Honestly, I have the special edition and after about ten minutes of playing I switched to the original graphics and music and didn't really look back. They really have aged quite well, even though of course they look much blockier on a 24" TFT compared to the original 15"ish CRT experience...
Which is kinda strange because the "pixel" art of those days was never intended to be rendered as blocky pixels, but designed to make use of the CRT's softness.
Arguably true for the EGA versions (when played on real EGA hardware), but the VGA versions used a 320x200 resolution, which was line-doubled to 320x400, and displayed on monitors sharp enough to be usable at 640x480. The pixels were obviously blocky.
Indeed, you could see the pixels, but that was all it was. Advanced games used antialiasing to lessen the blocky effect. You only could dream of a future where graphics are "paper like" without pixels. At that moment, it didn't fill like low-res, at all. 320x200 256 colors was the bleeding edge of computer graphics. Later on, some games started appearing with 640x480.
That's also why I can't stand some of the modern pixel-games. They are too blocky and doesn't work well on modern screens. Using blocky graphics is not "retro" at all. It's more an artistic impression of how they think old games looked like.
I bought the special editions of 1 and 2 over the weekend with the sole intent of extracting the original game files and playing them via scummvm. Didn’t even try to play the special editions. And getting them working in scummvm was as much fun as getting to play the original games themselves!
