Most good platformers from the 80s and 90s still hold up: Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, the Donkey Kong Country Games…
The Atari 2600 was before my time, but I bought one at a flea market when I was a kid and was actually impressed by how fun a lot of those games were: Laser Blast, Outlaw, Warlords, and Missile Command, to name a few. The problem is that the hardware is pretty important to the experience. The responsivemess (or lack thereof) of those old controllers is part of the design, so I’m not sure they’d emulate well.
Once you get into the early 3D era, it’s hard for me to say what’s actually good and what’s nostalgia. I love Goldeneye, and it revolutionized the FPS, but it’s probably a pretty bad experience if you didn’t grow up on it. I’m pretty sure Mario 64 is still a legitimately good; it seems like it was still well received on the Switch, and it’s core mechanics have remained basically the same through Sunshine, the Galaxy games, and Odyssey. I think Legend of Zelda: OoT is still legitimately good, but it’s hard to tell. I certainly still enjoy playing it, and it think it’s worthwhile just to see the origins of Z-Targeting, but I’m sure it does feel dated. Either way, you should play the N64 version of Majora’s Mask for sure. It’s still the strangest, darkest Zelda game, and the 3DS version was shit.
Finally, most turn-based RPGs are going to hold up, but I want to make special mention of Pokémon Gold, Silver, and (especially) Crystal. It’s become trendy in the last few years to say these games are actually bad because of a bad level curve, a bad post game, and some other assorted complaints. The level curve criticism is fair, but the post game is great, and most of the other issues are just people who are upset it didn’t follow some of the conventions set by later games. I could say a lot about it, especially if I got into it’s connectivity with RBY, Stadium, and Stadium 2, but I’ll just say it’s still one of the highlights of the franchise, and a contender for greatest sequel of all time. Every fan of the Pokémon should play Crystal at least once.
I am back on Elite Dangerous after taking some time to focus on Deep Rock Galactic in the first half of the year. I now have a second flight stick and did a little community class on flight assist off flying. Plus there have been lots of updates coming out. Taking advantage of the new engineering changes to build a really good combat ship and then going to focus on getting to Elite in combat probably, which also helps me practice my faoff flying.
If you take a screenshot in horizons and then take the same screenshot in odyssey, you’ll see that blacks are crushed to absolute shit in odyssey. You can even raise gamma to max and you still will not recover that shadow detail. The devs clipped it. They tonemapped the game incorrectly. It becomes blatantly obvious when you play this game on an oled screen haha.
I.e., take screenshot in horizons where tjere is a large shadow or no light hitting a part of your ship. Replicate it in Odyssey. It’ll be obvious. Or try raising gamma to max and you’ll see that zero shadow detail is recovered.
Also idk if you’re familiar with reshade, but if you google and install Lilium’s HDR shaders, it makes it even easier to see how crushed shadows are. It shows you a waveform visual that maps brightness. (Graph works in sdr as well as hdr)
Interesting, I think I’ve probably never noticed because I use night vision pretty much all the time when I’m flying my ship. I’ll look into reshade but I’m playing on Linux via proton and I’m not sure I want to hack more on an already working setup lol
Fair enough. The real issue is when you play in HDR (via inverse tonemapping) on an OLED. It’s just missing sooooo much shadow detail. It’s a well known issue that they never fixed and probably will never fix unfortunately. I’ve been experimenting with ways to recover the shadow detail using reshade add-ons, but so far no luck :-(.
Going to stick with portable systems, because a box is a box is a box, even if some are cooler than others (PS2 slim with attached screen, and N64).
#3 Gameboy Advance SP
Loved the compactness of the clamshell design. So much more portable than other systems at the time.
#2 Steam Deck
Windows games on a Linux handheld, plus it runs old games that Win 10 can’t.
#1 PlayStation Portable
This was and will always remain my favorite gaming system. So many great games, movies, a cool disc/cartridge hybrid media format, SD card support for all sorts of stuff, custom firmwares… man, such an amazing system.
DSi introduced region locking to Nintendo handhelds. I stopped buying them at that point. The next Nintendo system I bought was the switch, which was no longer region locked. The DSi kicked that off, so it might be my least favorite.
Favorite hardware is a much tougher nut to crack. Could be my first console, n64, or my first gaming apparatus, the Gameboy Pocket. But the PSVR1 blew me away and made me a little less into flat games. The PS5 has everything I love from PS4 onward (and does VR), and the Steam deck streams my PS5 from bed while also playing pc, retro, and Xbox games and being a full on Linux machine.
Home consoles were region locked based on physical barriers in the slots that would block a cartridge from a different region. You could just extract those barriers and the console could play any cartridge from any region, though. Handhelds had been different, though. Up to the DSi, you could buy a handheld cartridge from any country and it would plug in and play no problem.
Favourite: Steam Deck, hands down. It has totally revolutionised the way I play games. I very often choose to play games on my deck instead of on my far more powerful pc.
Least favourite: Smartphone. The closest I’ve come to having an enjoyable traditional gaming experience on a smartphone was Sky: Children of the Light but even then I was constantly getting frustrated with the touchscreen controls and dealing with my phone getting as hot as the surface of the sun. Its also just not a comfortable shape to hold while you game.
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
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