No market for traditional animation?

I've been blowing a fair amount of quarters the last couple months playing Street Fighter 3 at my residence's little arcade section (albeit it's a little boring when you basically own the high-score board), and have been wondering, where the heck are all the games with traditionally animated graphics these days?

Is it just too expensive to contract an artist to animate a figure of decent construction (rather than stupidly simple) such as in Street Fighter 3?
(I believe all the fighters in that are animated at 12fps, which is the same as used in the majority of animated feature-films)

I'd have figured with vector programs such as Flash they'd at least have made a slight comeback in both the Casual and Gaming market as it's more cost effective to animate a vector object than it is one by hand, even though the quality is of a different level.
(basically, I've yet to see a vector animation, with the exception of two, that move as well as a traditional work)

I want to see traditional works make a come-back, rather than just still graphics or pre-rendered characters. I'm guessing the kind of thing I'd like to see is just too expensive in this day and age?
(I only ever see it in just one-on-one fighters {Street Fighter3 being the best looking one}, and even then the current games that make use of it are typically recycled from the previous iteration in the series, even Street Fighter 4 has moved into 3d)

I fully agree with you. Whether its in games, or animated films.

Its a stylistic thing. I like toy story and shrek, but I also like the look of older handdrawn classics. Same deal for games. I was playing streetfighter 2 ce on mame the other day. Just looks great all around, and has a fun sense about it. No ones really making this stuff anymore.

I just don't understand why everything must be 3d in this day and age. Yeah its more cost effective, but you'd think more people would have the vision and balls to do something different from the norm creatively.

I got into an argument with my older brother about this. He couldn't really understand where I was coming from, so I guess people like us are the minority.

*shrug*

I think maybe it's that most people just want to ride the wave of whatever is `current` or cutting edge, plus what they're used to. Kids being born these days are being exposed to amazing 3D stuff that I would never have dreamed of 20-30 years ago, so you can imagine how retro/2d/hand-drawn type graphics would be like some old black and white movie in comparison.

Personally I have always been fond of 2D and always will be. I don't like 3D so much although it can be visually/technically impressive. It does take a lot of time and effort to draw good 2D art but then again I think the idea of creating 3D models and texturing them and animating them is probably pretty time consuming.

I'm expecting 2D to make a big comeback soon when 3D has become so `normal` that 2D starts to seem special. People just want whatever they don't usually have.

I'd like to join this support group too please!

I was getting so excited about gaming and the direction things were going, when all of a sudden WHAM!!!! Everything had to be 3D all of a sudden. (And really bad 3d at that... I'm talking about the early Saturn and PS1 days)

I love pixel artwork, but it seems we will never see it again as it was. I'd say the pinnacle of things were the Capcom fighting games and the Metal Slug series. Only in the last few years has 3d stuff gotten really good, but now it takes several years to create the assets for a game, so new releases have really slowed down.

Thankfully, we have MAME.

Wouldn't it be possible to create cartoony/pixelstyle output with any 3d-tool using specific shaders/converters/whatnot? It would certainly save development time if you can create 1 figure which you can rotate/mirror, move limbs, etc. compared to pixeling all that by hand. And even if you would have all the frames pixeled at some point, imagine your boss suddenly says: 'ok. nice, but our sponsor changed, we now require another had and different hands' then doing all the manual pixels again would be rather frustrating, while in a 3d tool it would be fairly easy to replace stuff.

Note that I'm not preaching for 3d games, I'm as 2d/retro as I can be.. :P

That's essentially the only thing I see nowadays, both on TV and in games that actually use a flat style, but it doesn't reflect that 'traditional' look I'm heading at. There's too many limitations with that setup, and it looks nowhere near as natural as hand-animated characters with proper use of squash/stretch.


I couldn't even see the need for pixelling them, current-gen systems could handle high-resolution 12fps-animated sprites with full alpha on the edges and everything these days.
(in fact that's what they're doing with the Street Fighter2 HD remake for XB Live! Albeit it's still the 3-frame animations like in the old title, and lacking any extra visual flair they could have thrown in)

I just want to see something modern using traditional graphics. Imagine something like Yoshi's Island done with todays technology, it would look absolutely gorgeous with high resolution drawings, as well as a couple visual effects. The beauty of having it all hardware accelerated (rather than 2d-software rendered) would be the distinct lack of jaggies, and the ability to make everything move much more smoothly.
(like Anthony's Cletus, albeit that's all claymation)