An effect you may be noticing is motion smoothing, or the lack of it.
If you play Pong on an old console, it likely moves the paddle at full speed the moment it gets input to move. Acceleration is instant. This is very precise, but it also feels unnatural.
Modern versions will usually have some acceleration time that smooths out movement. It can be a very small effect, but it feels more natural and most people prefer it. It’s also less precise. People generally learn to compensate for it over time.
It’s so weird to me that no one uses the term “slowdown” any more. Lag and latency meant networking delays back in the days you’re talking about. Not a complaint, just an observation that I’ve been wondering about the last few years.
But yeah, as others said, slowdown/lag was pretty common. I immediately think of the ninjas jumping out of the water in TMNT3, the beginning of Top Man’s stage in Mega Man 3, and the last boss of The Guardian Legend, but there were many more. Early 3d is shocking too, with more sub-30-fps games than you remember. Some called themselves at 20, even. [Edit: Now that I think about it, even some NES games capped at 20. Strange times.]
I believe OP is referring to input latency, which isn't so much a result of the system slowing down due to increased load, as much as running in a consistently slowed-down state causing a delay on your inputs being reflected on-screen. There's several reasons for why this is happening more often lately.
Part of it has to do with the displays we use nowadays. In the past, most players used a CRT TV/monitor to play games, which have famously fast response times (the time between receiving the video signal and rendering that signal on the screen is nearly zero). But modern displays, while having a much crisper picture, often tend to be slower at the act of actually firing pixels on the screen, causing that delay between pressing Jump and seeing your character begin jumping.
Some games also strain their systems so hard that, after various layers of post-processing effects get applied to every rendered frame, the displayed frames are already "old" before they're even sent down the HDMI cable, resulting in a laggier feel for the player. You'll see this difference in action with games that have a toggle for a "performance/quality" mode in the graphics settings. Usually this setting will enable/disable certain visual effects, reducing the load on the system and allowing your inputs to be registered faster.
Input latency includes the time it takes to render the frame. CRTs have a small inherent latency advantage compared to modern LCDs but they're not instant and that advantage is miniscule compared to the disadvantage of the lower framerate. A game running at 30 fps on a gaming LCD will have lower input lag than a game running at 20 fps on a CRT. I'm sure there are outliers that poll inputs in a silly way that increases input lag, but for most games the render time will be the greatest factor. Performance modes usually simply reduce the render time (even if the framerate is unchanged).
You’re right. Yes, there’s slowdowns in a lot of older games but not necessarily input lag. The slowdowns dont bother me hardly at all. I think you hit right on it!
“Lag” does indeed come from network/signal theory and does indeed refer to networking. Been a minute, but I want to say lag is the round trip delay and latency is A to B but don’t quote me on that.
That said? Nobody cared. “Lag” was always the time between action and response. Some of that might be input delay. Some of that might be display delay (which has always been over-exaggerated but…). And a lot of that really was network delay. These days it tends to be more rendering/logic delay because people who are playing on shitty internet connections know it.
There are only a few reasons I can surmise that this would be the case:
CRTs don’t add any input lag
There’s no extra latency from being connected to the internet
There’s no latency from bluetooth/wireless on the controller
Because most older games are extremely badly optimised by today’s standards. The original Metroid slows to an absolute crawl when there’s more than about 4 sprites on the screen; the dragon boss in Mega Man (2, I think) was such a laggy, slippery mess that I gave up trying to beat the game; Ocarina of Time runs at 20FPS (worse if you’re in a PAL territory like I am), and that’s one of the better playing N64 games.
I think you’re either noticing one of these extra sources of delay, or you’re blinded by nostalgia.
Unless it’s an HD one, there’s no input buffer so it’s impossible for a CRT to have more than a frame of input lag. And the console needs a frame to notice your input anyway.
You measure lag by taking the capture of a frame an input happens when it is halfway down the screen. Therefore, CRTs have input lag of half their refresh rate. For NTSC, that’s about 8ms. For PAL, 10ms.
Incidentally, a modern gaming LCD has a 2ms average pixel response time. Which is about the same as the difference between NTSC and PAL.
Classics still had lag. DK Country 3’s final boss was so laggy it’d affect the boss music.
Not quite super classic you mentioned but a chunk of the speed run tech around Super Mario 64 is how to optimize the camera to avoid lagging on certain effects (the sunshine to the wing cap, the top tower in whomps fortress, the sub in dire dire docks).
I say that less as a knock on the game and more that there were technical compromises made back in the day as well. Nostalgia sometime last hits and people assume everything ran blazing fast.
The Nintendo64 did run blazingly fast. Comparatively, even modern consoles are a step down in terms of power compared to Nintendo64 hardware for its time.
Had the draw distance been lowered in Ocarina of Time, its performance would have been at minimum a steady 30fps, as Ocarina of Time runs in a more optimized Mario 64 engine. Which, naturally, is less optimized than what Kaze has done to Mario 64’s engine, but Kaze also has like 20 years worth of more coding and computer knowledge learned, making comparison pretty unfair.
Framerate is also not the only metric in determining if a game’s performance is bad. Ocarina of Time runs at 20fps (unless you are in PAL region, then it runs at 17fps because of PAL standards, oof), but it never misses a frame. It is extremely consistent at 20fps. The frametime is perfect even on original hardware. The same cannot be said about most modern AAA games, even Nintendo games. Modern games might mostly run at 60 or 30 fps, but they very often dip below that and even more often have hitching and stuttering due to inconsistent frametime. Even though the fps may be high, the playability of the game is worse than Ocarina of Time.
I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part.
HA!
Older games were laggy as all fuck and had very significant input delay.
But ignoring the rose tinted glasses: I DO think there is some element of truth to this: My formative years of online gaming were 56k and an ATI Rage. I probably logged at least a thousand hours of UT at 20-ish FPS and my ping was regularly in the hundreds. I can definitely appreciate lower latency games, but I mostly just need VRR (for screen tearing and the like) and I am set. Whereas one of the younglings from work pretty much can’t play anything below 60 FPS… and we have tested this.
Im not certain what input delay youre referring to. It is likely very dependent on the games I play as well. Of course some of the older games pushing the hardware to the max were laggy when a lot of sprtes etc were loading.
Aurelia is an adventure point and click where you move to a cozy fantasy town. Beautiful art and presentation and just good erotica all around with reasonable puzzle and rpg gameplay.
Third Crisis is an ultimate gooner game. It really goes out there and if you’re into that sort of thing and it’s really well made.
Kaiju Princess hang out with a girl who’s secretly a kaiju monster
Most steam erotica games started out as poor quality visual novels or clone games with titties but the scene is really shaping up to something much more interesting!
I personally like Galaxy War’s “Let’s Get Married!” series, which is two puzzle games. The premise is to advance through dungeons by spending health, keys, and money. Enemies are not just obstacles, they drop money and the route you take through each level will determine what resources you have down the line. The meta game is to keep track of routes, and in future playthroughs, have a more precise plan that accounts for the future. It is very math-based, since there is no RNG. Each action is a tradeoff. It is the same gameplay as DROD RPG and Tower of the Sorcerer. The characters and molestation elements feel similar to Rance, though more good-natured.
Another game of interest is Monster Girl Dreams. While I personally don’t care much for the battle fuck system, I very much like the variety of characters and the large amount of dialogue that can be had with them. The game is freeware, and well worth playing if you enjoy lovey-dovey sex with monster girls.
In a similar vein to Lulu Farea, I am interested in Star Knightess Aura. Some resources cannot be replenished during a playthrough, so you need to consider routing. The plot might be interesting, as it is about brainwashing the protagonist. You select what aspects of her personality are altered, changing her one thing at a time. For those who are into corruption, I think it holds promise.
I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.
I distinctly remember mario bros on the nes. There was like a 1/3second latency between pressing the button and mario jumping. You had to time your jumps (especially when running) further back than you’d expect to compensate. You just kinda got used to it after a while.
Yep. On the emulators now it is instant. I recently stayed at an airbnb with an nes and played with my kids. The lag is definately there. Even my kids were falling off stuff shouting that they pushed the jump button.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Older games are a laggy mess when there is too much on the screen. Not to mention sprites disappearing. The issue I think is, we have gotten better and better over the decades until recently. We are just seeing a backward slide in performance (for many reasons, not just poor optimization).
I’ve only recently (2 years ago) started to play older games I was interested in but never got the time to play. I even got a 16:9 CRT-TV and modded all the original consoles. It toatally depends on the game if it is a smooth and optimized experience or just an unresponsive mess of code.
Examples: Virtua Racing on the Genesis or Star Fox on the SNES. they were slow and quite laggy. sure they were essentially pushing the limits of what the console could do and in the case of Star Fox had to have the FX chip in the cartridge but I wouldn't call racing around on the Genesis in Virtua Racing a "smooth" experience.
Other games are like this too with loading. Mortal Kombat CD on the Sega CD. you get to the Shang Tsung fight and the game has to load every time he morphs. Other games would also slow to a crawl if there was a lot on the screen. To your point Ranger X on the Genesis had these little tadpole enemy things that could quickly populate the screen if you didn't take them out quickly it would slow the game down. Same would happen on the PSX with the game Loaded.
Its wild how gooning and porn are so normalized to the point they harass real woman in their comments and dms 24/7 but god forbid a porn game, I like them ocassionally, when I don’t want to be lazy and I’m in a gaming mood, it’s like reading some Choose your own adventure erotica with visuals, but the story is porn story adjacent
It seems less bad to me, I actually have to use my brain a little, idk I get bored using the same content daily, every one in a while I’ll use vr, comics, books, or a game, but tbh whenever I start to need something extra like that I just don’t jerk off for a day to normalize, don’t want to enter the gooner mindset
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