Final Fantasy Remasters Reignite Controversies Over Pixel Art (vice.com) 70
Patrick Klepek writes via Motherboard: Few role-playing experiences are as beloved as the original Final Fantasy games, which is why Square Enix announcing a new brand it's calling Pixel Remasters for the first six games was greeted with equal parts shock and horror. For every brilliant reinvention, like last year's Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you have these nightmarish updates to classics like Final Fantasy 6 that are so abjectly awful to look at that fans created mods to try and replace the visuals. It's not really clear what Square Enix wants to accomplish with these Pixel Remasters, but what's abundantly clear is that Square Enix intends to revisit the visuals across each 2D game. The new sprites aren't massive departures from the originals, but they're different, and it's led to speculation about whether the company is going to address a longstanding issue with older games being released on fancy new televisions and computer monitors.
I've always loved the way video games looked -- fuzzy and crunchy -- on those humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family rooms. What I didn't know until earlier this year, however, was the science behind it all. It's not just that high-definition displays provide a crisper look at art made in earlier eras of video games, but that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT, and when that art is viewed on a modern, non-CRT display, you're actually losing some intended detail. [...] The problem is many people will never experience it in real-life, and so filters and similar technologies are essentially forms of emulation for television tech. More than 705 million CRT TVs have been sold in the United States since 1980, and the vast majority of these environmentally unfriendly devices are in the process of being broken down and recycled. That process will take years. But more practically, nobody is making CRT TVs anymore, and as the existing supply naturally breaks down, it falls to hobbyists to keep them ticking. No great shock to learn that Starkweather isn't a huge fan of Square Enix's approach for the Pixel Remasters, partially because it risks erasing the work of the original artists. One solution that Starkweather proposes is Square Enix spending time on a refined CRT filter.
"Filters are simply filters and they change visuals without having any artistic intention behind," said renowned pixel artist Thomas Feichtmeir. "I have not yet seen any CRT filter implemented in a game which truly simulated a realistic CRT experience." While naive folks like myself learned about CRT through a Twitter account, Feichtmeir had a similar realization years ago. At home, Feichtmeir had a CRT monitor next to an LCD laptop, and as he transferred his dawn pixels from one to the other, it dawned upon him that they looked different. He noticed a similar issue playing games re-released on modern displays. "If you make a piece of pixel art on a LCD and you put it on a CRT," he said, "it's the equivalent of taking one of your articles, putting it through Google Translate and to expect that the other language it comes out [with] will have perfect meaning and grammar. A whole field of 'localization' exists for writing and in the game industry to address those issues." Though Feichtmeir has no specific insight into what Square Enix is or isn't planning for its Pixel Remasters series, watching what's been released gave him pause on the CRT theory. "Considering the couple of screenshots and snippets we saw in the presentation, I would not say any of it really accounts for the gap between CRT and LCDs," he said. "We still can see a lot of techniques which theoretically should stay on a CRT -- like overly dithered textures or just color optimized battle backgrounds. The biggest change are the characters, where they basically removed the volumetric shading in exchange for a dark outlined flat style. In my eyes this just changes the style to something which does not feel close to the original. And I think what a remaster should deliver on is to recreate the feeling how the original game felt."
I've always loved the way video games looked -- fuzzy and crunchy -- on those humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family rooms. What I didn't know until earlier this year, however, was the science behind it all. It's not just that high-definition displays provide a crisper look at art made in earlier eras of video games, but that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT, and when that art is viewed on a modern, non-CRT display, you're actually losing some intended detail. [...] The problem is many people will never experience it in real-life, and so filters and similar technologies are essentially forms of emulation for television tech. More than 705 million CRT TVs have been sold in the United States since 1980, and the vast majority of these environmentally unfriendly devices are in the process of being broken down and recycled. That process will take years. But more practically, nobody is making CRT TVs anymore, and as the existing supply naturally breaks down, it falls to hobbyists to keep them ticking. No great shock to learn that Starkweather isn't a huge fan of Square Enix's approach for the Pixel Remasters, partially because it risks erasing the work of the original artists. One solution that Starkweather proposes is Square Enix spending time on a refined CRT filter.
"Filters are simply filters and they change visuals without having any artistic intention behind," said renowned pixel artist Thomas Feichtmeir. "I have not yet seen any CRT filter implemented in a game which truly simulated a realistic CRT experience." While naive folks like myself learned about CRT through a Twitter account, Feichtmeir had a similar realization years ago. At home, Feichtmeir had a CRT monitor next to an LCD laptop, and as he transferred his dawn pixels from one to the other, it dawned upon him that they looked different. He noticed a similar issue playing games re-released on modern displays. "If you make a piece of pixel art on a LCD and you put it on a CRT," he said, "it's the equivalent of taking one of your articles, putting it through Google Translate and to expect that the other language it comes out [with] will have perfect meaning and grammar. A whole field of 'localization' exists for writing and in the game industry to address those issues." Though Feichtmeir has no specific insight into what Square Enix is or isn't planning for its Pixel Remasters series, watching what's been released gave him pause on the CRT theory. "Considering the couple of screenshots and snippets we saw in the presentation, I would not say any of it really accounts for the gap between CRT and LCDs," he said. "We still can see a lot of techniques which theoretically should stay on a CRT -- like overly dithered textures or just color optimized battle backgrounds. The biggest change are the characters, where they basically removed the volumetric shading in exchange for a dark outlined flat style. In my eyes this just changes the style to something which does not feel close to the original. And I think what a remaster should deliver on is to recreate the feeling how the original game felt."
Interesting (Score:3)
Interesting, I had never thought about it, but it makes sense. So, the original artists designed the pixel art based on the look they would get on a CRT display - with its scanlines and everything, as that is what both they and the actual gamers viewed the sprites on. It turns out, this pixel art looks very different on a CRT display - the artists would have done the shading and details differently if they were working on CRTs. A quick visual explanation is this tweet [twitter.com]. Square Enix is apparently redrawing to get a more "correct"/"as originally intended" look on LCD screens.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I used four different CRTs growing up and I don't remember them looking anything like that. In fact, I remember counting out the pixels on Tails' sprite in Sonic 3 so I could make one of those bead board things.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, this is what I came to say. Literally the only thing all CRTs have in common is that they are blurrier than LCDs or LEDs because of the obvious fundamental differences in the tech and the use of phosphors. I had a[n old, dim, slightly blurry] Trinitron when I was a kid and my pixel games looked fine on it even though the mask differs. These games weren't designed for specific CRTs, or if they were, the differences from CRT to CRT didn't matter. They were just designed to be blurry.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure blurry is the right word. As someone that wears eyeglasses, blurry is most like a gaussian blur done by paint programs. CRTs just are lower resolution, but they are clear in that lower resolution. I'd argue blurry is what the CRT emulating filters are doing.
I've noticed playing Super Nintendo games on a modern flatscreen is colors are washed out and there's a slight input delay (feelable in games like Super Mario World). I have a NEC 35" CRT from 1997 that puts out vibrant colors that blow away mod
Re: (Score:2)
oops kind of bumbled that last sentence
Re: (Score:2)
I've noticed playing Super Nintendo games on a modern flatscreen is colors are washed out and there's a slight input delay (feelable in games like Super Mario World).
You need a better TV if you have significant latency. My ancient SHARP AQUOS dumb TV has a game mode that does minimal processing and only takes one additional frame. Too bad it has a CFL backlight and therefore sucks power, otherwise it'd be perfect — it has great brightness and contrast, and the color is 100% spot on (as tested with my colorimeter.)
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
Re: Interesting (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Dont forget those games were not designed for a trinitron. They were designed for a home television set.
WTF are you on about? It was a Trinitron home television set that was approximately as old as I was, maybe a bit older. When I was a toddler I used to fuck with the color knob so my dad hung it from the ceiling.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was a Trinitron home television set that was approximately as old as I was, maybe a bit older.
Ahh, I thought you were a bit older.
Irrelevant since I grew up poor and everything I owned was old except my Amiga 500, which was cheap.
Trinitron was a Cadillac name for computer CRT monitors.
Yeah, I had a Sun 3/260 I later upgraded to a 4/260, and I had one of those really boxy-cased 1152x864 Trinitrons hooked up to my cg3. But before I had that, I had my Amiga hooked up to that TV I was talking about. It was a Trinitron TV old enough to have big knobs that clicked when you changed stations. The Trinitron name was used with TVs (since 1968!) before it was used with computer monitors. Assuming a "
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Literally the only thing all CRTs have in common is that they are blurrier than LCDs or LEDs
pixel artists wouldnt describe it as blurrier; CRTs tend to blend pixels differently than "modern" displays, and artists absolutely placed pixels a certain way to take advantage or account for CRT display properties.
for example, blurring the image on an LCD often does not produce the same effect.
one reason for this is modern displays (LCD, plasma, OLED) have individual, physical pixels. CRTs do not.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just that high-definition displays provide a crisper look at art made in earlier eras of video games, but that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT
Not just that. The early graphics hardware was limited in the colors it could display where you couldn't pick an arbitrary color for each pixel so you had to rely on the way the pixels bleed into each other on the NTSC CRT to make any sort of rounded edge look round. The flip side of that was no perfectly square corners since the surrounding black pulled them dim.
Re: (Score:2)
This is half wrong.
The color's on a SNES (for which these Square-Enix games were intended to be run on) are a specific palette. They are not intended to "look CRT warped", no console game is, as they were developed on computer screens, but intended for televisions which had a different color gamut, that most people used the RF converter for, not the composite or s-video.
At best, the problem with emulators is that people don't realize what limitations apply to what console and output device. Most people had
"Patrick Klepek" (Score:1)
I get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know exactly what he's talking about. That's why I got an old-school Trinitron (which someone was giving away for free) and now treat it with the greatest care.
Here's a great example: https://www.reddit.com/r/inter... [reddit.com]
The skeleton on the left looks much more detailed, almost three-dimensional. It doesn't feel like blocky pixels.
The ogre on the left looks like it's wearing an animal hide of some sort. The ogre on the right looks like it's wearing an orange interference pattern of some sort.
Of course, modern games should be made to look good on what they're played on: LCD. But old games, if we want to preserve them for future generations, -- we should make them appear like they originally did.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That all adds delay. Unless you throw a decent processor at it to complete all the changes so each frame is done on time. On CRTs, the source, a 15.7khz signal in effect basically directly connected to the CRT beam guns. It didn't go into a cpu, get put into a frame buffer, modified then outputted again. Modern TVs weren't designed with gaming in mind and many have delay because its costly to remove and there's no need to unless you're playing video games. Even the best "gaming" flatscreens are still using
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My old flat TV looks fucking amazing for 60Hz anyway, and it has a 1-frame "game" mode that minimizes latency. But it's a SHARP AQUOS set, not some Vizio or LG garbage. It was like $1500 at Costco back in the day, now you can get a set that size for $300 new... with an LED backlight, even. This old TV looks great, but it's a power sucker.
Before this one (which is a 52") I had a 32" AQUOS, traded it for an air compressor and tools. It was also exceptional.
Re: (Score:3)
Yah, people say this a lot. I prefer the pics on the right. I prefer the non CRT every time.
Still I always went with RGB Scart of a monitor in those days so not having the blur mayu have infuenced me somewhat.
People often seem to get angry at this! I am in no way trying to say how they should see things in any way. Just what I like becuase of my journey.
Re: (Score:2)
You can prefer it any way you want - but at the time it was released, it looked like it did on the left, and that is how the original artists and programmers intended it to look. They never intended it to look like the picture on the right.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I know exactly what he’s talking about. That’s why I got an old-school Trinitron (which someone was giving away for free) and now treat it with the greatest care.
Here’s a great example: https://www.reddit.com/r/inter... [reddit.com]
That is indeed an excellent illustration of why ”perfect rectangles” is not a desirable representation of pixels when simulating computer graphics originally intended for display on a 15 kHz CRT TV or video monitor.
In some comments to this article, though, there is maybe some confusion over what you'd actually want to see in a CRT simulation. Granted, there were many different types and generations of CRT displays. They varied in terms of their accepted horizontal and vertical timings, the dot p
I thought they already remade (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The mobile remakes which were used as a basis for later ports was blasted for having absolutely hideous and inconsistent visuals, which was blasted yet again when Romancing SaGa 2's remaster used brand new redrawn pixel graphics, and FF: Record Keeper had brand new sprites for a huge amount of the FF franchise and really nice attack effects. It was a zero effort cash grab
Ain't that the truth (Score:2)
Machine Learning (Score:1)
I am seeing a lot of ToDo about artifact color-- (Score:2)
and also about shadowmask artifacts.
Of course, the people who wrote the story did not mention either one.
the SNES (at least in the US at any rate) could do artifact color, to get "colors" that are not in the actual game data, simply by placing certain colors next to each other.
Shadowmask artifacts would appear on any color CRT.
To get actual CRT artifacts on an LCD, you would need a filter that accepts time-sensitive real-time-accurate scanline and color signal data, and then process it dynamically on the fl
Re: (Score:3)
That would be very processor intensive, as it would have to make lots of per-pixel-pair and per-timeslice computations per scanline, and do that several thousand times per second.
Nah, that would be a piece of cake for even a relatively low-end GPU.
Re: (Score:2)
And in fact there are LCD emulation scalers in some emulators, so this is actually a thing already being done. Whether it's being done well enough now to satisfy purists is of course another issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Libretro have had CRT Royale for a decade by now. Its not a intensive process so long the processing isn't bolted to compete for resources.
Its a solved issue, but not if your way to acquire effects is Reshade, which is a performance nightmare.
The other big problem is that you quickly need a 4k monitor to correctly display all the subpixel phosphors, and CRT royale is designed around that.
Re: (Score:2)
Artifact colour was created by the way the colour information was embedded in the composite video signal, not by the CRT itself.
So if you had a RGB monitor, you didn't get those colour artifacts.
I think most of the difference is just failure to adjust to having a different colour space on a modern computer monitors vs a TV: most of all different gamma and black level.
Not just is phosphor different, but different console hardware that produced the analogue signals could exhibit a weird transfer function from
Re: (Score:2)
LCDs do actually have a slight bloom effect as well (I learned only last week that some drawing libraries do adjust for this) but it is much smaller.
Yeah, because there's a plastic overlay over the pixels some light is diffused, but it's reduced on the most common screens, which have glossy overlays instead of the diffusing glare-reducing types. So it actually varies from display to display anyway, and over-optimizing is still a thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes I am aware.
Artifact color is a consequence of the timing of the color burst signal, embedded in the scanline. This is why the CRT filter would need to be timing sensitive, and need to compute color pairs, as well as timeslice position in the scanline analog signal. I think I already stated as much.
Shadowmask on the other hand, has to do with how the electron beam hits an actual screen with tiny little holes in it as the beam intensity is modulated. This results in some cross-phosphor activation, and s
Re: (Score:2)
Try playing games not by Ubisoft, EA, or Activision.
Typo in the title. (Score:1)
This is a "cuntroversy", a cuntroversy is when someone whines and moans about something without having any real arguments other than "I don't like it" and calls it a controversy, in other words; "Being a cunt". Examples of cuntroversies is "Harry Potter teaches magic" (It doesn't, magic power is genetic) and "Lolita is pedophilia" (It isn't, Humbert is a villain protagonist and shown to be a horrible person).
Don't like crisp pixels? Get ENB or Reshade and fiddle with the settings.
Re: I always love this argument (Score:2)
Need better comparisons.. (Score:2)
So yes, it's obvious and well-recognized that nearest-neighbor scaling with much more precise pixel rendering is not how these were ever expected to be viewed. Frankly, no one is acting like they think this. However, all those comparisons compare just that: nearest-neighbor to CRT.
However, there are filters which strive to imitate CRT behavior (as noted in the article, but they failed to compare emulated CRT to real CRT). Also there are various filters trying to produce the desired facets (edges appearing m
"Controversies"? (Score:1)
Millennial (Score:1)
âoe humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family roomsâ - written like a true millennial who now feels super high tech with their 100-inch flat screen - bet theyâ(TM)ll feel awkward in 20 years when the same comment is made about physical screens and how hilarious they were compared with beaming images direct into the brain. Be humble and recognize technology within its historical context.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
Common mistake. People think a "68er" is someone who was born in 1968, rather than someone who was a student/came of age in 1968. OP here thinks millennial means people born in/after 2000, rather than someone who came of age in the 2000 decade.
It's OK to think these terms are stupid and meaningless or whatever, but if you use them, use them the most common way, please [wikipedia.org].
CRTs were no magic (Score:1)
CRTs were wildly different, and pixel art wouldn't look the same over two different screens. Different manufacturing techniques would re
Re: (Score:3)
Final Fantasy's heyday was firmly in the 90s, not the early 80s. In fact the first one wasn't even released in the US until 1990. There were certainly commonalities between most of the era's TVs. Some were dictated by the NTSC standard, like interleaved scanlines. Others weren't forced technologically, but nevertheless persisted in practice. For the Super Nintendo, I never saw one hooked up with anything other than the RF cable it shipped with. S-Video only started gaining traction later with the Dreamcast
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the world didn't use the NTSC standard, so we can already say that most of the world wouldn't see the pixels in the same way as the Japanese artist, who would be using an NTSC-J TV set.
In Europe, around the mid nineties, RF cables weren
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
> On the Commodore 64, many colour combinations would result in such ugly artifacts as to make text unreadable and graphics unrecognizable.
Apple 2: Hold [xtof.info] my beer [oldgames.sk]
The solution for CLEAN, readable fonts was to use to TWO pixels of white and a black border such as what Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego [ebayimg.com] did.
> if people tell you that CRT screens were better,
They ARE with the caveat being depending on what is being displayed as this picture [i.redd.it] clearly demonstrates. With CRT you get aliasing for "free". F
Re: (Score:2)
And the Commodore 64 had great graphics capabilities for the age, as any ZX spectrum or CGA PC owner could jealously attest.
Re: (Score:1)
[ducks]
By the way, the CGA was one of those cases in which some games could look better on a composite monitor, because they were designed to create the illusion of having more than 4 colors on screen by deliberately exploiting the artifacts that a monitor of that kind would produce. Of course, games had to be explictly designed for that, not many were; and
Pixel aspect ratio? (Score:1)
There's more than just the look to the feel of aut (Score:2)
Not really clear? (Score:2)
It's not really clear what Square Enix wants to accomplish with these Pixel Remasters, ...
$$$
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, I'm particularly fond of the FF1-VI (not so much anything after) IP set so I'm all for any kind of re-invention they want to do (as long as the
Re: (Score:2)
Inconsistent (Score:2)
Well, my feeling about CRT filters is that people tend to overdo it. If you really look at a lot of old televisions, the bloom and scanlines aren't anywhere near as prominent as the filters depict. There's a difference between the pattern of a television shadow mask and a monitor shadow mask, and depending on the quality of display you had when you were a kid, your perception of what pixel art should look like will vary considerably. Usually the NTSC/PAL color smearing is overdone as well. That's why go
Re: (Score:2)
my feeling about CRT filters is that people tend to overdo it. If you really look at a lot of old televisions, the bloom and scanlines aren't anywhere near as prominent as the filters depict.
If I had to guess, and I do so I am, at least some the disparity lies in the quality of televisions in our memories. Many kids had old hand-me-down televisions for their gaming, and they were often not very good to begin with, and also often quite old. I was a poor kid and even I had my own TV; I got the old Trinitron literally from the 70s when the main set in the house was updated to a new one from the 90s. I played games on it a few times and the picture was definitely a lot sharper.
Some of it of course
Hello - Goodbye (Score:2)
Don't like it, Don't play it (Score:1)
Still not learned the lesson... (Score:2)
What a laughable article! I mean, sure, the part about CRT's having a certain effect is quite right.
The problem is they claim that the new FF redesign brings it closer to how CRT's would display the sprites,but the new sprites don't look anything like the old sprites on a CRT!.