ZOSYA - Best game graphics ever?

[Lee Bee]

In case anyone wasn't aware, the ZOSYA team are back with perhaps their most beautiful game ever, Seraphima! To me, this is what 'the future' of Spectrum game graphics looks like. Hard to believe it's real!



This is the latest in ZOSYA's line of stunning platform games from the past few years, which has also included:

Valley of Rains, 2019


The Dark: Lost Pages, 2021


And Angles, 2021


Would you agree that these have to be the finest Speccy graphics ever? Are there other major contenders I'm forgetting about?

[stupidget]

I always thought Savage and Dan Dare 3 looked pretty amazing.

[+3code]

And Turrican.

[XTM]

Yes, the contain some of the finest graphics, certainly in the top 10-5% of Speccy games, and the games are technical marvels. But the finest graphics? Personally I have to say no. For me there are some that look even nicer, I especially like the graphics in Dan Dare 2, and that is precisely because of how they use paper colour as well (a lot of Speccy games hardly do and only have black paper) and mix the colours masterfully - while at the same time not going crazy on dithering and stippling like way too many Speccy games do. I mean, just look at the colours that show up in the 2nd half of this video, after the 7:43 mark.

All in all I'd say Zosya games have great graphics but there may be a minor flaw here and there. For example, I'm not too fond of the graphics in the 3D levels of The Dark. They are very fast, but the way the walls are done with those diagonals doesn't look that great to me. Travel in Time looks marvellous though I feel a few horizontal stripes on the road to improve the illusion of speed would have helped immensely (probably at the cost of the framerate). And in the vertically scrolling spaceship levels in Angels, the star field in the background that actually scrolls up instead of down makes it look like you're flying backwards. I don't want to come across as too critical as these are just minor nitpicks, but they are there nonetheless.

[bluespikey]

Removing women's clothing as a means of memory optimization. Genius.

[Kweepa]

Looks good, but hard to take the main character seriously when her breasts are larger than her head.

[XTM]

Removing women's clothing as a means of memory optimization. Genius.

Not sure if you're talking of all titles with female protagonists, but in the case of Seraphima, any memory optimization certainly was heavily undermined by having a bit of sampled speech in it.
(When she says "I'm ready", her lips should have shut briefly after the "I'm" bit, that's what I mean with nitpick)

[Turrican]

And Turrican.

It´s me!

[Jbizzel]

I don't think these games are the best graphics, but very nice optimization (I don't mean the lack of clothing either)

Actually, what the hell do we even mean when we say "best graphics"? Seems such an obvious, but is it animation, sprites, backgrounds, the graphics engine?

[Chris23235]

Like with all Zosya games it is the attention to detail that is astonishing. Leaves falling from trees, refelections in the water. Everywhere is something that you don't see at first.

[Pegaz]

It's nice to see how spoiled and picky we've become, these days...

[Ivanzx]

I really think they are doing the best Graphics ever on the Spectrum, along with some other homebrew groups like Retroworks and Sanchez Crew.
XTM compared them with Dan Dare 2, aber mann , I think Dan Dare is far away from some of the Zosya productions, as sprites are limited and repetitive as well as the background

Use of colour, size, and design of sprites, is in general better in the Homebrew era (comparing the best games) than back in the day.

[XTM]

Well, I've said Zosya are in the 5-10% top of graphics, that is only my opinion. Same goes for the backgrounds in Dan Dare 2, I like them specifically for the way they are using colour in combination with detailed pixel graphics, giving the illusion of there being more than the 15 standard colours. Yes, the Zosya games do have some amazing effects like the white sparkles in Seraphima, or the water reflections in Valley of Rains and objectively the graphics in those games are better than in Dan Dare 2.

But, and this again is just my opinion, bigger sprites does not necessarily always mean better, as the bigger your sprites are, the less room there is on screen, especially if it is horizontally limited by a graphical border as in the case of Seraphima. I totally understand why these borders are there, they help keeping the frame rate up, but the trade-off will be a slightly cramped screen. Valley of Rains didn't have them but here the sprites are also very big. It certainly makes for an awesome view, but personally I prefer games with smaller sprites and more room to maneuver in. Consider games like Myth, or Rex, especially the later with its tiny sprites (even though Rex sadly gets very slow when a lot is happening on screen). Or the games with small sprites but using multicolour, like Gluf, El Stompo, Multidude ... there is just so much stuff out there. There is bound to be other titles I'd have added but can't remember now.

I don't want this to come across that I think the Zosya games aren't great, they are exceptional works of art and the way they have created multi-layerred parallax scrolling with colour to boot, even with variable movement speed in Seraphima, is nothing short of spectacular. Though I think from a gameplay point of view there are better games and I can't just totally ignore this - but yeah, the thread title is about the graphics. I guess objectively they probably are the best graphics ever (just as objectively the C64 is more powerful than the Speccy

[Nienn Heskil]

It's nice to see how spoiled and picky we've become, these days...

Considering the state of a 'sinclair user' around these parts, it's impressive (not) they are sometimes aware new games are still coming out

'they use DITHERING in it and and and ... if this was out bAcK iN 1983'

Spoiler

[HEXdidnt]

I'm consistently impressed by Zosya's colourful graphics, and how they work within the Spectrum's limitations but, when it comes to the sprites, they seem to focus a lot more effort on the player sprite's animation than anything else... and the larger the sprites, the more noticeable it becomes that the enemies aren't animated as well. Seraphima is a prime example of this - the main character is very smoothly animated, with lots of incidental detail enhancing the presentation... though one has to wonder why they bothered giving her wings - is there a power-up that lets her fly, or even double-jump, at some point?

Valley of Rains wasn't so impressive to me as Angels or Seraphima because it looked to me like a fairly blatant rip-off of Savage. Angels seems to take some graphical cues from Streets of Rage (specifically Blaze), but is impressive because of that - because it's been reasonably successfully squeezed into the 8x8px attribute blocks - rather than in spite of it... Though the vertical shooter sections seem like pointless padding. The Dark... honestly looks pretty clumsy to me, but is quite clever in what it's trying to achieve and how it's going about it. The engine probably would have been better suited to a slower-paced game - Eye of the Beholder, for example.

Their driving games seem pretty mixed... In some respects, the presentation is excellent - animation of the player car is generally great - but the roads and trackside detail tend to be pretty bland. The effects in Travel Through Time - headlights, the shadow that passes over the cars as they drive under a bridge - are technically impressive, but I can't help but think the car sprites are too large for the roads they're on.

[Lee Bee]

Actually, what the hell do we even mean when we say "best graphics"? Seems such an obvious, but is it animation, sprites, backgrounds, the graphics engine?

Good question. I suppose "best graphics" could refer to many individual aspects, including both the visual aesthetic and the technical excellence. For this, I was really thinking of the overall production, including:

• Attractive art style (eg beautiful clouds, trees, horses, etc)
• Impressive sprite size
• Attention to detail (eg background animation, transitions)
• Ambitious scope (eg intro, cut scenes)
• Use of colour and management of attribute clash
• Graphical innovations (eg parallax scrolling, reflections in water)
• Speed of engine
• Overall presentation (eg loading screen, HUD)

Mainly, I just think the game looks beautiful. The skies are my favourite part.

[Ralf]

I agree, they are the best nowadays. Lots of graphics, lot's of details and yet very clear, very colourful and cleverly minimalized colour clash.

Going a bit away from graphics, they also have very good framerates in their games and good animation.

Their competition are certainly Dave Perry and Nick Brutty duo, they had some really pretty, colourful games. Actually some of Zosya
games like Valley of Rains are heavily inspired by Perry/Brutty games like Savage.

Of course it's a bit unfair to compare 80s games to modern ones as making graphics then was much harder, the tools were worse, you
couldn't browse net for inspirations etc.

Also if you want to see some pretty graphics, you should check demoscene productions. But I guess that we talk about games only here.

[XTM]

Also if you want to see some pretty graphics, you should check demoscene productions. But I guess that we talk about games only here.

Yeah, I mean that's the thread title already. I was going to say games with graphics by Grongy or helpcomputer0 would probably take this crown, but so far we "only" have their static pictures.

[Joefish]

What I like about Seraphima and Valley of Rains is how there are several different arrangements of parallax effects, and they vary from one area to the next. I like the temple area with the large columns that pass by faster in the foreground - that's something that even Psygnosis weren't doing on the Amiga until Shadow of the Beast III. Although there's some awkward bits where you have no idea if objects in-plane with the player can be passed, jumped on, or just block your way. And the way there's no clue when you can step off the edge of a level safely; that's a poor bit of gameplay design.

Technically it's clever that they've got two speeds of scrolling, but it's awkward to play the game with that sudden switch from walk to run speed, and it doesn't seem to be present on all levels either. I think if you're going to try and implement inertia (rather than simple stop/start one-speed scrolling), you either need an 'any-pixel-rate' scroll, or an instantaneous pixel-positioning background renderer, so you can do Mario/Sonic type continuously variable scrolling speeds. Anything less just doesn't play right.

[zxbruno]

I always look forward to their next game. Not a puzzle, not AGD, great graphics, presentation, story and production. I wish they were around in the late 80s and early 90s. They would've pushed the other developers to do better.

[Turtle_Quality]

If we're talking best graphics in Spectrum games I can't believe no-one has mentioned the Nirvana / multicolour games yet, Manic Pietro, Old Tower etc...

[Pegaz]

Nirvana engine is great and i like it alot, but in reality it turned out that its mostly limited to platformer/puzzle type of games.
How many shooter, racing, sport sims do we have in Nirvana engine? Almost none.
Why does this great Sensible Soccer port have to be in stylized mono graphics, while the Amstrad version looks almost like an Amiga?
Zosya games are truly a piece of art, animation, sprites, graphic design, the whole production is something never seen before on Spectrum, regardless of certain compromises that had to be made...

[Joefish]

There's been some good sprite designs in multicolour games, but I'd suggest it's only Space Monsters Meet THE HARDY where the backgrounds live up to the potential too, comparable with the likes of Dan Dare II as previously mentioned. And there the sprite design has been simplified a little to allow for horizontal pixel movement. Still pretty good, though maybe not quite as good as some of the static designs from the likes of El Stompo (and I'll plug my own from Buzzsaw+ too). But given the constraints of having the same colour in a band across the whole sprite, they're way better than any ordinary game where all sprites are all the same colour (Dan Dare 1 and 2 again!).

[Ralf]

The problem with Nirvana is that it uses small blocks and everything is made of them. How big are tiles and sprites in Nirvana? 16x16 pixels or so.

On the other hand take the girl with wings from Seraphima. How big is she? I guess something about 48x40 pixels.

I suppose it would be a nightmare to do a sprite like that in Nirvana moving. If I remember correctly, Nirvana allows only quite limited amount
of changes on the screen during one frame.

You will never have the best graphics if your objects are small.

[AndyC]

Swings and roundabouts. You can do better in a smaller sprite when you can put more colour into it (it's why a lot of people like the C64 and Amstrad low resolution, less pixels but more ability to define shapes with colour) although even with things like Nirvana that's still quite restrictive.

The big sprites in things like Seraphina can naturally convey more detail, but it can also make for clunkier gameplay as the screen size becomes more constricted relatively speaking. The need to have big, ugly black borders around everything to hide the colour clash also doesn't really help much (although it's handled a lot better here than something like Shadow Warriors for example). I'm inclined to agree with JoeFish as well that the multi-speed scrolling, whilst technically impressive, feels a bit janky because it has to suddenly jump between speeds rather than increasing incrementally.

None of that takes away from the fact these are all very impressive titles and would probably have wowed everyone in magazine screenshots back in the day.