Originally Posted by Tuco
Originally Posted by Wormerine
That's interesting, and probably a reason why I remember so many games looking much better than they do now.
Well, yes and no.
While it may be part of the equation, I can promise you that even using the most "faithful" equipment out there a lot of these old beloved games would still look way less impressive to you today.
Our memory usually has that funny tendency to fill the gaps.

You remember that old gorgeous animated background scenario in pixel art from your childhood, then you back to it and you realize there were barely a couple of details actually moving, they had two frames of animations each and the whole thing was in 16 colors with pixels the size of a peanut.
Nostalgia is undeniably a part, but I think there's more to it than that. Sure, early 3d can be particularly unimpressive (even worse without a crt to smooth out those polygons!) but a lot of sprite art holds up really well even today-there's a certain charm to handdrawn stuff that is just timeless, like that portrait shown earlier (with the crt effect)-looks better than what you'd see for a 3d portrait in say, NWN2, despite the gap in technology. In particular, earlier art styles often worked better with stylized art designs, like Fire Emblem or Advance Wars or when handling mediums that lean more on interpretation and abstraction. When graphical quality is slim, game design tends to be a bit different. You might get a narrative description of an npc you meet in an rpg rather than a cinematic for instance.