Games with detailed pixel-art interiors

[EinhanderZwei]

What I'm talikng about is 2D games that have very detailed interiors and environments in general, preferrably sprite-based. Some examples:
- Crusader: No Remorse/Regret
- X-COM 1-3
- Castlevania: Harmony Of Dissonance
- Jagged Alliance 1
- All RPGs sbuild on Infinity Engine (esp. Fallout 1-2)

[Obiwanshinobi]

Fallouts neither are powered by Infinity Engine, nor have that much pixel art in them. Check out Disciples II: Rise of the Elves and Ys Complete I&II.

[EinhanderZwei]

Fallouts neither are powered by Infinity Engine

Didn't know that... Should've said 'all these classic isometric RPGs from Interplay'...

nor have that much pixel art in them

Well, the prefabs are copied-pasted all over the place, but some interior designs are really impressive

[Obiwanshinobi]

I mean, the likes of Fallout and Crusader seem pre-rendered with techniques other than pixel art. "Pure" pixel art can be used in the copy and paste manner too, as you can see in Suikoden II.

[Necronopticous]

PoPoLoCrois

[ratlhead]

Tales of Destiny (PS1)

[The Coop]

Metal Slug 1-5
Misadventures of Flink (Sega-CD)

[Obiwanshinobi]

Chrono Trigger (especially Undersea Palace and Black Omen), Monster World IV, Rudra no Hihou. If you wanna experience pixel art at its finest, you shouldn't be using any filters, just the scanlines. In zSNES bilinear filtering is enabled by default, but you can disable hardware video acceleration in your DirectX settings to get rid of it.
Alundra, Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile (yes, you want the US version for the PSX with this patchy voice acting; no, you don't want the PSP version with the same voice acting, but without gameplay improvements of the US version and with pixel art butchered with filtering).
Tales of Destiny for the PSX seconded (on a CRT via RGB lead looks gorgeous; that filtered screenshot doesn't do justice).
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, The Adventure of Little Ralph, Panzer Bandit.
If you're gonna give Monster World Collection for the PS2 a spin, make sure to play in the 240p mode and disable the filtering (as well as deflickering). Same goes for Fantasy Zone, Treasure Box and Phantasy Star collections (where you can also find great examples of pixel art).
Flashback.
If you're after graphics akin to that computer games you mentioned, plenty of fairly recent Ukrainian and Russian games kept that style (Metal Heart, numerous Blitzkrieg iterations). Also, Divine Divinity (the first one) and Commandos.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

The fighting mecha-based game of FamilySoft's Iron Blood (on both PSX & PC formats) has plently of detailed pixel artwork.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[JBueno MD]

I´ve always liked Ogre Battle 64 precisely for its lovely 2D art, even if it does have a prerendered look. Here are some random pics, though I can´t find images of some of the best locales.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Scurge: Hive for the GBA (action adventure with isometric view). In VisualBoy Advance choose GDI as Render Method to avoid bilinear filtering and deformation (I assume GDI doesn't filter the graphics by default).

[BIL]

Seconding Ys I & II Complete (Windows) - some of the overworld fields and interiors of houses are a tad generic, but the dungeons and character sprites are beautiful (particularly the too grotesque to be superdeformed, yet too cute to be creepy monsters).

[Drum]

Well, this thread got expanded pretty quickly so I guess all of the following will qualify:

Resident Evil remake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFhQrp5Bhhk
Resident Evil Zero
Resident Evil 3
Resident Evil 2

Naturally, they all have 3D character models but those backgrounds are ludicrous, especially in REmake.

[Elixir]

Pretty much anything by Vanillaware

[RNGmaster]

The World Ends With You has some incredible sprite-work, but it might not be your favorite art style.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Sanitarium, then. Terrific atmosphere.
If you include - broadly speaking - adventure games with pre-rendered backdrops, animated or still, pixel art or some other technique, commendable titles come in dozens. Commendable on aesthetical basis, that is, since other qualities of those games might not be that hot.
I for one hold the backgrounds of Chrono Cross in regard nearly as high as its music, but don't think the game is really worth playing unless you badly wanna know what happened to one character from ChT. Them backgrounds, however, look fabulous. Even in 2000, when 640x480 resolution was standard for PC adventure games, Chrono Cross with its p240 was graphically second to none. Of course playing most PC point 'n' click adventures for the graphics is rather pointless without a CRT (even that fan-made Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars runs in 800x600 and that's it). High resolution modes and hacks, so helpful in the likes of Diablo II, wouldn't be of much help in games where each backdrop is supposed to fill the whole screen (also, pixel hunting would be quite a bitch in high resolutions).
Gotta wonder how much of the graphic adventure games' success can be put down to the visuals more flashy than most other genres could muster back in their heyday (a bit like 1vs1 fighters on early 3D-capable home systems). Of course die-hards are gonna defend "good writing" and "compelling puzzles", but I'm afraid if it wasn't for the graphics, the genre would have never gained that much prosperity. You never know, though. After all, visual novels and dating sims, quite successful in Japan, hardly ever seem to have great presentation, their writing doesn't even pretend to be good (at least those very few I played didn't show such pretensions) and they can be very thin on the porn content.
I wish more games coupled visual splendour of graphic adventure with broader appeal of action adventure, but it's hard to overlook how badly Heart of Darkness flopped. Oddworld (character animation about as awful as in Heart of Darkness, albeit for different reasons, but overall artistic direction just as commendable), Resident Evil and Onimusha sold better, and yet this way of doing things seems dead in the water.

[Drum]

In the adv game genre there's Bad Mojo (always link that game and Sanitarium in my head).