For me it has to be Toki. The characters were so weird and creepy, especially the bosses!
Does Old School Runescape counts? Cuz damn do those graphics have aged but I still love it to bits.
definitely hahaha even though they created a new one, people still prefer the old. Unfortunately i never played it growing up, I feel i missed out
Vangers is definitely an ugly game. Aged horribly. But it’s just so intriguing.
Barring that Warriors of Might and Magic for the PS2. It’s really not a good game but I love it so much. It’s a dame shame 3DO went under.
DEAR LORD!
Hogs of War.
I’m sure I’m doing it something of a disservice here, but even at the time I remember thinking it looked pretty grim.
Lots of browns and greens, lots of repeated textures and lots of pretty clumsy animations.
And you know what? None of that mattered in the slightest.
Minecraft
Seriously how the hell? It’s fairly basic and unless you have the chops and patience to rebuild a minecraft new york city, not much else going on
But then I fire that pixelated crap up again and off i go trying to recreate a giant tower that looks like a penis.
Honestly, just how damned ugly minecraft is puts me off every time I think about trying to play it!
I have seen it being played with apparently higher res graphics packs and… just, wow it’s still ugly! I mean I haven’t exactly looked deeply, but…
My mommy group had a minecraft server when all our kids were potato stage and it was mostly a few very talented redstone builders, a few people collecting resources, and my husband in the corner building a penis castle with penis fountains overlooking our little town.
The penis is inevitable.
Beauty is, I think, somewhat in the eye of the beholder. A few games that couldn’t have been called very conventionally pretty, though:
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A number of roguelikes that use ASCII graphics (though today I play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead* in graphics mode). Same for Dwarf Fortress. Often these are very deep games with a lot of gameplay to explore and a lot of replayability but nobody is playing them because of their graphical beauty.
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The Dominions series and Conquest of Elysium series from Illwinter are fairly-involved strategy games, which both have graphics that…well, I can understand someone appreciating some aspects of them, but again, nobody is buying these games for the graphics.
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Kenshi – a squad-based open-world sandbox game – has a certain amount of attractiveness, but the textures and models are limited in detail and I don’t think that people are going to call its graphics beautiful or on-par with high-budget games today.
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Noita is a difficult action roguelite game where one constructs wands using various spells and spell modifiers and gives one’s wizards various powers as they dig through a world. The graphics are pretty chunky pixel stuff, which someone can enjoy but aren’t something that you’d probably play the game just to look at.
I think that the importance of graphics is more-important for games that don’t have a lot of replayability. There’s a lot of “oh, wow” factor when you see something beautiful and it’s still novel. But if you see something many, many times, eh, less-impressive. A lot of roguelikes and roguelites focus on replayability – the graphics of something that you’ve seen countless times are going to be old hat at some point, no matter how pretty.