>>712858228
>hand-painted lighting with vertex colors always produced really nice results imo
the main problem is thst there's always a tradeoff
baked lighting and colors can look great, but with games trying to do fuckhuge worlds (like the new mario kart), you open the door to either the game running like shit due to having to preload a massive world, or just having to buckle down and accept random pop-in that every know-it-all is going to cherrypick and go "wow nice pop-in you niggershit devs"; rainbow road, probably the only course in world with baked lighting, already has these sort of minor culling goofs all over
either that or using thick fog or fading in the polys like older games did
anti-soul gas is just the cheap and easy solution to pop-in
doesn't remotely mean it's good, but it's easy, perfect for devs on a tight schedule, at the cost of the game's visual style