kai2: Have you ever played a game you expected to be terrible and it turned out to be good, interesting, or even great?
Yeah, Stardew Valley.
In the early 1990s all video games were heavily pixelated because most games used Mode-X for graphics, which was a common trick developers used by taking a standard VGA graphics mode, and doctoring the video card registers to hack up the mode into something custom which was more useful and suitable for games. This meant most games used 320x240 graphics with 8-bit (256 colour) indexed colour mode. It was the way things were done because reasons.
We loved our games, but we'd be lying if we didn't crave better graphics with higher resolution and more colour. Lying I tell you, big fibbers.
"It's all about the story, the characters, the game play, the immersion blah blah blah"... Yeah, those things are important in any game, and no amount of amazing graphics, sound effects, or music can make up for bad gameplay or a horrible story. That's a given.
But insofar as we say a game does have a great story, good gameplay mechanics, good characters, etc., I'd rather play a game on equal ground on all of those areas - but which has better quality graphics, sound, effects, etc. because I see that as progression at a technological scale. Subjectively I find higher resolution and colour usage to be more appealing to my eye in general also. But I wasn't alone in wishing games had higher resolution and more colours, most people did at the time.
And then technology and software companies stepped up to the plate and started bringing us 640x480 256 colour games, then 15*16 bit colour, then 24bit colour and 800x600, and eventually 1024x768. Along the way more and more games were not hard-coded to a single resolution, but let you choose based on your hardware capabilities and personal preference.
Fast forward to today and the graphical capabilities of our computers and displays are rather incredible. The rich level of detail possible is mind boggling, and most of us aren't even using the latest generation of stuff.
But there is this niche of games coming out for many years now which are trying to go backwards in time with their visual art style. Back to low resolutions and low colour depths, to replicate the art style of these older games from history, and make this a form of "retro" art. I'll be honest, for the most part I think the retro pixel art game art style is greatly overdone these days and I personally find it off putting more because of its overdone nature than due to the art style itself. And as such, whenever I see a retro pixel-art game being released, I have an involuntary knee jerk internal reaction of "ugh... not another one"
But of course, this knee jerk reaction is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak too, because a certain number of these type of games actually end up with extremely high ratings and widespread popularity, and to overlook all of them simply due to personal bias of being sick of seeing an artistic style being overdone is sometimes being a bit short sighted. :)
Stardew Valley was one of these games for me. Initial thoughts I had when I saw it were not something friendly to say. :) There were other elements of what I saw in this game that I really didn't like either, and so I just threw it into the "ugh, nope" mental basket I throw most such games into.
But then GOG gifted us beta testers some games to test during Galaxy beta development, and Stardew was one of them. I installed it and tested it, didn't give it much time and moved on. Months later the game had received a major update and lots of people were playing it and talking about it, a LOT. Eventually all the noise made me grumble and get curious, so I installed it and spent a few hours playing it. I didn't really care for it at first that much, but as the story started to unfurl and the game's larger dynamics and depth showed through, I kind of started enjoying myself and kept at it.
Days later I was addicted to it. *despite* the craptacular graphics. :)