Something that continually makes an appearance in modern gaming (usually with larger titles) are Easter eggs that feature some sort of retro computing thing. Maybe it’s an interface, maybe it’s a whole mini-system of sorts, etc.

Here’s an example of retro in a modern game:

With the non-gaming stuff we do with computers, as much as the industry tries to get us to use everything with a totally modernized look, time and time again people will revert back to super-simple means of using a computer interface.

For example, there are many (hundreds of?) thousands of users who will go into their Windows settings and purposely turn OFF all menu animations and fading because it’s simply not necessary. The fading in particular can get annoying quickly because it adds in needless time to display something that should be instant, such as a "Save Document? [Y]es, [N]o, [C]ancel" dialog box.

For those wondering if you can do that in Windows 7, yes you can. In fact you can make the whole Win7 UI look almost exactly like Win2000 if you wanted to.

A "computery" interface can also lend itself to fonts as well. Some people absolutely can’t stand anti-aliased fonts in any form, so when they see an anti-aliased font like this:

…they’ll purposely turn that off to show this instead:

I do have to admit that there are times when the aliased look, as jagged and "ugly" as it may appear, is easier to read at times simply for the fact that computery-looking fonts feel more comfortable on view; I can’t explain it any better than that.

As a small side note: Linux is the only environment that has desktop UIs that do fonts right, because you can set which size fonts go from aliased to anti-aliased.

Using a small Windows font as an example, Tahoma in 8pt size is easier to read aliased compared to anti-aliased.

Anti-aliased:

Aliased:

On a Linux desktop, you could for example instruct the desktop UI (in settings) to "only show aliased fonts at any point size below 9", and it will do it. Windows doesn’t do that, and to the best of my knowledge, Mac doesn’t either although I could be wrong there.

Given the all-or-nothing choice for aliasing in Windows, there are many who opt just to turn all the anti-aliasing off.

Do you like your fonts and menus computery? Or do you like the modern smooth and anti-aliased look?

Personally, I ride the fence on this one and really can’t answer with a definitive yes or no. When the fonts and menus bug me with the smoothness in Win7, I just open up a VMWare session of Windows 2000 to get my retro fix.

What about you?

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