Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.
There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.
At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal
Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.
The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.
Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.
I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.
I loved the in-the-moment gameplay and the narrative arc they had going there for a while. Despite myself I’m still invested in some of the characters… but it’s one of those games where I really recognized how all-consuming the engagement treadmill I had been on once I stepped away. It’s probably a good thing for me that it’s in the shitter at the moment, or I could easily get lured back in.
Oh, and the r/DtG mods deleted my highly-upvoted Lightfall “lore/prediction” shitpost that was a massive wall of text winding up to an Attack on Titan pun, so fuck 'em.
I’ll second that… I always found PS1 3D games to be pure eye-cancer even when played on a CRT TV back in the day. N64 was good-but-not-great by comparison.
The first time I thought I was seeing real life on the screen was NFS3 on PC, which… well, looking back, I was clearly wrong, but it’s decent-looking at least. The next time was when I briefly mistook my cousins playing NFL2K on Dreamcast for a Christmas day football game back in '99, and I feel like that generation of console (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/OG XBox) is about where 3D games are, graphically at least, still palatable.