Fond memories, disappointing realities

[Fudzy]

I remember being quite involved with making sprites and levels for faux-3D games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. Then came one of the first true 3D FPS games, Quake. I remember comparing the enemies in that game to the beautiful, delicate strippers in D3D and wondering, how would technology ever advance enough to make the monsters in Quake look as 'realistic' as the strippers in Duke?

Fast forward almost two decades (you feeling as old as I am right now?) and the achievements of modern hardware have enabled designers to create very realistic human models. I'm yet to find a game that puts me in the uncanny valley (if you don't know what that is, look it up) though and it saddens me.

This still is no where near as depressing as getting nostalgic and diving into some abandonwarez. It becomes gleamingly obvious how terrible graphics were back then.

Not to say that the visual quality of a game is the be all and end all of course but it certainly helps. The pixelated nipple stars of the nameless strippers in D3D have nothing on the breasts of newer (mostly Japanese fighting) games but the old 320x200 girls do still hold a special place.

Appreciate how far technology has come and I hope we are all able to reminisce about these posts in another decade or two.

[Fudzy]

MyBB recently had a similar competition where I submitted this (in reference to the uncanny valley):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

When I was younger, a lot of effects in movies seemed indistinguishable from real life. As I've grown and always been inquisitive about this, I've noticed an almost exponential improvement in what is achieved these days when re-watching older movies.

There are exceptions but I are there any other people feel the same way?

I recently saw photos comparing real life people to Madam Tussard models, the wax models were blatantly obvious while I thought they were impressively close when I was younger.

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthre...uncanny-valley