Yeah, the artistry in a lot of older games is pretty incredible, if only for the sheer amount of detail and work the creators put into the very tiniest aspects of these games. Like Yoshi's Island for the SNES, where every corner of the game was crammed with secrets, bonus rooms, etc. In some cases, even messages from the creators about the work they put in:
That game itself was impressive in its mechanics too, given that it had situations where enemies behaved in unique ways that were never likely to come up in the actual game.
Or a game which I still remember quite fondly from 2001, Wario Land 4. There, despite using traditional sprite animation, every single level had at least one different tileset and background (usually two or three), its own music (which had things like echo effects added for caves and sped up or slowed down based on on screen events) and tons of details that were exceedingly unlikely for the player to notice. Like a whole tileset for a single room or two, with tons of animations. Or music specifically for part of an ending medley... if the player did really poorly overall. Or a sound test where every single song was exclusive to the sound test.
That's the kind of thing that was more common in older games. A huge amount of attention to detail and small secrets scattered everywhere.
A great thing about Yoshi's Island is that it's possibly the only SNES game that benefits from the fancy pixel-smoothing modes that emulators offer. Rather than looking distorted, it makes it look like a completely modern 2D platformer.
http://www.nindb.net/snes/yoshis-island/
That game itself was impressive in its mechanics too, given that it had situations where enemies behaved in unique ways that were never likely to come up in the actual game.
Or a game which I still remember quite fondly from 2001, Wario Land 4. There, despite using traditional sprite animation, every single level had at least one different tileset and background (usually two or three), its own music (which had things like echo effects added for caves and sped up or slowed down based on on screen events) and tons of details that were exceedingly unlikely for the player to notice. Like a whole tileset for a single room or two, with tons of animations. Or music specifically for part of an ending medley... if the player did really poorly overall. Or a sound test where every single song was exclusive to the sound test.
That's the kind of thing that was more common in older games. A huge amount of attention to detail and small secrets scattered everywhere.