My thoughts are… that I was in the minority of those who absolutely adored Wind Waker’s style when it was released.
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I liked it too, although I probably got it a few years after release (maybe 2004-05).
The Zelda N64 games were obviously cartoony in character design, so Wind Waker didn’t seem too different, just brighter.
Based on screenshots, I did wonder whether the flatness of the art style would make depth perception harder in places, but that didn’t seem to be a problem in the end.
Apart from character models, water, and grass plains, there’s quite a lot of detailed texture work that goes against the flat style it’s famous for. I was probably too young to realize that at the time.
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I enjoyed Wind Waker’s graphics for what of it I could play(never could get the hang of the magic leaf enough to get past the bottomless pit you have to glide across to enter the game’s second dungeon), though I consider the best looking 3-D Zelda I’ve played to be Ocarina of Time 3D with the 3D slider in the off position(only ever had 1 working eye, so the 3D effect on the 3DS just resulted in off putting bands of lighter and darker parts of the screen)… Granted, only 3-D Zelda’s I’ve ever played were the Gamecube port of Ocarina, Wind Waker, the wii version of Twilight Princess(which I never got past the joust on the bridge since Wiimote aiming is a total pain in the anatomy when seeing the crosshairs requires getting so close to the screen you have to hold the wiimote behind you for it to see the “sensor” bar correctly if you’ve positioned it as recommended… And Nintendo’s asinine decision to limit the gamecube controller option to the Gamecube version of the game), and Ocarina 3D… Though, personally, what would have been my ideal 3-D Zelda would be if the in-game graphics could look as good as Ocarina’s official artwork… Though, if anything, capturing that animesque look in a fully 3-D world with a dynamic camera, at least circa the 00s and 20-preteens seems to be harder than going for the most realism possible. At least, all of the games I can recall going for the look of a 2-D animated series/movie were either sprite based or had a fixed camera that only let you see objects and characters from very specific angels.
Granted, I’ve always had a strong preference for animation over live action when it comes to television and movies, and even over a decade post-blindness, I tend to imagine the stuff I read as if it was being animated, not as live action.
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I wish I could mash the “love” button harder for this sentence, lol. It’s criminal how animation gets treated as lesser than live action. XD
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Me too. Although I now think it could have been better, even on the m1.
A few years ago I was doing some m1,3,4,4p graphics. The idea was cross compile from a modern machine and run on original hw. I started building apshai18 and got as far as real time pan and zoom random dungeon on the actual kit. This showed it was indeed possible. As for flight sim, I think that too. Sublogic had almost no geometry, so it had hardly anything to do.
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It was still amazing at the time. Loading from the cassette tape was VERY slow and you had to retry sometimes.
I was an young aviator at the time and had the best fun.
I miss those days. 
Jeff
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you mean this:
is definitively a masterpiece of code, considering how the 128*48 monochrome graphics is handled in the hardware…
(EDIT after checking the reference)
handling aero equations then rendering the results in 3D graphics thru 2x3 block mosaic with a 3,5 Mhz Z80 (I guess LDIR and LDDR helped much…) is a major coding feat…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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It’s probably best described as being to a flight simulator as a cart racer is to a driving simulator, but I was never bothered by the original StarFox’s graphics, even having played StarFox 64 first. Heck, wouldn’t mind having game accurate 3-d printed versions of some of the bosses that didn’t get upgraded for 64… Granted, I’m a geometry geek with a passion for polyhedra, so everything being low poly to the point you can see individual faces of objects has a certain appeal… Do kind of wonder what a game with graphics done entirely in the style of StarFox SNES’s title screen and character portraits would look like… And speaking of other games on the SNES that were doing experimental things with graphics, I’m not sure games like DKC Returns or DK Jungle Climber really improve over the pre-rendered graphics of the SNES DKC trilogy.
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It was a 1.77Mhz Z80.
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Yes, you had to retry a lot. In hindsight, they could have had a really simple error correction which would have helped tape loading enormously.
On the BBC micro, they had blocks of 255 bytes with checksums. each block had a block number and you could just run two copies of the “recording” together and, if it couldn’t get a block from one, it would get it from the other (hopefully). That was quite a neat solution without error correction. ie block redundancy.
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A still from Super Mario Land for Gameboy (the old
black-and-white screened one) where Mario jumps a
mushroom out of a block. There are minimallistically
rendered waves and clouds, and two enemies onscreen
on the blocky geometric platforms.
It’s beautiful.
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Clearly Mario ought to get realistic head injuries from hitting blocks and the enemies ought to go realistically “Splat!” 
More seriously, perhaps the drive for realism is a result of the nature of the interface? E.g. it would seem somewhat odd to me to see “realistic graphics” presented as a trump card for a sidescrolling platformer, even one done using 3D graphics.
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E.g. it would seem somewhat odd to me to see “realistic graphics” presented as a trump card for a sidescrolling platformer, even one done using 3D graphics.
Donkey Kong Country was heavily marketed around this. You could say it wasn’t really striving for realism, just 3D graphics, but I think it qualifies.
From Wikipedia:
[The unveiling of DKC] did not reveal that [it] was a SNES game until the end of the presentation, fooling the audience into believing that it was for the upcoming Nintendo 64
Marketing materials emphasised the revolutionary graphics—often noting that Rare’s SGI workstations had been used to create the Jurassic Park (1993) film’s dinosaurs[58]—and positioned Donkey Kong Country as a direct competitor to Sega’s Mega-CD and 32X platforms to remind players it was not for next-generation hardware
The gameplay is good (if pretty difficult) but it would have worked just as well with lower-quality graphics, as the Game Boy Donkey Kong Land series shows. Although even those look surprisingly good for what they are given the proper hardware.
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For what it’s worth, even NES SMB3 looks significantly more realistic than NES SMB1, and SMW more realistic than NES SMB3, and then the Super Mario All-Stars versions of SMB1-3 make SMW look cartoony in places. Not that any of the Mario games are really going for realism(probably more surrealism, though I’m sure that has some pretentiously precise definition in art criticism circles that Mario doesn’t quite fit even though it’s a game where Mushrooms make you grow twice your height, you save mushroom-headed people from the Turtle minions of a firebreathing Dragon Turtle, and the sequel has you fighting a giant frog whose minions are weak to radishes).
Though, I understand Yoshi’s Island having a picture book aesthetic was Miyamoto pushing back against the pre-rendered CGI of the DKC games.
As for Donkey Kong Land, while the Gameboy only has about40% the resolution of the SNES, the same pre-rendered sprites trick works about as well in monochrome as in 16-bit color. Though, DKL3 definitely looks best on Super Gameboy unless you have the GBC rerelease, which I think might be Japan exclusive. If you didn’t know, in DKL3 on Super Game boy, every map and level has it’s own color scheme, though the ability to change the pallet is disabled for this game. Still, of games I played on SGB back in the 90s, only the Pokemon games did things better in the colorization department.
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Though, I understand Yoshi’s Island having a picture book aesthetic was Miyamoto pushing back against the pre-rendered CGI of the DKC games.
Interesting, I never thought about or that or made the connection.
As for Donkey Kong Land, while the Gameboy only has about40% the resolution of the SNES, the same pre-rendered sprites trick works about as well in monochrome as in 16-bit color.
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. It doesn’t suffer too much from being low-resolution, I agree. And based on what you’re saying, I guess that it’s partially a hardware limitation and not just an game graphics limitation that affects the colors.
The only thing that can really be blamed on the GBC games themselves is the extremely simplistic backgrounds, which don’t really look great IMO but are probably necessary for easier visibility.
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While I suspect complex backgrounds might have been a visibility concern without color to help provide contrast between player and enemy sprites and the background, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original GB just couldn’t handle complex backgrounds in a side scrolling platformer very well if at all. Both DKC and DKL might have been using the same core trick to push the limits in the graphics department, but the SNES was still the far more powerful system even with the GB actually having the faster clock speed.
And content wise, DKL3 is very comparable to DKC3 while being 1/8 the ROM size, and from a little googling I did just now trying to find if the DKC games used a coprocesser in the cart(something no official GB games ever did), DKC needed some revolutionary for the time compression to fit it’s graphics into the capacity limits of a SNES cart. And as far as I know, the first GB games to utilize a higher capacity cart than the ones the DKL trilogy used were the Gen 1 Pokemon games.
Also, I never stop being amazed by how programmers of the 80s and 90s managed to do so much with so little compute. The DKC games are 4 megabytes each and the DKL games are 512 kilobytes each and those were considered massive for their platforms. To think a single song as a low quality mp3 might take up more disk space than a game that was so technically impressive people thought it was going to be an N64 launch title when it was first shown off.
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A typical Atari 2600 game is 4KB. Even back in 2010 when I last looked, a completely blank MS Word document was larger than that.
Best I can tell, 4KiB is the smallest amount of disk space any non-empty file can take up on a modern Linux system… and on a FAT32 formatted SD card, that minimum filesize goes up to 32KiB. I was also recently shocked to learn the original Super Mario Bros. was 40 KiB and originally planned to be Nintendo’s final cart release before going full stop into the Famicom Disk System… though of course, advances in memory chips lead to higher capacity carts and the NES got cart conversions of many FDS releases and the FDS never saw US release… Still, makes me wonder if a full SMB1 sprite sheet as an optimized PNG would be larger than the game itself.
The blank MS Word docs I looked at had that much actual metadata in them. Nothing to do with filesystem allocation clusters or anything like that.
The sector/cluster size isn’t related to the filesystem, but to the minimum processor who can handle the filesystem.
with a 64-bit CPU, is possible to address each byte of a Tbyte-sized HD (2^64= 16 exabyte, sufficent, I think, to cover all main and secondary memory sizes until well beyond bill “640k are enough” gates’s lifespan but both ext4fs and ntfs support 32-bit architecture, limited to 4 Gb (2^32) and no wonder that the most popular HD size is 2 TB (that is, (2^32)*512) o 4 TB (that is, (2^32)*1024)
(thanks to calc(1), the *nix arbitrary precision calculators, for its excellent handling of huge numbers…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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