It's like a rewiring through new experience. Back in the day games were improving in looks and gameplay rapidly. Then the latter started deteriorating for many big studio titles.

You tell me some new AAAA Ubisoft game is coming out and my gag reflex starts to tingle.

A new pixel graphic indie title with great reviews? Sign me up.

The fruit that was once sweet has become poison.

The reasons for adult you playing games younger you played are:

• They remind you of your youth. This happens when you get old enough to notice your youth is gone before you could even take full advantage of it.
• They don't require a subscription and they don't disappear when the publisher pulls the plug.
• They're more fun.

Mega man is one of my favourite franchises, but man I wish we could get past the side scroller old style and get a modern ratchet and clank style open city mega man. Or a new mega man legends.

I've been playing the older Ys games. Ys seven and back. These games are great. I didn't play a single Ys game until last year. No nostalgia for them. Practically no JRPG nostalgia either as I was a Diablo/Baldurs Gate type gamer 20+ years ago. Now I'm eating up all these old JRPG games

I stopped being a graphics whore around the mid PS2 era, mostly because my computer couldn't run the more realistic games like GTA Vice City 😁

I unironically love seeing newer indies with PS1/N64 style 3D graphics

good graphics have replaced good art direction and style

If youre my age, then games were advancing in graphic fidelity at the same rate as getting better and more in depth. Devs were able to learn from eachother on what makes a game great. Then the horse dlc happened, and suddenly devs could only make games that could be chopped up into pieces and sold as an al a carte game instead of the 7 course meals they had been making.

Partly because games are so inefficient these days that we have no choice. Looking at you, Unity and Unreal

Never liked photorealistic games for some reason, my brain's perception just filters it out past the first few minutes looking at effects.

ASCII NetHack FTW

Back when 16 bit graphics were cutting edge, we thought they were getting close to photorealistic. It's crazy seeing screenshots of games that I thought looked amazing at the time.

I wanted photo realistic games when I was younger, and now I get to enjoy playing them. I also enjoy playing 2d games. It turns out fidelity is just an artistic choice which does little to predict the quality of a game 🙄

Until it can be actually photo-realistic and cross the uncanny valley, it's best to just have a stylized aesthetic anyway.

Adult me is making teenage me happy, because I play games which looks super realistic and state of the art in my teenage times :D

I still stand by the whole "Glorious PC gaming master race!!!!" Circlejerk had a profoundly negative impact on video games, as for about 10 years the mainstream gaming community seemed to only give a shit about frame rates and resolutions and Devs where happy to just focus on that instead of making their games fun to play or have interesting stories.

Meh. Pixel graphics are fine but I prefer games that look beautiful, and most pixel-art games do not. I especially don't like it when they're "pixel art" but don't actually align everything to a pixel grid, so e.g. characters can move smoothly off the grid, or things can rotate without aliasing. That ruins what I still get from the aesthetic.

But give me something like Ori and the Blind Forest's aesthetics any day. Or Skyrim or Witcher or Deus Ex for recentish AAA titles.

What I wouldn't give for a true successor to beyond good and evil

Really I just want one thing. The same thing every gamer wants. To escape to the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.

In most games I find no matter how good the static assets look, the animations immediately break the illusion of 'realism'.

One recent exception to this were some of the cutscenes in Expedition 33, the facial mocap was very on-point and, even though the game isn't anywhere close to photorealistic, it felt close to watching real actors perform a scene.

Ghost of Yotei did a great job in gameplay and graphics.