I strongly contest that anything from the ancient days still looks good or from the consoles you mentioned for that matter..., the standard resolution nowadays is 1920x1080 (at least) and the standard resolution back then was EGA or at best VGA (640x480) (or TV resolution which is even more terrible) If you ever played on of the old games (or the pixel indy games) on a LCD you know why games nowadays usually do not go that route. The detail level required for a game not to look completely ugly is so high that you can never reach it with pixel art (where images are drawn pixel by pixel), only with proper sprite art (where they are drawn in sections at the least).
Look at Bastion or Limbo for beautiful looking games. And to be fair, AVWW tried to do something along these lines but using pre-rendered objects was maybe an odd decision after all. Sprite artists are drawing while pre-rendered needs to be modeled for that. Using a 3d model that was made for HQ renderings as a sprite usually never turns out well (lines and definitions are blurred and not pixel perfect, light is weird). This is also why I decline most if not all job offers where someone wants sprites from my 3d-models. You'd need to go to the resolutions of GSB to make that viable (ie, around 512x512).
AVWW is not ugly, it is just weird looking, incoherent might best describe it (Background vs Characters). And that is not easy to solve. If you want to see ugly, try Resonance on a 1920x1200 HD desktop ;P 4x linear scaling is not pretty. And no scaling is tiny. So either tiny or ugly.. not exactly a good choice.
Neh, I'll still take the old systems, thanks. As a retro gamer I'm used to the older ones, and I very rarely find recent games that I honestly think are good looking. Stuff like Bastion is decent enough (didn't like Limbo at all), but very, very rare. At least, to my perception, anyway.
I'm well aware my tastes are pretty rare; in that I'll take something like, say, the original Super Mario Bros, with it's simple sprites and stark, bright color schemes, or, I dunno, Space Invaders on the 2600, over...... well, damn near anything produced in the last 15 years. Particularly anything on the PS1 (I find pretty much EVERYTHING on that console to be really fugly). As it is, it's so rare I find something I like the look of, that I tend to simply not give a rat's ass about the graphics of most games. I've always put gameplay over graphics ANYWAY, even back then, but still, I usually just dont care.
Particularly with games rendered in 3D. I cannot off the top of my head think of any that I honestly thought were pretty. Usually, my thoughts on them are "meh", which sums everything up nicely.
And having been stuck with bloody ancient monitors for the longest time (I only JUST got a monitor capable of 1920x1080 very recently), I've no issues with resolution at all either. I was perfectly happy with 640x480 back in the day, thank you very much. Geez, this probably makes me sound old, doesnt it, despite that I'm not.
