Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Today’s prompt is all about pre-rendered graphics, a type of graphical design that has largely fallen out of fashion but was a major part of video games, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s. Games like Donkey Kong Country, Mortal Kombat, and Age of Empires II prepared their characters in advance in ways that could be both attractive and very limited. On one hand, they could allow a great deal of fidelity; on the other, they were very restrictive and couldn’t allow a great deal of dynamic movement. Having played through DKC earlier this year, I can say that it lacked much of the fluidity of my favorite platformers – though even still, it was much better on that front that most pre-rendered games of its day.

Since the 2000s, it’s become both easier and expected to simply have complex enough in-game models, but it’s sometimes used by retro projects. Understandably so, I think. There are a lot of ways to make video game graphics, and these could look funny or strange or even classy. You wouldn’t know it from Age of Empires II Remastered, which has more conventional 3D models, but I do think the pre-rendered animations made the original seem almost prestige in a way that befit its historical subject matter. Anyway, though, here’s the question to you: what are your favorite examples? And I’m specifically thinking of in-game graphics, not cutscenes (which we discussed in a thread earlier this year). Graphics you actually move – which in the case of Donkey Kong Country, mostly relates to falling.

And, as it always is, what did you play this weekend?