Its a pure indulgent nostalgia thing, lots of people love it! I actually prefer it as pixel art than the blurred stuff you get in VGA era games. There's just something about crisp pixels I love. Plus, dithering masks my shoddy gamejam art haha.
Viewing post in The Telwynium: Book Three comments
Oh yeah, not all VGA games for sure, but a lot of adventures at the time went to scanned and downscaled art, lots of anti-aliased lines. I do love them too of course, but there's something really evocative about the lower pallete stuff I really like as well.
And 90s CRTs were plenty crisp! Especially at 320x200 like most games around then. I think 1024x768 was a pretty common desktop res on CRTs. When people talk about pixel art being designed for blurry monitors or with big scanlines, I think it's more console games on NTSC TVs.
Yeah, interesting! I've definitely started enjoying a lot more old movies/music myself even though they're before my time and I never watched/listened as a kid. But something about the style I like, even though it's outdated. So can definitely be an appeal to older styles even when nostalgia isn't a factor