Breath of the Wild: stepping out of the cave in the begining, seeing that vast world in front of Link waiting to be explored
The Switch was the first console I had since the PS2, and the PC “gaming” I did in the meantime was mostly retro games on emulators or a bit of Stardew Valley, so the contrast to that was HUGE.
Another one was re-playing Ragnarok Online months after quitting (and giving away all equipment and deleting all characters) with a friend. We were barely second job class (he was Hunter, I was Priest) and rudimentarily equipped enough to beat Abyss Knights, so we went leveling in the area where those sometimes spawn. AND ONE OF THEM DROPPED A CARD! Cards are extremely rare (allegedly 0.01% drop chance) and monster-specific, and the Abyss Knight card is extremely valuable. So from one second to the next, we practically went from piss poor to rich AF.
Another extremely lucky moment was in Diablo 2: a regular cow in the Cow Level dropped a (perfect!) Windforce, at the time one of the best unique items in the game. I don’t remember exactly but IIRC from some online calculator the chances for this drop were under one in a million (I wasn’t even wearing anything with lots of MF%)
Ikr? There are a lot of people who look like this. Practically impossible to tell one another apart just by looking at, let’s say security camera footage…
I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.
More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.
Hard to say what’s the absolute best one, but some highlights:
Finale of Ace Attorney Justice for All; when you finally have the change in circumstances needed to pin the real killer and send them into a genuine panic.
Pizza Tower, final boss third phase: When Peppino sees that Pizza Face is sending him a Boss Rush, and flips his shit, annihilating each boss at lightning speed.
Ghost Trick, Phantom Detective: The final “4 minutes before death”, and multiple last revelations
Most of these are memories of story-driven moments nailed in by very solid soundtracks, which has very much convinced me how important music is to these games.
In 2005 I was playing Final Fantasy XI Online and met a group of 5 Japanese players in an expansion area. We wound up partying together for 8 hours straight. They all spoke English in chat for my sake, and we had an incredible rhythm together. We discussed new anime and a few English cartoons that had recently made it to Japan. We took a selfie together at the end of the 8 hours. It was the best gaming experience of my life. I’ll never forget it.
That entire game was just forever chasing the high you got from that one time you had a really good party. I’m already finding myself glossing over the fact that 99% of them were awful and you only settled for them because you didn’t want to wait around another 30 minutes for chance of a better one.
It might be fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.
And that’s while ignoring the extra processing time of the interpolation and asynchronous workload. That’s so slow, that if you wiggle your joystick 15 times per second the image on the screen will be moving in the opposite direction
The basic flow is
[user input -> render 33ms -> frame available]
It is impossible to have a latency lower than this, a newer frame simply does not exist yet.
But with interpolation you also need consistent time between frames. You can’t just present a new frame and the interpolated frame instantly after each other. First you present the interpolated frame, then you want half a frame and present the new frame it was interpolated to.
So your minimum possible latency is 1.5 frames, or 33+16=59ms (which is horrible)
One thing I wonder tho… could you use the motion vectors from the game engine that are available before a frame even exists?
No, modern game engines produce a whole lot more than the necessary information to generate a frame. Like a depth map and such. One of those is a map of where everything is going and how fast.
It wouldn’t include movement produced by shaders, but it should include all polygons on screen. which would allow you to just warp the previous frame, no next frame required
Most recent one I can rememver was beating Tears of The Kingdom. I was SO invested in the final boss battle and I got really emotional. I was so immersed I was basically vocally taunting the boss for everything they had done. Only other time that happened was with Cyberpunk 2077 and only because of Edgerunners.
Then in the past (jesus has it really been more than 17 years??) the first time my buddy and I beat Halo 1 on Legendary after an all-nighter of gaming. That was awesome. Horrible smell in that room tho lmao.
Beating Link’s Awakening as a kid. No internet no hints or help just hours of exploring when I was stuck on a puzzle. It’s so hard for me to get lost in a video game like that now and not just reach for an answer or check the internet to see what I’m doing wrong. It’s a shame now, I know links awakening now like the back of my hand and I’ll never get to explore a first play through of that game ever again.
Same, me and a friend struggled with that game for a while, but still remains an extremely satisfying game to have beaten when you couldn’t just look things up.
Anytime a SoulsBorne game clicks, especially Sekiro
Winning a really tight match of Rocket League against people at a similar or higher skill level
Playing split screen Freedom Fighters with my buddy back in the day. It got so competitive we started taping cardboard on the screen to prevent screen-peeking
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Aktywne