There are about a bazillion things I miss from my C64. Things which made games games, like SID chip music, flashy loading bars and loading screens. Music which defined the game rather than being some bog standard hip-hop track or something that could have been lifted from any random film. Joysticks with suckers attached to the bottom, and a user manual with instructions for how to program a simple game. These are the things of “proper” computers and “proper” games. These are also things which everybody who grew up with them fondly remembers during pub conversations while getting dirty looks from the scary blokey blokes in the corner talking about football or something.

So I’m not going to go on about those things any more. They’re a given. What I really miss is something that was born out of necessity – a hardware limitation which (as quite often turns out to be the case) resulted in something that not only looked cool, but in my opinion looked better than it’s non-limited modern day counterpart. And that’s the palettised fade. And by palettised, I’m talking 16 colour fixed palette.

Let me demonstrate:

Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it gamey? So much more visually interesting than:

Yawn. And the thing is, apart from some TV and film credits where they do something swanky with their text fades, it’s something you oh so rarely see in games from which medium they were born. It’s just, “let’s just make the alpha go from 255 down to 0 and that’ll do” over and over and over again.

Somebody somewhere bring back the palettised fade!

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under rants, games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.