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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3364 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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SMAC is frustrating these days for combining some of the best mechanisms ever seen in Civ games with graphics bad enough to just about render it unplayable now.

It would need a lot of rebalancing for the modern age. Hasn't the meta stabilized on "settle densely and forest all the things"?

Tell me about that! I found the game unplayable when it was new (the alien life was a color I couldn't differentiate from the background.

Does it? I mean I get graphics are subjective. But everything post 320x200, 256 color VGA graphics seems to have aged incredibly well. You still see games made in that pixel art style, unlike 4 color CGA or 16 color EGA! And especially the late era 2D games, before devs rushed into half baked 3D implementations that truly aged terribly. The original StarCraft, Master of Orion 2, Alpha Centauri, Red Alert, Baldur's Gate, etc all still hold up today IMHO. I mean I know there are bonkers HD sprite versions of many of those now. And yeah, HD StarCraft and Command & Conquer do look a lot better. I'm not gonna pretend there is no meaningful difference. But 640x480 or 800x600 sprite graphics aren't half bad. They are closer to 720p HD than to 240i SD.

For me at least yeah. The graphics and interface were so bad that I couldn't really stick with SMAC when I tried it. I don't mind old graphics per se, but something about that game really did not age well imo.

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