
>>2857258
Was it "I see" or "Icy" ???
I have always like this trend in 90s early 00s gaming. Glad I'm not the only one who noticed it. Its such a light, airy, cheerful feeling to have environments like this in games.
>>2857258
Ah yes, the Sega appreciation thread.
I always liked Emerald Hills Zone's skyline.
>why were games so sunny before?
1. Economic and Political optimism was very high (at least in the U.S.)
2. More games were made for challenge and fun in mind
3. The order of the day in terms of game design was more colors and clarity, not realism (well, not as much as today)
>>2857729
It's "I see".
I WANT TO FLY SKY HIGH
LET'S GO TO GAY BAR
Some people brought up mushy nostalgic reasons for the bright colors. While I won't say the general mood had no impact, I do dare say that it was not the strongest motivation. To me, there were several independent factors at play here. Because I like the topic, I'll just spam this thread a little, and go through them one by one. I got to add, my position is a bit DOS/PC centric, in case anybody feels like complaining ...
>>2858287
Let's start with Outrun. The game has indeed a uniform sky, with flat clouds. In some stages the sky has a gradient, but the clouds stay fairly simple. I see several reasons for this. First, the game is tile and palette based. Each tile can have one palette of 16 colors. Since the number of palettes is limited, palettes are reused across objects. Take a look at the car, for example. Despite the hardware being able to push several hundred colors at once, the car is made of little more than a dozen. That's due to the palette size limitations. Now, you could have a palette of a dozen shades of grey, to model fairly complex clouds, but there's a problem with that. It makes the clouds clash visually with the color density of the car, the track, or virtually any other object on screen. All other objects have this "low color" style to them, with few, but well chosen colors. Doing the clouds all smooth and stuff, would just make them look out of place. A good example of what it looks like when you don't follow this rule, is Test Drive III. That game had flat shaded polygonal objects, that defined an art style. However it then mixed in photos, of cars, and dashboards. These styles clash quite badly. You do not want to mix art styles like that. On Outrun you will notice that even when the clouds are more defined, like in Cloudy Mountain, they maintain the low color density style of the rest of the scenery. This is entirely a design decision to maintain consistency.
>>2858290
Next up, realism. Anon said that the lack of realism back then was a motivation. I'd like to counter that with Indianapolis 500. The game was arguably a hardcore sim, at least for its time. However, the game had a technical limit to deal with: 16 colors VGA. That's all it had for the entire screen. With these few colors the game had to do the circuit, all cars, the sky, and maintain a uniform artstyle. Its clouds are a lot like Outruns, and the reason is the same. Dithering, while certainly possible, would just confuse the artstyle, lead to a clash. The game does have a few dithered colors and objects, but it's always a 50% mesh, and used sparingly, like for smoke, or the tire variants (because the number of greys was too low). So, despite the game being a hard sim, it's still fairly colorful, out of technical necessity.
>>2858291
The next aspect I want to bring up is lighting. The timeframe we're looking at, mid 80s to mid 90s, introduced a lot of rendering changes. Polygons, textures, static and dynamic lighting. While some nitpicker will without a doubt tell me that all that stuff happened long before, this is the timeframe when it reached the mass of developers, and different styles surfaced. I'll focus right now on dynamic lighting, with my examples being Doom, Magic Carpet and Tomb Raider. As mentioned in other posts, developers were dealing with hardware limits. At the time of these games, one very harsh limit was a total of 256 colors on screen. In its most simple sense, lighting means taking the same color, and making it brighter or darker. That means, within your 256 colors, you need different shades of your primary colors, in order to actually do the lighting. The result? Against the blue sky theory presented above, these games actually have a very monochromatic palette. Brown in the case of Doom, blue in the case of Magic Carpet. So again technical limitations lead to the visual style. Now, where do I place Tomb Raider in this? The game did dynamic lighting and a fairly varied palette, at the same time. It paid a price though. The palette had only few different shades of the same colors, and in many situations it made Lara, and the environment, look a bit flat. The introduction of 3D accelerators improved that situation, fortunately.
>>2858293
Another technical reason, that may not be as instantly obvious, is resolution. At the time of these games, resolution of video game hardware was fairly limited, hardly ever more than 400x300 pixels, at least for the high speed 3D stuff. So how does resolution matter? Part of these fast paced games is reaction. The player needs to be able to quickly react to turns, opponents popping up, other obstacles. That also means, the player needs to be able to recognize these things fairly quickly. However, due to the low resolution, an object that is fairly close to the player, is still just a few pixels large. With a more realistic, desaturated palette, that object has a very high chance of being lost in the mush of same hued asphalt, sky, and other obstacles. When the shape of the object becomes distinct, it's too late, and the impact inevitable. So the designers used palettes that allowed to tell objects apart, even when they're just a small blob of pixels. To illustrate my motivation, the second screenshot is downscaled from a game with a more uniform palette. It's very difficult to see the approaching car. The headlights help a bit.
>>2858298
My last reason for now, would go back to lighting, but from a different angle. A lot of these games used no dynamic lighting, be it for technical limitations, or the lack of benefit. Regardless, what the designers did, and were arguable right to do, is use colors the way we perceive them off screen. When we look at a car paintjob in sunlight, we don't perceive it as desaturated or subdued colors. We see, and perceive, a fairly colorful paintjob. Same with virtually every other object around us. The designers used these colors. Interestingly enough, designers still actually use these bright colors. We just don't see them anymore, because modern engines add a lot of shading and implicit desaturation through the lighting model. As example you see screenshots of games that are not exactly well known for being colorful. Yet here, with the lighting model completely disabled, you can see that indeed they have a fair bit of variety. While still somewhat desaturated, the colors are not unlike those of the past. And this game is not an odd one out. Take any modern racing game, and you'll see a very similar effect. In fact, to end these posts, Outrun's very own sequel, which still feels as cheerful and uplifting as the original, uses such a seemingly subdued palette. In a way, it takes advantage of all the technical changes mentioned above. The lighting model allows more realistic colors, the color depth allows more hues and values, the resolution reduces the requirement to make objects pop out.
>>2857290
>full of mixed-race gangsters
my god, you can smell the murica
is the first thing an unitedstadian notices in a person is their ethnicity?
feel good being raceblind
Rooollinnng Staaaaaaaaart!
>>2858301
Thank you for the analysis. Nothing feels unmotivated about how developers like SEGA circumvented hardware limits and, in the process, came up with visuals that hold up today on their own terms.
Fantasy Zone's another example contemporary with OutRun, a game that debuted their System 16 board yet feels years ahead of most games that came out in 1986/1987. When that game tries its own 3D/tromp-l'oeil effect (last regular boss before the end stage separates into multiple blocks, each then coming back together at a spot in unison), it doesn't corrupt the background visuals or wreck the framerate, instead faking a sense of depth for each piece of the boss with just single-color shading and three-point perspective for that enemy only. So a world that first hints of depth via its receded parallax layers now has visual phenomena like this, bound to color principles but suggesting something beyond the hardware.
>>2859849
Hard to believe, but UK Resistance is actually British.
>>2857302
Fucking loved how obnoxiously cheery everything in Virtual On was, all the colors were loud as fuck, the music was happy to the point where it was almost unfitting -- but only almost, the takeoff sequence over the ocean/over the clouds in VOOT, the whole package. Easily my favorite bit of classic blue skies.
>>2858301
That was a nice writeup.
>>2857701
to this day, I'm disappointed Daytona 2 has never been ported to anything ever
and my laptop isn't fast enough to try running it in Supermodel
pretty much every single Model 3 game desperately needed a DC port, and like only 3 of them did (VOOT, VF3TB, and there's at least one other game I'm missing)
>>2859942
>VOOT, VF3TB, and there's at least one other game I'm missing)
Fighting Vipers 2 got a Dreamcast release in Japan and Europe. Was Dynamite Cop a Model 3 game?
>>2859943
> Was Dynamite Cop a Model 3 game?
nope, it was on naomi
>>2859943
oh and SEGA Rally 2 as well.
No Daytona 2/SCUD Race hurts though.
>>2859946
It was on Model 2 actually.
>>2859949
Except the port isn't very good.
>>2860237
The port's okay, the problem is the game itself isn't all that good compared to the original SEGA Rally which is possibly the best arcade racing game ever.
>>2860274
Arcade Sega Rally 2 is still buggy in super model, it hasnt been updated in ages.
>>2857275
Did you ever see rain as sprites in 3d games? As far as I remember it always was just 3d lines.
![Virtua_Racing[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/TjbicdY.png "Virtua_Racing[1].png")
![super_mario_bros[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/kiSRRIZ.png "super_mario_bros[1].png")
Is there NES games where sky is blue, not violet or aquamarine?
>>2858298
Damn, so many times I sent my car flying along with my unfortunate victim on this track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_DH3L54Z6A
>>2862321
That's enough blue for you?
>>2862348
Not exactly NES but blue's OK.
>>2862342
Fucking hell, didn't know they made 5 of those on the ps1
>>2862394
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp0zIrEa4cs
I hope this one get leaked someday, it looks so classy.
>>2862394
They made six of the original Test Drive games, but only 4,5, and 6 made it to the PS1.
>>2862394
TD5 controlled like complete shit so you didn't miss much, not knowing of it. The best thing it had going for it was the the famous sloped streets of the San Francisco map. It was almost like recreating a street race from Bullitt, which was pretty fun even if the game always has been garbage.
>>2862669
>TD4, 5, 6 and Offroads controlled like complete shit
fix'd
There were a few tracks in GT1 that had some nice blue skies, but Grand Valley was definitely the best.
Pic related, going over that bridge was such a comfy ride.
Pilotwings 64?
