This is photorealism

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I'm old enough to remember and I'm here to tell young'uns, that's what people actually looked like then IRL.
- Yeah, I'm really glad we all smoothed out.
  
  I for one preferred the pyramidal boobs.

put that image on a crt and it'd look realistic
- Less fake...

Isn't it a weird effect? I assume it has a name but I don't know what it is. But what I do know is: I remember some older games looking better than anything, because when I was playing, they did. When I revisit them years later, they're not how I remember.
- They did look better on CRTs. Modern displays will smooth things in a way the original developers didn't intend. It's less pronounced in the PS1/N64 era, but SNES/NES has some games that look noticeably worse without applying a filter.
  
  This is true of SD media as well. Watching a VHS rip for example is pretty jarring on an HD display, but it didn't look that way on a CRT.
- Even stuff that's more modern gets me, like Skyrim. When I first booted that up, I couldn't imagine graphics getting much better. Now, I go back and see flat textures with sporadic grass nodes...
- I find it interesting that people seem to remember graphics being so much better. I remember back then thinking "WTF? Why are the walls wobbling around so much?" Or why characters bodies were broken up into chunky blocks instead of a single shape?
  Final Fantasy VII drove me nuts with the blocky characters while you were exploring, but the much more detailed characters during combat.
  I will concede, though, I don't remember the N64 looking so blurry back then. Playing it now, it's like goddamn! There's excessive antialiasing and motion blur.
  
  Graphics were designed for the consumer. The average consumer used a CRT, which blurred the edges, so the sprites were designed around that.

Dreamcast tho
- I remember walking into Toys R Us and seeing the Dreamcast for the first time, running NFL 2K. YOU COULD SEE THEIR BREATH IN THE COLD. It was absolutely mesmerizing. I had butterflies.

Did anyone actually think that? I was around playing games at the time. Graphics can be mind blowing and you can still dream of how they could be better.
- I remember playing Donkey Kong Country as a kid and thinking it looked more real than real life.

I was just playing FIFA 2008 with my 8 year old son
- My plan is to raise mine with the old games too, so that they can appreciate how far we've come.

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