Typically I play Marvel Rivals with my friend group, as it is one of the few multiplayer games these days that supports at least 5 people on a team (we already tried League, Paladins, etc and got tired of that real quick).
On my own, I sometimes feel like playing a retro game, so I have been playing Legend of Dragoon, but recently my save file got corrupted somehow so I haven’t restarted. Instead I switched to playing a less retro game, Need for Speed Carbon. Its been maybe 10 years since I played it last, so it has been interesting dealing with the horrendous rubberbanding and random crashing on PC. I also like to play Goddess of Victory NIKKE as a mobile game whenever I have down time but am away from home.
But I don’t think it is atypical to really focus on playing one game at a time. I’d say that would actually be quite unusual and likely only done by people who have a job playing multiple games per day (a not so good reviewer, streamer, etc).
The “review outside the 2 week period” is typically for when games are updated to no longer be playable. For example, when Helldivers 2 had the PSN account requirement, players who bought the game more than 2 weeks prior could get refunds.
No, I don’t focus on realism over the playability of the game. The last “photorealistic” game I played was Ready or Not. But I have recently been enjoying Vintage Story, The Legend of Dragoon, Koudelka, and other games with “bad” graphics. Aside from Vintage Story, it should be noted that these other games were considered “cutting edge” graphics for their time, but they are by no means photorealistic.
My issue is that TAA (among other things such as UE5s Nanite and Lumen tech when incorrectly used) typically ruins games it is used in, both from an image quality perspective and a performance perspective. I wish that developers would stop using the default or current implementations of TAA so that better, more performant algorithms that don’t have the downside of smearing and has the upside of being faster can naturally emerge. Really, these are mostly problems that have already been solved but are ignored because big game studios operate via “Checkbox Development.” Rather than spending the time and money to implement these better solutions, they instead just check the default box for the default effect because it is faster and costs them less money.
Also as a person that grew up when game consoles could connect to the TV via an RF Switch, the image-damaging effects of Temporal Anti Alias smearing are extremely visible, and NOT a “miserable invisible miniscule artifact.” They’re massive on the screen. The particular examples shown in this video do not show it particularly well because it only focuses on raytracing, but the effects of TAA are still visible because turning on raytracing almost always forces on TAA, since the low resolution raytracing benefits from the smearing TAA causes.
I have two real CRTs (a 4" JVC radio TV and a 27" Sylvania), and while none of the existing shaders perfectly capture it, a guy who calls himself “Retro Crisis” on YouTube and Github has some modified CRT shaders that come really, really close.
My only gripe is that he has different shaders per system, rather than a single “this is your CRT so all games will correctly render through this one” shader.
Yes, but the N64 still had more or less “better” looking games. Even though the PSX had higher resolution textures, it was no match for the N64’s feature of perspective correct geometry and texture mapping. The PSX’s affine texture mapping and vertex snapping due to imprecise floating point math could not be hidden on a CRT, unless the 3D was really, really tiny. This is why so many PSX games opted to use pre-rendered backgrounds instead of rendering in full 3D, whereas this was a rarely used method in N64 games. It was basically a cheat, because the CRT masked (sometimes more convincingly than other times) the fact that the background was just a JPEG. Fully 3D games on the PSX just look 100% worse when compared to their N64 or PC counterparts, and its almost purely because of these quirks of the PSX.
For example, ignoring the minor texture improvements, comparing Metal Gear Solid on PSX vs MGS Integral on PC, all things like for like (same resolution, same display, point texture filtering, etc), MGS Integral looks a million times better because it has perspective correct geometry and texture mapping. Now personally, I always prefer MGS on the PSX because I like that weird quirk and consider it part of the “true experience,” but ultimately this is a graphical weakness of the PSX, and one that even CRTs could not do much to hide.
Silent Hill 2, the original, really made excellent use of silence. The first game had its moments, but SH2 really was, from a narrative perspective, peak Silent Hill.
I certainly hope not. If Xbox drops consoles then Sony will absolutely be pricing PS6 at $1k to make up for Concord and PS5 Pro not selling. What’re you going to do, buy an Xbox? They’d immediately gain a monopoly over the console market. We all know Nintendo learned the wrong lesson from the Wii and Switch and will likely never make another console with strong enough hardware to actually compete with Sony/Microsoft ever again.