I feel like there is a balance I need to enjoy a game fully. I really like modded Minecraft because I can approach the problems in many different ways but there is still progression. While in vanilla I often find myself lost because the things I have available to do next are only to help me do more things in the future.
Well, I was trying to complete my second playthrough of Metal gear solid 2. But a bad Windows 11 update seems to have corrupted something, and now my PC is crawling.
So, attempting to reinstall/repair. Thanks Microsoft :3
Other than that Metal Gear has been awesome. I finished 3 the other week and have also been playing 4 on the ps3. Not super keen on the bombardment of cutscenes so far in 4, but it’s still pretty neat.
I have really appreciated learning the mechanics of each game. I feel like this is one of the first series where I can play each game twice and learn new things about the game on each playthrough. I can tell how I’m improving and when certain fights were completed with luck or if I actually mastered them. The depth is super addicting
Not super keen on the bombardment of cutscenes so far in 4, but it’s still pretty neat.
This isn’t a spoiler but I need to warn you: the final cutscene is 40 minutes long with no break/checkpoint and you can only save your game after, not before or during. Literally everyone who goes into the game blind ends up trapped there late at night wanting to go to bed.
Thank you for the heads up! I’ll have to go check when the cutscene comes up so I don’t get caught off guard.
I ended up having to watch the MGS2 cutscene before the last boss, and one of the really long MGS3 cutscenes on youtube because I fell asleep while they were playing lol
It’s so weird to me that no one uses the term “slowdown” any more. Lag and latency meant networking delays back in the days you’re talking about. Not a complaint, just an observation that I’ve been wondering about the last few years.
But yeah, as others said, slowdown/lag was pretty common. I immediately think of the ninjas jumping out of the water in TMNT3, the beginning of Top Man’s stage in Mega Man 3, and the last boss of The Guardian Legend, but there were many more. Early 3d is shocking too, with more sub-30-fps games than you remember. Some called themselves at 20, even. [Edit: Now that I think about it, even some NES games capped at 20. Strange times.]
I believe OP is referring to input latency, which isn't so much a result of the system slowing down due to increased load, as much as running in a consistently slowed-down state causing a delay on your inputs being reflected on-screen. There's several reasons for why this is happening more often lately.
Part of it has to do with the displays we use nowadays. In the past, most players used a CRT TV/monitor to play games, which have famously fast response times (the time between receiving the video signal and rendering that signal on the screen is nearly zero). But modern displays, while having a much crisper picture, often tend to be slower at the act of actually firing pixels on the screen, causing that delay between pressing Jump and seeing your character begin jumping.
Some games also strain their systems so hard that, after various layers of post-processing effects get applied to every rendered frame, the displayed frames are already "old" before they're even sent down the HDMI cable, resulting in a laggier feel for the player. You'll see this difference in action with games that have a toggle for a "performance/quality" mode in the graphics settings. Usually this setting will enable/disable certain visual effects, reducing the load on the system and allowing your inputs to be registered faster.
Input latency includes the time it takes to render the frame. CRTs have a small inherent latency advantage compared to modern LCDs but they're not instant and that advantage is miniscule compared to the disadvantage of the lower framerate. A game running at 30 fps on a gaming LCD will have lower input lag than a game running at 20 fps on a CRT. I'm sure there are outliers that poll inputs in a silly way that increases input lag, but for most games the render time will be the greatest factor. Performance modes usually simply reduce the render time (even if the framerate is unchanged).
You’re right. Yes, there’s slowdowns in a lot of older games but not necessarily input lag. The slowdowns dont bother me hardly at all. I think you hit right on it!
“Lag” does indeed come from network/signal theory and does indeed refer to networking. Been a minute, but I want to say lag is the round trip delay and latency is A to B but don’t quote me on that.
That said? Nobody cared. “Lag” was always the time between action and response. Some of that might be input delay. Some of that might be display delay (which has always been over-exaggerated but…). And a lot of that really was network delay. These days it tends to be more rendering/logic delay because people who are playing on shitty internet connections know it.
I distinctly remember mario bros on the nes. There was like a 1/3second latency between pressing the button and mario jumping. You had to time your jumps (especially when running) further back than you’d expect to compensate. You just kinda got used to it after a while.
Yep. On the emulators now it is instant. I recently stayed at an airbnb with an nes and played with my kids. The lag is definately there. Even my kids were falling off stuff shouting that they pushed the jump button.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Older games are a laggy mess when there is too much on the screen. Not to mention sprites disappearing. The issue I think is, we have gotten better and better over the decades until recently. We are just seeing a backward slide in performance (for many reasons, not just poor optimization).
I’ve only recently (2 years ago) started to play older games I was interested in but never got the time to play. I even got a 16:9 CRT-TV and modded all the original consoles. It toatally depends on the game if it is a smooth and optimized experience or just an unresponsive mess of code.
Examples: Virtua Racing on the Genesis or Star Fox on the SNES. they were slow and quite laggy. sure they were essentially pushing the limits of what the console could do and in the case of Star Fox had to have the FX chip in the cartridge but I wouldn't call racing around on the Genesis in Virtua Racing a "smooth" experience.
Other games are like this too with loading. Mortal Kombat CD on the Sega CD. you get to the Shang Tsung fight and the game has to load every time he morphs. Other games would also slow to a crawl if there was a lot on the screen. To your point Ranger X on the Genesis had these little tadpole enemy things that could quickly populate the screen if you didn't take them out quickly it would slow the game down. Same would happen on the PSX with the game Loaded.
I feel the opposite when I hear people complain about load times… “We want you to buy our SSD so your game will boot in 11 seconds instead of 19 seconds!”
Son, let me tell you about loading games from casette tape.
You’d start it loading, get up and go have dinner with the family. After 30 minutes, maybe it would be done. Maybe.
Maybe it hit an error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you need to re-wind and try again.
The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.
I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.
The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.
Not only on tape, but some radio shows would transmit computer programs that you could record and use. I know of the UK and Finland, but I think other European countries did it too.
Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.
Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.
You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K worth of space.
I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part.
HA!
Older games were laggy as all fuck and had very significant input delay.
But ignoring the rose tinted glasses: I DO think there is some element of truth to this: My formative years of online gaming were 56k and an ATI Rage. I probably logged at least a thousand hours of UT at 20-ish FPS and my ping was regularly in the hundreds. I can definitely appreciate lower latency games, but I mostly just need VRR (for screen tearing and the like) and I am set. Whereas one of the younglings from work pretty much can’t play anything below 60 FPS… and we have tested this.
Im not certain what input delay youre referring to. It is likely very dependent on the games I play as well. Of course some of the older games pushing the hardware to the max were laggy when a lot of sprtes etc were loading.
There are only a few reasons I can surmise that this would be the case:
CRTs don’t add any input lag
There’s no extra latency from being connected to the internet
There’s no latency from bluetooth/wireless on the controller
Because most older games are extremely badly optimised by today’s standards. The original Metroid slows to an absolute crawl when there’s more than about 4 sprites on the screen; the dragon boss in Mega Man (2, I think) was such a laggy, slippery mess that I gave up trying to beat the game; Ocarina of Time runs at 20FPS (worse if you’re in a PAL territory like I am), and that’s one of the better playing N64 games.
I think you’re either noticing one of these extra sources of delay, or you’re blinded by nostalgia.
Unless it’s an HD one, there’s no input buffer so it’s impossible for a CRT to have more than a frame of input lag. And the console needs a frame to notice your input anyway.
You measure lag by taking the capture of a frame an input happens when it is halfway down the screen. Therefore, CRTs have input lag of half their refresh rate. For NTSC, that’s about 8ms. For PAL, 10ms.
Incidentally, a modern gaming LCD has a 2ms average pixel response time. Which is about the same as the difference between NTSC and PAL.
On the one hand, we’re more accustomed to better hardware latency. On the other hand… we played first-person shooters on 56K modems. The lag was legendary
I played using a cell phone connected by USB with a 14k data connection. It was slow af but I got unlimited data for $5 a month and it didn’t tie up the land line.
Wasn’t prediction baked into the netcode very early in the FPS genre? I wasn’t playing multiplayer in the Doom days, but by the late 90s, you wouldn’t have latency so much as you’d have rubberbanding. Games also use very little bandwidth, so 56K was no different than broadband, from my recollection.
First multiplayer FPS I played was Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (released in '97). In that game, you had to lead your shots to a silly degree to actually hit anyone. But I think you’re right; by then most games weren’t suffering from that problem as much.
Different games (really engines) had different models for it. Some games you would feel things grind to a halt while you waited for a packet. Others you would have rubber banding where the prediction of what your opponent would do was wrong and they teleport 2 meters to the right. And a select few would result in endless double kills as you both killed the predictions.
The big difference was that arena shooters (which DOOM effectively was) tended to have encounters where you might have 3 or 4 players all shooting each other at once with a high enough TTK that it was very easy to lose track of one enemy because you saw a more immediate threat. So it was a lot easier to just assume the rubber banding was a you problem or not notice it at all.
Then we had CoD and it all became about super short TTK and 1on1 fights. And now? Now it was incredibly obvious when someone warped because they were your only concern.
Back in the day, my games were UT (mostly the good one, sometimes 2k4), Jedi Knight 2, Tribes 2, and Operation Flashpoint. I was a cool kid… But even then, it was almost never perceptible in UT even though the Unreal Engine had “the worst netcode”. Also not OFP since your encounter ranges were so long and you were squinting through iron sights so you had no idea if you missed because of lag or what. But JK2 and Tribes 2 were VERY obvious when the network was acting up because you were generally dueling someone or taking out a lone flag carrier while skiing across a field.
The other way around. I grew up playing games on PCs that were quite underpowered for a long time. I played Doom like this. Hell, I had to reduce screen size even in Wolfenstein 3D. I loved fog in GTA San Andreas because it reduced draw distance and when it was raining in Las Venturas, I had to look at my feet like I was speedrunning Goldeneye. I played through Oblivion in a 640 x 480 window and thought it looked amazing. I still have to fight not to turn off AA completely first time running a game on my RTX 3080 because it was the first thing to go for so long.
All of this trained my brain so now I have bulit-in antialiasing and frame generation. I don't give a shit. Give me good art direction and gameplay loop and I can just generate smooth graphics in my head.
I had a super underpowered PC I grew up with and it influenced my imagination. For a long time stuff I’d imagine also ran at like 15-20FPS. Really weird effect.
I used to be good at Mario 1, but I cannot play it on emulators. It feels like there’s a delay. It feels a little like Mario is on ice, much like the ice levels of Mario 2. Mario is running, and I want to jump or stop, but there’s a noticeable delay and it makes me feel like my old ass has lost my touch. But playing any modern game, my reflexes are good enough. In a Nintendo to Nintendo comparison, I play Animal Crossing on the Switch, and sure enough, if I’m running and pull back on the stick, my villager skids at exactly the time I want them to. But on that same Switch with the same controller, I can’t control Mario in Mario 1 worth a damn. I do just fine in Super Mario Wonder, though.
(Side note, more to do with Animal Crossing than older games, but I’ve noticed a wired controller, plugged into the Switch dock via USB, with the Switch on the dock, gets more latency than the Switch in handheld mode, which I’m pretty sure uses Bluetooth to connect to its controllers, even if they’re physically connected — not 100% sure on that. But for one example, fishing — even the five-star rarity fish — is quite easy in handheld. But, with the wired connection, I mash A as soon as the fish bites, and it still slips my hook. Maybe the latency isn’t from the controller to the dock to the Switch, maybe it’s from the Switch to the dock to the TV (and speakers since I close my eyes and listen for the sound, which most animal crossers agree is the best way to fish).)
It’s mostly the TV. The input difference between wired and BT should be very small, though the switch is not optimized for wired controllers. The variability of TV response times on the other hand it massive in comparison. Specially modern TVs with heavy post processing who think they are clever trying to interpolate frames or other shit like bad HDR implementations, etc. HDMI DRM also adds latency.
All that causes most TVs to be subpar for gaming. I still game on TV, mostly cozy games. But I accept that nothing competitive will come out of gaming on a TV.
I’m very slowly working my way through my fifth Baldurs’s Gate 3 run since it went from early access to release. Decided I want to do all the origin characters and make decisions as they would.
I’ve already done Gale, evil Dark Urge and now Shadowheart (spoilers below)
Tap for spoilerIn the beginning, I didn’t have Shadowheart save Lae’zel from the tieflings when she’s captured because to me she would want to be as far away from the githyanki as possible. I chose to romance Karlach because I never had before, and in my headcanon Karlach swayed Shadowheart from choosing Shar. Romanced the emperor and am going to try siding with him on a play through because I never have before lol
I find something I missed on every single play through, and so far there is enough unique content in the origin runs to keep them interesting. Not sure which origin character I will try next but I am really enjoying playing as Shadowheart.
Edit - I loved Cyberpunk 2077! At some point I want to replay as male V.
I’ve tried this, too, and they always self-destruct. Their character growth when you don’t play as them is so tied to them reacting to the player character’s influence that taking that influence away tends to prevent them from growing.
With Shadowheart in particular,
spoilerNightsong made a convincing argument that I shouldn’t follow Shar anymore but I saw no reason why I should just go along with the vanilla thing that she immediately switches to being a cleric for the opposite deity and I spent Act 3 bumbling ineffectually through a couple questlines with no clear ideology to lean on, plus a history that had previously skewed quite evil and thus left me without the alliances a more moral character would have developed by now.
The two exceptions to that rule have been Karlach who right out the gate has got her shit shockingly together for this cast and, hilariously, Astarion who absolutely thrives as his worst self. Those are the only two Origins I’ve managed to beat without betraying the RP of it all.
That’s fair. I’ve also noticed dialogue in places that assumes you are not the origin character you are playing, or ignores when specific characters are not in your party.
Tap for spoilerWhen you recruit Minsc as Shadowheart, there is a place in the dialogue tree where you refer to yourself in third person. There was a line suggesting I ask Lae’zel about a githyaki slate in Act 1 when I chose to kill her instead of join her earlier in the game.
I wonder if the difference is because Karlach was a later addition to the game as an origin character.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne