I played the Pikmin 4 demo and had a ton of fun with it, but I have to wait for a sale to pick it up.
So instead o got Brotato because I saw it was $5 on switch, having a lot of fun with it! Will probably get Vampire Survivors when it comes out on switch, I hear it has more interesting maps than Brotato
The hardware architecture on the PS2 and PS3 was so radically different, it effectively makes emulation impossible.
The change made in the PS4 and PS5 makes the transfer of those games relatively trivial, but attempting the replicate the now abandoned Core processor of the PS3 is the hold up there, as is the PS2 Emotion Engine.
The reason the PS3 was so expensive was including PS2 hardware to handle the backwards compatibility. They weren’t going to repeat that mistake with the 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, on the Xbox side, Microsoft never had that problem.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
PS1 emulation is a breeze, but with current hardware in the PS5, I think a PS2 emulator on the platform wouldn’t be too insane. But yeah, PS3 emulation? Not happening.
I think you’re wrong on the disc not working thing though. The original Xbox was only half supported for a long time.
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes. It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
That really depends on the game and upscaling methods used. Duckstation for instance does a pretty amazing job of making most of those old games look good. Check out this video of Crash Bandicoot running at 4K for instance.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.
Didn’t stop them putting out a HDMI Mini PSX. You get around that by cleaver pixel replication and filtering upressing, etc. The PS3 PS1 emulator actually had options for this.
I’m 22. I grew up playing my PS1 on with an upscaler on the 55 inch Vizio in the front room. I like the PS1 art style quite a bit and think that a good upscale and maybe a filter is all you need to make things look how I want.
Idk, I think it would make a difference in the Microsoft v Sony sales. Nintendo doing the N64 and NES eShop have been massively successful. Xbox doesn’t really have any killer apps, they’ve really just had Sony beaten on software features the past two generations. Sony implementing the software features that Nintendo and Microsoft offer would make a decent difference.
Plus, imagine how well a “play your childhood discs on your xplaytendo switchtion” would work in an ad campaign. Getting people to pull out their childhood game collection would make for a great viral campaign for gamers as well.
Idk, the thing about the internet that I don’t think older people have realized is that it creates an even larger freeze in culture than ever before. If you started gaming in the 90s, you likely heard about older games via word of mouth and got your games at a physical store. There were no minor celebrities that would turn a cult classic into an actual classic. Nowadays? Old media is fully capable of wiping out new media in the right circumstances. Songs like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and some Pink Floyd (if I remember correctly) have taken #1 Billboard spots in the past 2-3 years. LSD Dream Emulator went from a game nobody played to a PlayStation classic because of some YouTube videos. We’re in an age where there is an extremely high demand for old media and no way to access most of it without piracy. There is a TON of money to be made by charging money for emulation and moving things to new consoles.
Mark my words, Skyrim will come out on the next generation Xbox, because Bethesda understands that accessibility is good enough to charge for.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
We’re almost at that point. PS3 emulation on the Steam Deck is ALMOST there. Another generation of hardware improvements should push us over the edge. Then it would be up to Sony to decide “hey, we want to make money on the titles we can license and put back in an online store…”
PS2 games work almost flawlessly on my steam deck under emulation and the PS5 is more powerful than that, and Sony have access to the OG system engineers, software and hardware to work from, note they already had PS2 games working on the PS4. The PS3 is the tricky but people do have it working on PC so no reason Sony couldn’t. There’s no excuse not to have PS1, PSP or PSVita emulation games as they’re all easy
Baldur's Gate 3.
I can probably count the number of games I've paid full price for in the past 15 years on one hand, and this is one of them. No regrets whatsoever.
Looking back on Steam, last time was GTA V. Prior to that Skyrim, and prior to that Portal 2.
In those places, the games are differently priced. Regional pricing is on Steam, epic, and a few other stores. Also, I only buy games, I don’t pirate and I rarely buy games for 60 dollars. I typically just wait a bit and pick them up for 30 or less. That said I understand, pirating is easier and for AAA games it might truly not matter if you do or not. Indie games are certainly a different story and each purchase, even extremely discounted, gives the developer that little bit more which can mean a lot.
I live in one of those places and we don’t have regional pricing. When Steam starts offering competitive pricing in Africa I’ll start buying games at full price but for the moment I’ll stick to buying games on sale and piracy.
Ah, okay. Yeah, looking at Steam’s pricing it doesn’t give me the option to regionally price for shillings of any kind. The most I can regionally price is the South African Rand. Do prices on Steam then just show in USD for you or do they actually sell stuff in shillings?
I play with a friend. If it works out anything like Divinity: Original Sin 2 we'll be finished maybe around April or something.
We usually play about 1 hour at a time, almost never more than 1.5 hour... and about 2-4 times a week. So it'll take a long while, but it's a lot of fun.
As a new dad I don’t have the time for games that I used to, but I’ve been playing BG2 for a few hours every week, and now BG3 has taken over, it’s actually a perfect game to play whenever you just have a short time on your hand.
It’s one of those game experiences where I think of my character all the time when not playing. Can’t wait to get back, when the little one is sleeping again.
Loop Hero! It’s free on Epic right now and I’ve been really enjoying it! A nice blend of procedural generation, deck building, and roguelike allow it to be a very rewarding and engrossing experience overall where I feel I’m consistently progressing.
I still haven’t been able to beat The Lich yet, but little by little I’m knocking his health down that much further to make the loop (heh) feel rewarding!
I definitely had fun with it, and I finished it just as I was getting tired of it, so it was the right length. Got it off another EGS giveaway a couple of years ago, I think.
I think I’ll take a break from Final Fantasy 14 for a while. The story was just so uninteresting for so long, that I just don’t want to continue right now. Everything else was good enough, the different jobs I tried were fun, but I just need to do something else.
Other than that, I started Baldurs Gate 3 with a friend, we are still relatively early, exploring the first region.
If you can get past the UI, I recommend at least trying FFXI. The stories are so good, the XIV writers spent half of SHB and EW adapting them. Kato did the scenario for the vanilla game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, and his world building brilliance is at its best there. The world is so real and immersive, and there are all kinds of connections between world events and characters both big and small.
I’m good for a while, but I’ll probably go back to WoW eventually. It’s the only other MMO I’ve played (far more than FF14) and it’s basically comfort food for me. A bunch of friends also still play it, so that’s a plus as well.
Replaying Witcher 3 for the xth time. So far only ever played the base game, now I look forward to the dlcs. So far I am mostly rushing through the main quest and am now facing the wild hunt at kaer morhen. Never before reached this state with so few side quests completed 😅.
I agree. I also think 2 of the 3 endings to B&W are sort of terrible, which soured me on it a little. And the one ending I liked is kind of hidden and obnoxious to get.
B&W was like a nice vacation as Geralt headed into retirement. Pretty landscapes and some fun new skills to play with (loved that you could finally make a crossbow build work).
HoS was just pure, spooky, tragic Witcher goodness. And like you say, the fact that it’s shorter and more focused lead to the writing being tighter and the storytelling working much better.
I’ve tried the original Life Is Strange twice, and both times I >!failed to save Kate!< because I don’t have an infallible memory and quit out of anger.
Admittedly, it’s not ideal for inline spoilers, but if you really want to hide for the benefit of others, that’s they way you’re supposed to do it on Lemmy, I guess.
Looks like sync doesn’t implement lemmy spoilers correctly, and still uses reddit spoilers. But the lemmy web-ui doesn’t honour those spoilers and does them the way I showed in my comment. That’s unfortunate, because people using Sync won’t be able to effectively hide spoilers, and will potentially be spoiled on things when Lemmy users use spoilers the way the web-ui tells them to in the editor.
Thanks for the tip! Looking into it, I don’t see the game files anywhere, just mods. Do you have to pirate it? I owned it 20 years ago, but I don’t exactly have the CD’s sitting around anymore.
Nice, this is definitely going on my list. Have not found a space combat game that got close to the level of freelancer. Everspace 2 comes close, but did not have the same spark so far.
I’ve been hoping Everspace 2 turns out to be a worthy successor. The first one was fun but didn’t scratch the Freelancer itch. I haven’t played the second yet.
I think it is still worth checking out. I did not have spent much time in the finished game, but played the early access version for a while. Might be more polished an better now. And also back then it came close to the freelancer feeling, just was not quite there yet. Or maybe my memories are just better than the actual game was, they are about 20 years old now 😅
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