I love Emulation since it can be on completely different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand you have ROM collections on modern system, like Capcom Arcade Stadium, or TMNT Cowabunga Collection.
On another you have complete reverse engineering project like PCSX-Reloaded, and community developed emulators with retail games are based on, all open sourced and technically legal, so long as you have the hardware, and tools to back the ROMs, BIOS’s, and other material required.
Then you have the complete black market, where the ROMs are illegally obtained, the BIOS’s are just downloaded from a random server, and the emulators are paying to get access to the latest retail games patches like Yuzu.
All 3 of these interact and play off of each other, like arcade collections using MAME, being able to extract the ROMs from collections to use in emulators, and Nintendo using someone else’s ROM dump of their own game for Wiiware. That it’s just interesting that emulation works at all.
I personally love it, and try my best to get my ROMs, ISO, and BIOS’s without resorting to downloading it.
It is a pretty wide spectrum as an example I would consider abandonware its own thing in-between downloading and physical backups. Also the funny thing about Yuzu is they would have legally been fine if they used common sense and avoided linking to any roms and just recommended people use their own. There is Suyu which is a fork of Yuzu that wants to avoid the same mistakes Yuzu made.
I do emulation since early 2000s (since I have a PC) and its one of the best things not only in gaming, but in computing and technology in general!
If you are new to emulation, then I recommend to use standalone emulators first. There are emulators for single systems, like Snes9x for SNES and others are multi-system emulators, like Mesen or Ares that can play many console systems.
Following is a bit more advanced:
RetroArch: My favorite is RetroArch, but that is not recommended if you are just new to emulation and want a simple emulator to access a few games without configuring too much.
MAME and FinalBurn: Arcade emulation with MAME in example can also be tedious, because that works a bit different than a normal console emulator.
DOSBox: PC emulators for old systems can play old DOS games, but you need to have an understanding how DOS works in order to be able to use it correctly. Because some games require setups in DOS and such. You can also install old Windows versions like Win98 to play Windows games. But you really need to install and handle Windows like a real operating system, and install each game as well.
I mostly only emulate playstation games.(pcsx and pcsx2) I did try an NES emulator for a romhack which was nice. Recently I tried Aethersx which is a fork of pcsx2 but for android. A lot has changed since a few years ago I remember pcsx2 lagging alot but now it runs pretty smooth.
Playstation 2 is already solid, that’s for sure. Since my new PC from last year, I am also able to emulate Playstation 3 (some claim even the Steam Deck is capable of doing so, but I’m not sure how good). And PSP emulator runs on most computers nowadays. We even enter in emulating a Playstation 4, but off course this is in early stages at the moment.
So yeah, there is lot of Playstation food for the coming years for you. :D Its really exciting. I still need to figure out PS Vita, and didn’t get into it yet. The original Playstation is still my biggest Sony love I have and probably right behind my favorite console, the SNES.
Romhacks are also huge part of why I love the emulation scene. If you allow me to plug an article I wrote, with lot of Romhacks and Mods for NES as a recommendation. There is so much cool stuff out there: …game.blog/…/nes-mods-and-romhacks-collection/
Someone even ported the original NES Super Mario Bros to SNES, and then modified that to add in a Super Mario Maker style editor; on the SNES! I can’t link it here if you are interested, unfortunately I only know a prepatched ROM source for it. And that is not something this community / place allows to link.
When I heard of ps4 emulation I thought it was amazing since I still have not tried emulating ps3 but I remember it use to be only for high end machines. I also assume ps5 emulation will be a thing eventually but I think it will be a while. I am curious how psx3 runs compared to psx2 since pcsx2 lagged when I first used it years ago. But now its runs about the same as the ps1 version. I imagine ps3 is probably more complicated to emulate than ps4 due to the architecture though.
Exactly (referring to more complicated), you are right about the architecture. The PS3 is that complicated, not even Sony themselves have a working emulator for their catalog of games in Playstation monthly subscriptions. Sony emulates PS1 and 2, and PS3 is only streaming and PS4 games are directly compatible with PS5. That’s because PS4 and 5 are similar in the architecture and basically a PC (obviously there is more to it, but CPU is similar).
And that’s why the most advanced PS4 emulator, ChadPS4 … I mean ShadPS4 (the community makes jokes and calls it Chad), doesn’t actually emulate the CPU entirely! Because its similar to a PC CPU, it can use lot of instructions directly. There are other PS4 emulators who try to emulate it entirely, like a traditional emulator.
As for PS3, it is still not in a state like PS2 emulator. Some games work fine and I can play lot of them in full speed without major or any issues. It’s under heavy development still. Some games still are totally unplayable. And depending on how heavy a game is, it can be really demanding on the current modern PCs (I know its a vague statement, its hard to make exact statement for situations like these). I think its still a few years away from how the PS2 performs right now. And then the question if anyone wants to port the emulator to a different architecture… phew!
I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.
I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.
Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games
I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?
To add to your point, Jedi Survivor was a huge improvement over Fallen Survivor. I’m not sure how you could look at that game and say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all.
Honestly I’ve I did jot know how survivor improved upon the first part since the pc version was so overshadowed by it’s technical problems. Tho I’ve heard the patch yesterday improved the performance massively
I did play months after release and I have a pretty beefy PC so it was fine for me. I did only encounter stutters at one specific area halfway through the game but other than that, it was really smooth for me.
Survivor improve Don the first one by expanding on the stances you had in the first game, a much larger world with a larger variety of enemies and tools you can use in combat. There’s a hub area which is kind of cool but I honestly didn’t really get the appeal of that. There’s also quite a bit of cool moments in the story that were really neat but I won’t talk about it because it’s a spoiler. I liked it a lot actually and it’s a shame all of it was overshadowed by the awful performance on launch.
Ubi actually has 2 kinds of open world games… Assassin’s Creed Style and Far Cry Style. I prefer the former, I was disappointed to see the Avatar game was the latter
I just want to say I was really disappointed when Far Cry 3 basically became the template for Far Cry games.
The main thing I hate is the “observe this outpost from a distance then permatag all the enemies so they’re visible through walls, then take them out” mechanic.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).
However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.
I really hope they make a sequel game, or maybe a similar game based on a different character that would allow for a bit of a wider range of gameplay. But I wouldn’t mind if they kept going with Kay, she’s a likeable protagonist to me and I just love Nix.
Have to say I ran into very few bugs and I wrapped up the main story and loads of extras after about 45 hours. Funnily I ran into only one bug after finishing the main story, getting stuck in ingame cutscene-camera that prevented me from doing anything else, including being able to reload the game lol.
There’s definitely been some minor goofy and janky stuff throughout the game, but nothing that ended up gamebreaking. I think the most un-finished part of the game that I wish they’d fixed up before launch is the lipsync issues. It just looks so bad in some scenes and takes away from the otherwise great immersive experience.
Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.
Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.
I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.
I suspect a big part of the process has shifted focus from making an enjoyable experience to how we can milk this for every dollar it’s worth and then some.
It’s risky trying to explore new avenues as a large company you’re expected to deliver unimaginable returns on your investment. So copying the games that did well will hopefully perform better that quarter. As opposed to spending resources on expanding the engine or trying out a novel idea.
On top of that I suspect the executives are envious of the addictive cash burning cycle that gacha games provide.
I feel like too many games have and continue to copy the formula established by Minecraft and Far Cry 3. I find the experience of exploring a new zone, climbing a tower, unlocking material xyz then rinse and repeat. To be boring and unimaginative. But it seems like I’m the weird one here and people seemingly adore it.
I thought the inventory management of BoTW was awful. It’s not fun to complete a cool quest line get a cool item and for it to break forever after two fights. Wtf
Crafting games such as Valheim have nothing to do aside from grinding for the sake of grinding. Sure building a cool house had some appeal but it’s overall just intentionally tedious.
Baldur’s Gate III was a breath of fresh air. I actually have been thinking for a while that maybe I just didn’t like games anymore until it came out.
I’m also about to start my first Elden Ring run with a group of friends for the first time soon. Excited for that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has some fantastic stories if anyone is interested.
As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.
In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…
Ogólnie w kwestii Dolnego Śląska polecam zarówno przeglądanie strony Radia Wrocław, a jak ktoś jest lokalnie to ogarnięcie radioodbiornika (najlepiej na baterie, jeśli zabraknie prądu) i słuchanie na częstotliwościach:
If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.
At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.
Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.
The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.
How much innovation can you get when you have to spend millions of dollars on large teams to develop games now, compared to even 10 years ago? It’s not really all that surprising that companies want to play it safe. It’s a large investment, and they don’t know if there will be a return on it.
That doesn’t even get into the fact that there’s only so many combinations of things you can do in a video game.
Companies aren’t innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.
Crimzon Clover’s really fun. It’s similar to Dodonpachi. Another good one is Ikaruga. It has an interesting mechanic we’re you switch colors to absorb bullets.
Avoid Sine Mora and other “euroshmups”, they just suck to play.
Sine Mora is not for everyone, but those who like it (like I do) really like it. The gameplay revolves around the time mechanic and so does the really messed up story. The audio-visual presentation is great too.
There are several people who do not like it though, as it is a bit outside the box and is quite story-heavy.
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