As a kid in the 90s, I couldn't really tell the difference between the capabilities of the SNES or Genesis and a hand-drawn cartoon on TV. As far as I could tell, if it was 2D, those machines could process it, but my brother and his friends just a few years older than me could tell where the limits were. When Mortal Kombat got big, I thought that was the end state for video game graphics. Everyone's just going to do that, because you can't get more real than real people, I thought. Early 3D graphics did age more poorly than the best pixel art the SNES and Genesis had to offer, and we knew at the time that that would be the case too. After years of revisiting those 2D games via emulation, a trip to a local Barcade reminded me of how important scanlines were to the art style of most games from the era, and now I basically only emulate those games with scanlines on and the most accurate emulation available when I'm playing anything earlier than the PS2.
Half-Life 2 was insanely impressive, and the thing that sold it most was the big real-time G Man head at the beginning of the game. Valve took cutting edge research in animating faces during dialogue and implemented it into the game in a way no one had seen before. It did wonders for selling the "realness" of what you were looking at. Just 3 years later, we had Crysis, a game pushing graphics so far that no one could even build a machine that could run it at max settings at the time, but even on medium settings, it was the best-looking game I'd ever seen.
Nowadays, I can look at a Digital Foundry video with side by side examples of ray tracing on and off, with them explaining to me how and why it's so much better, and I often can't really tell the difference unless I squint. I did see an Alan Wake II example that seemed pretty noticeable, but mostly only in the side-by-side, and if I was in the market for Alan Wake II, I likely wouldn't notice what I was missing when ray tracing is turned off. The things that make games look best to me now are when they can add all of that fidelity to the textures and animations of human beings, like in Death Stranding, because we're wired to more easily detect when a human being isn't real than anything else.
The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.
Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.
Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.
I only use it for WoWpedia, because it has a lot of information from years ago. I still remember when they added so many unnecessary interface elements and the website became slower. Luckily, I found userstyles.world/style/5722/clean-fandom-wiki, which made it usable again.
I have been preaching abandoning it for YEARS. It’s even worse on mobile because the formating is so messed up some links just don’t work. And even without adblock, there’s so many ads that THEY slow down the site. Just because it’s ‘free’ everyone defaults to fandom and I hate it so much
I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.
It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.
I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.
Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.
You could always use Invidious or Piped (instance list here) to avoid using YT directly if you want. You won’t get any ads or anti-adblocker bullshit with Invidious, so I usually use that. I’m not sure about Piped, but it seems good too. Unless your point is to simply stop using YT for anything, in which case just ignore what I said.
EDIT: To the now 8 of you who downvoted me, just, why? No, seriously, why. If you downvote me, please at least tell me why you are instead of downvoting and leaving. It makes me anxious to think that I was a dick or spreading misinformation or just being rude and not even noticing it, and would much rather have someone say something to me so I can at least know what people don’t like. That’s not to say I would agree with it, I might not, but I’d rather know what the problem is so I can agree or disagree.
I think it’s the fact that not everything needs a 20 minute video. There’s a lot of topics that I’m interested in but skip because I don’t have 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes for it.
That makes sense. I just thought he had something against Youtube (and for good reason), since he only said “Not watching a YT video” instead of “Not watching a 20min video”.
For just about every single pokemon fan game I play, the fandom wiki pages have pretty much been utter garbage. Either they’re out of date, contain almost no useful info, or have a slew of other problems making it as painful as falling in a bunch of cacti. Same for most other ones I used to visit.
Will admit, Pokemon Empire having their own site for their fan game is still infinitely better than the fandom pages for it.
I think bulbapedia cover just about any official content as far as I’m aware, so long as it’s licensed or made by nintento directly. Anything from the games to the anime to the trading cards to things like obscure licensed Japanese arcade games based on the franchise.
Don’t know if serebii does all that or if it just focuses on the games since I don’t use it.
The biggest insult is that Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia helped create fandom because he was fed up of people using Wikipedia to create detailed articles about fictional characters and video games. Wikipedia now has an artificially strict notability policy where things are falsely declared as not notable so they can be monetized on Fandom, all while Jimbo Wales has the gall to ask for money for his “non profit” Wikipedia while he makes the real money on Fandom.
I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:
Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade’s Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.
Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That’s where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People’s morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.
The video posted is actually all about what the competition is like :) its hard to compete with a huge company like wikia/fandom, but folks are making it work anyway, and that’s pretty cool. I really enjoyed the video
I’d be very curious to hear more details on this, do you happen to have a source handy, or any recommended reading?
In fairness, the money he gets from being a scumbag with fandom probably can’t be used to fund Wikipedia unless he wants to donate the money he’s making from his business to run his nonprofit. It’s not surprising he wouldn’t do that (even if thats the way the world ought to work) and I don’t presently have reason to believe he personally gets anything out of the donations that are given to keep Wikipedia running
Does this mean self-hosting the wiki?
Because that increase the barrier of entry by tenfold as a lot of publishers/game studios do not host their own wikis.
It really just depends on the fandom. Three more I know of are Bulbapedia for Pokemon, The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages for the Elder Scrolls, and Wookiepedia for Star Wars. They are all very comprehensive and functional.
Unless the game your playing made their own, or someone else decided to self host and actually fill it with content (and finding it can be a pain), there isn’t one.
Hoping someone knows a good fallout wiki, I hate using fandom, but it’s the only one I can find with good info.
TLDR; Fandom has a lot of QAnon articles written to make the scams seem legitimate to less computer savvy people.
My mom has fallen in a Qanon conspiracy world. The people from that world write Fandom articles about themselves to make it seem legitimate. I found them when I started investigating these people trying to convince her to steer clear.
I used to have the app, but that was ad galore. Now when I browse it, usually for some book series, with firefox and some ad blockers, it’s perfectly fine to read and browse. So I don’t really get the hate, but that might be because I don’t usually browse it for new content, but as a reference for finished series, like the wheel of time.
youtube.com
Aktywne