It's not the impact that's claimed at all. No sprite magic in the world will get around trying to display 200 pixels of image on a 65" modern TV. Play an NES game on a super-high-quality 13" flat panel and it looks a lot better than on a 75" one even without any fancy scanline filters or such.
Which pixels in Mario them would you move around, exactly, to prevent big square pixels from being really obvious?
Hell, those games didn't really look great on 60" RPTV CRTs either. (For anything other than 4x split-screen, my friends and I always preferred a smaller screen since the big screen exposed all the limitations of the graphics and by the N64 era PC games had advanced to the point that we knew what we were missing.)
And of course anything Mode 7 or full-3D era suffers all the same problems of looking bad blown up to modern display sizes without "CRT optimized sprites" being a factor anymore since the models are seen from all sorts of perspectives and sizes.
They looked better back then because it was new and magical and there were no 4k games to compare against, not because 256 pixels looked more like 1000. Like with VHS vs DVD - it was absolutely easy to tell even on a pretty small CRT.
Look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.
Which pixels in Mario them would you move around, exactly, to prevent big square pixels from being really obvious?
Hell, those games didn't really look great on 60" RPTV CRTs either. (For anything other than 4x split-screen, my friends and I always preferred a smaller screen since the big screen exposed all the limitations of the graphics and by the N64 era PC games had advanced to the point that we knew what we were missing.)
And of course anything Mode 7 or full-3D era suffers all the same problems of looking bad blown up to modern display sizes without "CRT optimized sprites" being a factor anymore since the models are seen from all sorts of perspectives and sizes.
They looked better back then because it was new and magical and there were no 4k games to compare against, not because 256 pixels looked more like 1000. Like with VHS vs DVD - it was absolutely easy to tell even on a pretty small CRT.
Look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.