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Every time I see 'Look how much better games look on CRT posts, this is what your childhood looked like' showing closeups taken by phone camera of PVMs with crisp scanlines and shit I wanna die like no that's not what games looked like when you were a kid, that's what cameras see also you didn't have a fucking PVM in your house come on and even if you did you weren't cranking down the brightness to get crisp scanlines as a kid or using RGB lol come on

like CRTs are cool and it's almost a shame you can't convey the actual reasons why in photos but the """CRT Aesthetic""" people chase now feel's even faker than raw pixels to me, even if it looks cool sometimes.

People will post pics like this... (my photos, btw, over composite)

and be like oh look at all the added detail and how it's not just jagged it's all rich and hinted at so much more depth than the raw pixels!

... and then you step back.

... That's not, in practical terms, massively different from the raw pixel art at actual play distances. It feels different! The CRT has this wonderful luminescence to it, things move nicely , some shit IS real like the Sonic waterfalls (Megadrive has more 'real' pixel art/crt things in general due to the width of megadrive games internally, but that's also more of a NTSC thing, and only partially a CRT thing).

People act like kids didn't know what pixels were, like everything implied these perfect, rich shadowy details. Hell most of us didn't know what a scanline was. Most of us didn't have TVs that even HAD visible, clear scanlines. Most of the space in between pixels blend together cause of LUMINANCE which is lost in photos.

I remember people freaking out about how good Wizardry for the NES looked on a CRT like "Oh this was meant to look like PERFECT ART and... up close, well, it's not as good as the juiced up pics implied... but it looks cool? On camera at least.

... But even looking at the shrunk down pics on my image gallery, they look more like they did in real life. Like... an 8 bit game.

I love my CRT but I hate this shit. I hate it cause it's gatekeepy and super selective. It's like the thing I posted a few weeks back about the "Perfect experience" and hate the idea that people are trying to trick people into thinking they're missing half the experience by playing on emulator. Like yeah, games were made to look best on CRTs. Decisions were made that wouldn't be made if LCD panels were around. But the art is designed to be resilient. Every CRT looked different. This wasn't some film ass "See my movie on a real projector or you're missing the real experience" shit (which is also bullshit), this is shit was made having NO IDEA how good or bad the screen they'd be played on would be. This shit had to communicate to children on some shitty zenimax TV that lived in a wood cabinet with an RF connector. However you want to play is FINE. You won't miss the artistry. The artistry is designed to survive the worst case scenarios.

Maybe try and mess with a CRT once if you're too young to have had a lot of gaming experiences on if you can? Maybe read about it? But people will try and tell you wack shit like "You're not supposed to see the dithering, they wouldn't dither if you could see it" which ignores the fact that... yes you can, in a lot of cases, and yes they would like lol you think you can't see the dithering on those crazy high end Japanese PC VNs from the 90s???????

edit: ALSO YES BEFORE ANYONE SAYS ANYTHING I KNOW THE OVERSCAN IS BAD, BUT I CAN'T CHANGE IT IN THE SERVICE MENU OKAY ugh I don't wanna take this dumb thing apart

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