General gaming discussion

Zero-Cool

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

Shrewd move.
I mistakenly thought it was 199 from now on. I guess I will just have to keep an eye out. No point buying it now until they drop the price again. Seems they did the 199 thing before recently too.

I think it's just days of play at start of summer and black friday in November. They might do it for new years as well but with ps5 coming out, it might drop again sooner.

CastorTroy

I don't see it dropping with the PS5 release. With it being able to be used with the PS5 and maybe even working better on PS5, it could be in demand again.
Remember when you could get a Move controller, PS3 Eye and starter disc for really cheap since it pretty much flopped, but as soon as it was announced they could be used on PSVR the prices shot up again.

Zero-Cool

CastorTroy wrote: »

I don't see it dropping with the PS5 release. With it being able to be used with the PS5 and maybe even working better on PS5, it could be in demand again.
Remember when you could get a Move controller, PS3 Eye and starter disc for really cheap since it pretty much flopped, but as soon as it was announced they could be used on PSVR the prices shot up again.

I wish Sony would give a hint of how it will work on ps5. Like say Resi 8 will have VR, will ps4 VR work with it or will it just work for ps4 games on the ps5 console?

It would be great if we didn't have to upgrade the hardware but I'd say the ps5 will have a new headset and moves, especially for individual finger movement.

B.A._Baracus

Zero-Cool wrote: »

I wish Sony would give a hint of how it will work on ps5. Like say Resi 8 will have VR, will ps4 VR work with it or will it just work for ps4 games on the ps5 console?

It would be great if we didn't have to upgrade the hardware but I'd say the ps5 will have a new headset and moves, especially for individual finger movement.

Yeah. There was some patent taken out by Sony which was about their own version of the index controller pretty much.

Zero-Cool

I am blown away by PSVR so far but just played The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners tonight and it's unbelievable, the ultimate zombie survival sim!

CastorTroy

Zero-Cool wrote: »

I wish Sony would give a hint of how it will work on ps5. Like say Resi 8 will have VR, will ps4 VR work with it or will it just work for ps4 games on the ps5 console?

It would be great if we didn't have to upgrade the hardware but I'd say the ps5 will have a new headset and moves, especially for individual finger movement.

That was my point previously an why I was holding off on the PSVR. They say it'll work on the PS5 but does that mean it just works on the PS4 games on the PS5 or can it be used on PS5 VR games.
Though as someone with a non Pro PS4, the PS5 should add some boost at least.

K.O.Kiki

https://twitter.com/tf2classic/status/1279475360850235403


Interesting!

K.O.Kiki

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

https://twitter.com/tf2classic/status/1279475360850235403


Interesting!

Original Orange Box TF2

Not the monetization monster of the current version!

Retr0gamer

Played some Halo 3 last night. Quite a nostalgic experience.

I only played the first 3 missions, 2 crackers and 1 pretty great mission, gets off to a good start. What I didn't remember was how awful the story and dialogue are and how ugly the character models are.

It's also so much more fun to play than Halo 2. The Brutes are less annoying and damage spongey and movement is so much faster.

Zero-Cool

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Played some Halo 3 last night. Quite a nostalgic experience.

I only played the first 3 missions, 2 crackers and 1 pretty great mission, gets off to a good start. What I didn't remember was how awful the story and dialogue are and how ugly the character models are.

It's also so much more fun to play than Halo 2. The Brutes are less annoying and damage spongey and movement is so much faster.

Don't mind your Halo bollix, how was delivering parcels in Death Stranding?

Retr0gamer

Zero-Cool wrote: »

Don't mind your Halo bollix, how was delivering parcels in Death Stranding?

I gave my thoughts in the Death Stranding thread. I played 2 hours and I think I only got past the tutorial sections.... still need a lot more time with it.

The Nal

Sick of these 8 bit 2D retro style indy platformers. Like, I had a C64 in the late 80s.

quokula

The Nal wrote: »

Sick of these 8 bit 2D retro style indy platformers. Like, I had a C64 in the late 80s.

Completely agree with this. You can still have great 2D gameplay and nostalgia without making the screen look like vomit. Cuphead is a nice example of this.

Hand drawn graphics look far better than pixel art, and there's no technical reason at all for pixel art these days. This is easy to say when I'm not an artist who has to draw all the animation frames of course.

pixelburp

16 bit is a better palette to work with than 8 bit IMO and while stuff like Shovel Knight made great use of the more limiting colour scheme I rarely find them easy on the eye or enjoyable to play across. Anything 8 bit or less is too much an eye sore for me

quokula

pixelburp wrote: »

16 bit is a better palette to work with than 8 bit IMO and while stuff like Shovel Knight made great use of the more limiting colour scheme I rarely find them easy on the eye or enjoyable to play across. Anything 8 bit or less is too much an eye sore for me

Maybe I'm wrong but I never thought 8-bit or 16-bit style literally meant 256 or 64k colours. I thought it was a bit of a hand-wavey "low res like the nes" or "slightly higher res like the snes" reference, without actually having any of the hardware limitations to adhere to.

Retr0gamer

Think there's some absolutely gorgeous 8-bit and 16-bit games out there with some excellent pixel art. I'd go so far as to say the best looking pixel art games look far better than the best looking 3D games... well outside of the hyper stylised ones which look gorgeous.

Give me Chrono Trigger or Metal Slug over the latest and great ray traced game.

8-bit and 16-bit refer to the bus on the CPU. It's an easy way to differentiate the NES from the Megadrive and SNES but it's a terrible way to differentiate consoles. For instance the PC Engine had an extremely powerful 8-bit CPU and a 16-bit graphics chip and had games like Rondo of Blood which were as good looking as the best SNES and Megadrive games.

The looks really came down to the colour palettes and limitations of the system. The NES for instance gets its look from only having a maximum of 3 colours per sprite and would need multiple sprites to go past that limitation. Something like Shovel Knight tries to work within those limitations, even if it takes liberties with it while most pixel art games don't bother.

Honestly think good pixel art is fantastic looking. It looks far better than the modern flash style of art as you can use aliasing and dithering to give games much more detail.

Also you have to remember that pixel art games looked far nicer in the 80's and 90's because they were played on a CRT screen. CRTs added aliasing and artists would work with the CRT aliasing to add extra detail to the art. The pixel perfect art we see now is not the art we saw playing our 8 and 16 bit consoles. People think it looked like this because of emulation on high res monitors and HD flat screens

A great example is this picture of Wizardry on the NES. One is pixel perfect, the other is how it looks on a CRT screen. A massive amount of detail and shading is lost.

pixelburp

Yeah, the "8 bit" reduction is pat, but as convenient nomenclature it saves time; that's an interesting point about the CRT monitors, hadn't considered that myself. 'cos as the image shows without the antialiasing caused by the hardware the NES sprites look shíte TBH. But on a more insurmountable - and personal - level, those lower colour palettes give me headaches and eye strain; the harsher contrast making it hard to properly enjoy even games like Shovel Knight. Ditto the less advanced soundchips and the "bleepier" soundtracks.

There are definitely two eras I stay will away from: the aforementioned "8 bit" NES one, and those early 3D years around the turn of the millenium. IMO very few of games made in the frontier times of three dimensions hold up these days. And in both cases they felt like eras when developers were trying to figure out basic concepts of game design by trial and error

Retr0gamer

I feel like the NES was were they perfected 2D gameplay and the 16 bit era was just a refinement of that. The NES is one of my all time favourite consoles because of the wealth of amazing and weird games on it. Only problem is RPGs as they only got good with ff4 on the SNES being a big game changer from the grind of earlier games.

As for early 3D again love the Saturn, PlayStation and 90s PC games. It wasn't brand new territory so again it's a very creative and exciting time for games. Loads of out right classics and interesting games on those platforms. Every game now just seems to be based around 4 or 5 homogeneous templates.

wotzgoingon

Retr0gamer wrote: »

As for early 3D again love the Saturn, PlayStation and 90s PC games. It wasn't brand new territory so again it's a very creative and exciting time for games. Loads of out right classics and interesting games on those platforms. Every game now just seems to be based around 4 or 5 homogeneous templates.

I don't know I think games have got better. Old remastered games are better than original too.

johnny_ultimate

Been playing some Cloudpunk recently. The gameplay is straightforward and simplistic; the side content too reliant on collectibles; the story is a bit of a mess (albeit enlivened by some fun encounters with various eccentrics) and so on... but by god do I love just being in its open, perpetually rainy city. The feel of flying around the skies and exploring the grimy neon streets is fairly one note, but what a note. The beautiful, voxel-based art and quietly droning soundtrack really just hits that right part of my brain.

I’m not going to pretend it’s anything other than a limited game design wise, but that the development team got the city and atmosphere so right is a pretty impressive accomplishment. At 1440p it’s a bit of a stunner, albeit in a different way than the show of technical brute force in something like TLOU2. Hoping the console ports can keep the look reasonably intact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLTk7t692SE

Retr0gamer

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I don't know I think games have got better. Old remastered games are better than original too.

It's more the excitement and variety in games from back then. You just wouldn't get a company like Squaresoft now releasing 3 or 4 highly experimental RPGs in one year. 3D adventure games like Tail Concerto or the Megaman LEgends games that just don't get made anymore. Insane rhythm action games like Parappa the Rapper and Incredible Crisis. And out and out weirdness like Irritating stick or Bishi Bashi. Sure there's a lot of 3D games from back then that haven't aged well but equally there's loads that have and loads that are experiences that you just can't get anymore.

Technical limitations will age a game such as proper bad 3D and especially poor framerates but there's plenty of games that transcend these. A good game is a good game forever when it doesn't date.

As for the NES there's so many absolute crackers on that system that despite looking simple are a joy to play and near everything is running at 60 FPS. Late era stuff from the likes of Sunsoft look great and have some of the best music ever. There's plenty of other games like that from the likes of Konami and Capcom and others.

johnny_ultimate

More than the graphics, what has really aged early 3D games are the controls. You can pick up pretty much any modern game these days, big or small, and instinctively know how it works - we’ve all become fluent in how to control games, and developers share a general universal language in that regard (obvious game to game tweaks depending on the particular needs). But there are so many mad experiments, failed efforts and technical limitations back in the day it can be like learning an entirely new language when you pick up some PS1 era games.

Retr0gamer

It's true for many third and first person games but there was a lot more games besides those two genres and developers would largely not complicate things with regards to controls if they knew what they were doing.

copperspock

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

More than the graphics, what has really aged early 3D games are the controls. You can pick up pretty much any modern game these days, big or small, and instinctively know how it works - we’ve all become fluent in how to control games, and developers share a general universal language in that regard (obvious game to game tweaks depending on the particular needs). But there are so many mad experiments, failed efforts and technical limitations back in the day it can be like learning an entirely new language when you pick up some PS1 era games.

I played GoldenEye to death on the N64, beat all difficulties and time trials. I absolutely loved playing that game. I tried it again not too long ago via emulator and an original controller, and I have no idea how I was able to enjoy it so much - the single analog stick controls are such a PITA!

Spon Farmer

Does anyone how to (or if it is possible to) save game progress for Tomb Raider Anniversary on a Mac?

I've Googled it but can only find talk of importing save files. I open the Package Contents in Finder but there is no save fill-in there and I cannot find any files related to the games outside of Applications. I bought the game onnthe Mac App Store.

copperspock wrote: »

I played GoldenEye to death on the N64, beat all difficulties and time trials. I absolutely loved playing that game. I tried it again not too long ago via emulator and an original controller, and I have no idea how I was able to enjoy it so much - the single analog stick controls are such a PITA!

I don't know what PITA means but I loved that game myself.

gimli2112

Spon Farmer wrote: »

Does anyone how to (or if it is possible to) save game progress for Tomb Raider Anniversary on a Mac?

I've Googled it but can only find talk of importing save files. I open the Package Contents in Finder but there is no save fill-in there and I cannot find any files related to the games outside of Applications. I bought the game onnthe Mac App Store.



I don't know what PITA means but I loved that game myself.

It's like one of those puzzles Lara finds in a tomb. Context. Pain in the ...

Spon Farmer

gimli2112 wrote: »

It's like one of those puzzles Lara finds in a tomb. Context. Pain in the ...

Okies.

Think those puzzles are fine just the falling and dying bothers me.

I was going to post here earlier to ask someone to come here and defeat the T-rex for me. I figured the Adrenaline Dodge was necessary and I can only do it by accident.

After a few game sessions though I became experienced enough to avoid it enough times that I could stay alive to shoot it enough times. :P

EoinMcLovin

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1285527461300711424?s=19

pixelburp

I was listening to Jim Sterling's latest, where he responded to these Ubisoft revelations. He sounded utterly spent and bereft of energy at this stage; he also dropped a few hints that of knowing further abuses, but needs to keep it to himself for now. So sounds like this is all tip of the iceberg stuff.

Zero-Cool

Anyone play Skater XL? I see it's out on full release next week but hard to get a feel of it. Supposed to be very sim like (made by devs who are skaters) but is it any good? 40 euro rrp.