It's the strangest thing. It's like the team saw the retro trend of taking arcade pixel art and gussying it up, and consciously reversed it. When you look at the ways Sol Cresta is ugly, it's ugly in precisely those places that retro games were already ugly - they just emphasized the appearance of those design 'flaws.' Take the 'pre-rendered' look of the meteors - it looks like someone ran the asset through a deep-fryer and its rotation is stuttery - every visual 'state' of the meteor occurs too many frames apart, making the rotation demonstrably stilted. (The same stiltedness is in every pre-rendered turret's rotation, too.) Another example: I saw couple reviews recently complaining about the Vaseline-smeared Thunder Dragon 2 backgrounds (
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
Sol Cresta's visual design philosophy centers on a grotesque exaggeration of 90s arcade visual flaws.
Aside from all the criticism about 'how' the game looks bad - I think this might be 'why' it looks bad. Even if the intolerable ugliness of it all turns you away from the game, I think you can appreciate that this is an interesting aesthetic approach to creating a 'retro' feel. I would bet there's other examples of designers taking this approach, right? I wonder if anyone has ever taken the so far - committing to it in such an exaggerated fashion.
Edit: Reading this over, I thought I should mention - I'd probably give this an 8/10, maybe an 8.5 (music and novelty) and certainly support SkyKid's 7/10 lest I be called a Sol Cresta apologist. I'm just interested in this aesthetic question.