gryson

I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.

So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.

Huh? Those are the original MIDI versions of the music, which is how Bobby Prince composed them on a Roland SC-55. There is no more authentic sound.

I doubt anyone in 1993 thought the OPL2 version of the music sounded better. General MIDI was mind-blowing in comparison.

Candid does not mean "secretive and very guarded", though. People misunderstand the meaning of candid camera and assume it means "secret camera" and so use it that way, but that hasn't reached a level of misuse to redefine the meaning of candid.

What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?

Japan burns about half of its collected plastic via thermal recycling (recovering the energy) and recycles about a third into new products.

The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.

This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.

Japan is nowhere near the worst for plastic waste per capita, and it has very high recycling rates.

Rely more on statistics and less on personal observation.

If it's a hardware limitation, there are no exceptions. Which is it?

Don't you know - everyone's an expert because they saw a YouTube video about how modern pixel art isn't authentic...

Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!

It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.

Doesn't that mean it's not the hardware's color limitations, but rather how color is used by the artists?

There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.

Are you referring to Earthion specifically or just making some grandiose comment about pixel art in the good old days?

What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).

I suspect the developers had enough foresight to not include text outside the display window.

The game makes good use of dithering throughout.

Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).

This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.