I would laugh if it wasn’t true. But also, people underestimate how realistic light and shadows can really sell a scene. It just shouldn’t require the electricity of a refrigerator to do it.
A lot of that is just poor implementation on the developers end. They go “oh the engine we bought supports this? Well let’s do the bare minimum to enable the setting.” And you get games that don’t even look better, but run like ass.
Well, yeah, ray-tracing is actually a lot simpler to implement, because you just implement things the way physics works and then that works in most situations as you’d expect (i.e. how physics works).
All the lighting techniques we used in the past were just faking lighting in ever more intricate ways. Computationally much less intensive ways, which is why we bothered with them in the first place, but it’s genuinely quite a bit of work.
There’s some ways to optimize ray-tracing itself (e.g. pre-bake the lighting into scenes), but many times it’s also a matter of mixing ray-tracing and more traditional lighting techniques, which brings in that additional work again.
Which is then why it’ll be done less and less, the better hardware becomes. Because if publishers can sell to a wide audience without putting in that work, they absolutely will not put in that work.
Starcraft! I really think Starcraft Brood War is a better, more balanced game. The quality of life changes in Starcraft 2 make it so hard to go back to playing Brood War. I don’t know if I can adjust back to only selecting a lot amount of units or needing to click on each building to build stuff or not having smart-casting and good pathing.
Well, my personal favorite game of all time is TES 4: Oblivion. The reasons I love that game are numerous but if I were to try to argue for it as being objectively the best game ever…
I guess I could say that the combination of older RPG mechanics with streamlined modern gameplay, mixed with a immensely beautiful fantasy world, flawless soundtrack, epic world-shattering plot, two of the best expansions ever made (KOTN and SI), absurdly legendary guild quests all come together to make it a true work of art.
I used to love TES4 too, but after playing Daggerfall and Morrowind, I started to look at Oblivion coldly. The old concept of Oblivion was great, but what was released… meh. But hey, quests in Oblivion are pretty good.
I began with Morrowind and I’ve played every TES game (other than those obscure “Travels” games in the early 2000s) but Oblivion remains for me. That said, Daggerfall’s sheer scope in both gameplay and world size is incredible, and Morrowind’s perfect blend of sandbox freedom with an awesome plot definitely do make them candidates as well. I just personally love the entire series and Oblivion was the one that converted me from “fan” to “megafan” so that’s why I go for that one.
I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, both in preparation for their sequels this year. What I played tonight of the latter was a bit obtuse, and I’m hoping it picks up.
The older Final Fantasy games. I made a point of doing a playthrough of the NES version of FF1, and I’m glad I did. The increased difficulty over the GBA version is mostly better than the absolute lack of challenge in later versions, but the added content and qol improvements make it preferable to play a hardmode hack of the gba version in the future.
The NES FF2 is just too much. I lose stats? No thanks.
And I’m really glad the Pixel Remaster version of FF3 exists now, the NES version was pretty unpolished and glitchy.
I would love to experience X-COM UFO Defense, but the only X-COMs I’ve played to any extent are the two “modern” Firaxis games. Going back to the originals is a real effort, especially without having the manual to hand.
OG XCOM has a really rough learning curve for sure. It is easy to understand the fundamentals of but it takes a lot longer to get it well enough to really enjoy. Once you do learn it I feel like it is different enough from new XCOM that you can enjoy both. I love new and old xcoms a ton.
OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.
This is pretty obscure, but the Game Boy Advance remake of Mario Bros. (Not Super Mario Bros.) is more fun than the original.
You can run, for one thing, and the controls are more responsive in general.
It’s one of the games on Super Mario Advance, and one of the main reasons I originally wanted a GBA when it came out! I had the original Mario Bros. for the NES and thought it would be fun to have a portable version. I was right.
Yeah the controls in the OG Mario Bros (and even the OG Super Mario Bros, to a bit of a lesser extent) are very clunky compared to modern entries. I’d say SMB3 holds up well though.
Literally if you’re playing on the original NES controllers made in a time before Nintendo understood the importance of erganomics. The corners dug into hands and even the buttons wore at fingers and I say that as someone who has naturally thick callouses.
Iirc, they didn’t even have the satisfying button press mechanism most buttons have these days where the button resistance drops as you pass the threshold of a “press”. And many games involved mashing or holding buttons. Like it was painful to watch my daughter try playing SMB and not just hold the B button to constantly run.
They were iconic but I prefer to see them than use them.
2point Museum has been a blast with all the commentary, announcements and fun descriptions and nordhold scratches that tower defence with meta progression itch
Every map in WaW zombies has been re-released at least twice. WaW zombies is cool because of how simple and barebones it is, but holy fucking hell that game was not coded for any sort of melee combat. The zombie bodies are so damn large, according to their hit boxes. Try to run past them but brush up against their pinky? Guess you’re done. Also for some reason the co-op splitscreen is not split vertically, and it’s not split horizontally, each of the two players just gets a quarter of the screen in a tiny box. Who knows why.
I love it to death but it’s real hard to go back to it.
I recently finished playing Breath of the Wild and declared it as one of my favorite games ever played. I just started Tears of the Kingdom, and it feels like I may not go back to BOTW, which is crazy that I could consider it one the best experiences ever, and also feel like I may never play it again so shortly after beating it. TotK seems to have everything in BotW and more, with quality of life changes on top of it all.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne