This game always fascinated me as a companion piece to Half-Life. It cemented some things in the HL lore that have just become accepted, while at the same time existing in Schrodinger's canon.
I'm considering giving it another playthrough and taking notes. How many people have actually played it? How many people who weren't gaming when it released have actually played? Is there any interest in it?
I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don't need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I'm thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.
The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that's achievable plays into what the design may be, although it's not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That's probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don't look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don't need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character's face. I don't need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won't notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or "play" sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don't want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.
Blood. I dunno, I got it from some guy.
This reminds me of a DM who did a setting with an extremely bureaucratic kingdom. We had to get an audience with the king, but the process required jumping through hoops with different paperpushers.
Eventually we were nearly at the hall to meet the king when the guards turned us away for wearing the wrong ties. I got us in by going through the Lionel Hutz "I'm not wearing a tie at all." routine, which intimidated the guards (not what I was going for, but my table rendition apparently included crazy eyes) .
A character that has all the cringe edgelord hallmarks- black leather clothes, gravely Batman voice, "I work alone" attitude- except he's a clumsy dwarf that's more or less cosplaying as The Crow and is forced, despite his demeanor to be a team player. Some day Darkbeard Grimblade will get his chance.
Cousin Eddy did that all on his own. Clark was too busy screaming at his family about not being able to pay for a pool.
As someone who prefers HL1 it was nice to be vindicated somewhat by a YouTube person agreeing.
11 months out of there year people buy shiny, jangly plastic toys and encourage cats to attack them. 1 month out of the year, people put up a shiny, jangly decoration right in the middle of the cats' living area and then act shocked when the cats attack it.
Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn't have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.
If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn't a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.
This is a good example. The cartoony graphics work well for Nintendo because it fits their hardware better as well.
For my personal example I can still play Starfox64 easily, but Goldeneye (one of my favorite childhood games) literally gives me a headache to look at. Goldeneye was going for a more realistic look on the engine of the time and aged terribly. Starfox is all big bright cartoon designs.