Portal and Portal 2 are some of my all-time favorite games. They’re about the only games I enjoy watching other people play, primarily when they’re playing for the first time—it kind of lets me relive that wonder of the first play through. Going through those with my stepdaughter (only 10 at the time) not long after I married her mom was a highlight of my life and really helped us form our own bond. As we progressed through I realized that chamber 17 was going to be rather traumatic for her because she was going to absolutely love the weighted companion cube, so we stopped playing for a few days while I ordered a stuffed weighted companion cube and gave it to her right after the level. As we neared the end of the game I explained to my wife about the Cake. She owned a bakery at the time and we presented kiddo with a cake like the one seen at the end of the game when she won. We did Portal 2 as well, me watching as she played the solo campaign and then we did the co-op together. I’d highly recommend it for any parent who likes gaming to share these with your kids.
Portal 2 spoilers The final fight where the ceiling crumbles and you see the moon and realize what you need to do is definitely a top 5 moment for me. Those games are so fantastic.
When I finished my first run of Subnautica, something definitely came over me. I ran around in my base cleaning up, I organized all my spare food and water in a cabinet “for the next person stranded here,” I released the fish in my alien containment, said farewell to my cuddlefish, parked my Seamoth in the moon pool, turned the lights out in the Cyclops, the whole bit. An amazing adventure was at an end.
My most recent was playing Saints Row 4 horrible pc port. The Enter the Dominatrix dlc was awfully hilarious. Seeing that they didn’t have enough money to do everything they wanted and seeing actual story boards in my game was great. Also the character commentary was fun. The thing that the said was too crazy for Saints Row was definitely true and did not expect.
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
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Aktywne