Don’t forget Intel’s latest GPU launches either! For custom PCs, there are some really affordable and relatively powerful GPUs available now (for the price). Despite their performance otherwise, Intel is killing it in the GPU space now.
For a lower spec build, you could definitely put together something with a 12100F (or other cheap CPU) and a battlemage GPU. Depending on where you get all the parts, you might be able to hit sub-$500 and get great 1080p performance, or for sure sub-$1k 1080p and likely 1440p performance.
Handhelds also have a lot of good options available too. To save some cash, you can get low end Steam Deck and swap the hard drive yourself. Got myself the cheapest LCD variant and swapped the tiny drive in it with a 2TB drive off Amazon.
I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel’s Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they’re disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.
If you’re really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.
For sure. There's also an amazing amount of backlog these days so you'll do really fine with an older system, especially if you count emulators as well. I for one don't require photorealism in every game
The uncanny valley remains, but as a palette cleanser, I do enjoy looking at expensive games every once in a while. It’s like walking through a film set that clearly took months and lots of blood, sweat and tears by the artists who created it. For as much as I have always loved scrappy Indie games, this kind of splendor is one thing they can rarely provide.
Honestly my Anbernic rg40xxv (yes all their devices have convoluted names lol) just arrived and I couldn’t be happier. Really into retro games right now so I don’t need more than the power of this lil guy.
There’s lot of good rom hacks to try (especially for Pomemon!) :) you might enjoy this one; it’s Pokemon Red, except all Pokemon are replaced by DBZ characters with all the ludicrousness that comes with that! Pokemon DBZ Team Training - pokemoncoders.com/dragon-ball-z-team-training/
Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash (NES): SMB1 turned into a Metroidvania with Celeste mechanics ported in. I think what impresses me the most is that they got 4-directional scrolling into this engine.
Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Crossover Randomizer (SNES): It's an absolutely incredible technical feat that this even works. SM and ALttP smashed together into a single ROM, with a few doors that take you from one game to the other, then the item pools are shuffled together so you have to go back and forth to find one game's items in the other. Unfortunately because ALttP is a much bigger game with a lot more items it kinda overshadows SM, you may not find this to be as replayable as the standalonerandos. But I recommend trying it once because it's just so cool the first time.
Unfortunately I can't find an up-to-date download link for this one, just a few Youtube videos with no link, but there's an ongoing Panel de Pon GBC Restoration Project based on a lot of unused assets buried in the ROM before it tragically got reskinned (again, this poor IP can't catch a break). I've got an older build of this on my hard drive I could upload somewhere if anyone wants it, but the version I have is far from complete.
These are a few I've played over the years and really enjoyed. I think most are still available, but some are unfortunately only distributed via discord servers.
No particular order to these:
Pokemon Prism - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Crystal with 2 entirely new regions and a large catalog of Pokemon from multiple generations to capture. To my knowledge, it is a successor to Pokemon Brown
Pokemon Brown - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Red. This was made 2 decades ago, and was the first mod I ever played. Includes a new region and many Pokemon from different generations.
Polished Crystal - A faithful (or not) upgrade to Pokemon Crystal.
Pokemon Crystal Clear - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that brings in many new features and vastly upgrades the AI.
Pokemon Crystal Kaizo - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that adds in much better AI and a fair bit more difficulty. All Gen 2 Pokemon can be captured and just about every trainer presents a new level of difficulty.
Altered Emerald - A massive mod of Pokemon Emerald that adds "(almost) every move and ability from gen 1 to 7" along with a few extras while making all 386 Gen 3 Pokemon capturable.
Edit: Just realized this wasn't strictly Pokemon mods... Oops lol.
Hands down my favorite lately is Shadowrun (SNES) - the addition of SNES Mouse support. It makes the game so, so much better. That's been huge for me, since the game is a point-and-click adventure. It's such a quality-of-life improvement. If the mouse existed and was common when Shadowrun was written, I have to hope that they would have thought to allow it.
Also, obviously there's a huge community of SMW hacks, and pretty much anything well-reviewed on SMW Central, I'm liable to enjoy.
In line with yours, there's Pokemon UItra Violet, a great hack of Fire Red for GBA. Also Pokemon Naranja, another Fire Red hack that's based on the Orange Archipelago.
I had never even heard of this game, but reading the description on Wikipedia, it sounds absolutely fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll definitely give it a go!
It's a really fun game - and if you want a more typical action-RPG vibe, you should also seek out the Genesis Shadowrun game. The games are very different, but both are true to the Shadowrun experience.
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Aktywne