The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Half-Life series. What is your favorite game in the series? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there other games that gave you similar feelings? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
I’ve only played the first few minutes of the first Half Life (I know, it’s on my list™). I had to turn off texture filtering immediately; the game looks terrible otherwise. Question: Why did games of this era (Morrowind also comes to mind) look this way, i.e. blurry?
Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.
Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.
I remember my brother secretly installed a graphics card on the family PC and I first noticed because when I started playing Half-Life one day it looked all smooth and “milky.”
I think they did it because they could? Like more pixels = more hi def. But of course the textures weren’t actually high res, so everything is interpolated