Where does that put the Xenon against desktop cpu's from the time?
Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2018 - 2020]
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Where does that put the Xenon against desktop cpu's from the time?
I don't think you could rank it accurately vs pc stuff, but I remember that devs initially complained about it being slower than a P4.
no, the video's author is a colleague of mine in my retrogaming whatsapp group. He has beaten close to 1200 arcades games with a single credit. He is like a well tuned machine. His channel has around 560 videos of games beaten with a single credit, but the videos of the other arcades he has beaten in "fallow land", already recorded and ready to be uploaded. With 600+ videos to go and 2 uploaded 1cc videos games per week, he has material to upload for a few years.
He is an engineer with a family but manages to have time to play and beat these arcades, it is his favourite hobby. Plus he is charismatic and has around him some very valuable retro gamers who play some of those arcades in coop mode with him and so on.
Wasn't that true for allot of games on 360/PS3, they were a sub-24fps mess with lower than low settings on PC. The 512MB total for games didn't help either when 4GB+ was the average for PC titles at near end of the 7th gen.
I have no idea why far cry 4 was green lit for a 360/PS3 version, that was almost unplayable.
Cash to be made. It was only a year into the cycle afterall.
Yeah there that since not everyone had a X1/PS4. Still remember when bluepoint said how hard it was to fit a 5GB games like Titianfall 1 into 512MB ram on the 360.
GoRetro! portable console, to be launched November 30th, priced 30€, and preloaded with 260 games. Dunno about the power of this thing, but it looks like a Gameboy.
https://codigocero.com/GoRetro-Port...260-xogos-nunha-consola-con-forma-de-Game-Boy
https://codigocero.com/GoRetro-Port...260-xogos-nunha-consola-con-forma-de-Game-Boy
It was pretty impressive they managed to downport it relatively intact (I've seen comparison videos), but I've never tried the 360 version, just only on PC. I think I read somewhere the Xbox 360 version was a last minute decision. It was released the first spring after the new generation's launch after all.
I think even Titanfall 2 could've been releastically released on the 360, I almost wish they had to boost their sales and exposure. Playing at "equivalent settings" on PC (600p, bilinear or trilinear filtering, 2x MSAA) actually was still quite an enjoyable experience:
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Sigfried1977
Legend
Still wasn't quite as bad as Shadow of Mordor or Watchdogs on last gen iirc. Those were literally unplayable.
talking of Descent and similar games, Descent 2019 comes to GoG next year and they give you a Descent game for free when you buy it.
https://www.gog.com/game/descent_2019
new DF Retro video, the game chosen for this episode of DF Retro is Pitfall. Has anyone played Pitfall?
I had the Windows 95 version, and it was revolutionary (not in the way you might think, more on that later) 'cos I had my first computer in september 1995 and I was tired of MS-DOS games. I mean..., many of them just worked out of the box, and some of them allowed you to play under Windows 95, which for me was the best solution.
But many others had you tweaking .bat files that I didn't totally comprehend or EMM386 settings that seemed obscure to me, and it was tiresome to leave Windows to DOS then type win to go back to Windows.
When I said revolutionary I meant that Pitfall was played on a window, and the graphics were soooooo good. Those used to be some of my favourite games. I also liked Sega ports of their franchises for the PC because Sonic 3 was played on a window, or Doom for Windows.
DOS was okay but my Pentium 100 32MB of RAM PC at the time was fast, but not fast enough to be switching from OS to OS and I am a bing fan of multitask and control, something that was clumsier in DOS, imho.
I had the Windows 95 version, and it was revolutionary (not in the way you might think, more on that later) 'cos I had my first computer in september 1995 and I was tired of MS-DOS games. I mean..., many of them just worked out of the box, and some of them allowed you to play under Windows 95, which for me was the best solution.
But many others had you tweaking .bat files that I didn't totally comprehend or EMM386 settings that seemed obscure to me, and it was tiresome to leave Windows to DOS then type win to go back to Windows.
When I said revolutionary I meant that Pitfall was played on a window, and the graphics were soooooo good. Those used to be some of my favourite games. I also liked Sega ports of their franchises for the PC because Sonic 3 was played on a window, or Doom for Windows.
DOS was okay but my Pentium 100 32MB of RAM PC at the time was fast, but not fast enough to be switching from OS to OS and I am a bing fan of multitask and control, something that was clumsier in DOS, imho.
Garrett Weaving
Newcomer
I have a really fond memory of taking turns playing Pitfall on PC with other kids, everyone trying to see what was going on, cheering and such. Some of the levels in that game were devious, but I haven't really played it since then, so maybe I won't have as much of an issue as I used to. The final boss in particular was an exercise in frustration, but damn, when I finally managed to beat it I felt like I was on top of the world and I was the only one to manage it out of the other kids 
I wish we had spent more time in that generation of games. I wonder what games would have gotten to look like had the play station not rushed Sega into frankensteining the Saturn into a 3D machine and shifted their focus to that sort of game and had Ninty also made a 2D centric 32bit machine before the 64. We could have done well with another 4 or so years of high quality 2D games. Imagine a full gen of games where Metal-Slug level of quality was the norm...
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actually, 2D art took a long time to be properly equaled in 3D, and even nowadays I don't see 3D games that can equal some good 2D art, like that of the original Broken Sword, or the art of the two first Age of Empires games.
The transition to 3D was great for sports games and racing games, but other genres like strategy and so on, didnt look very convincing. For instance, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 art was pure 2D and it is the best looking art style of the series for me, while the acclaimed Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has a typical 3D art style of the late 90s -with a 2D gameplay and feel- in a way that the sprites look like ugly flat mannequins.
Maybe the Gameboy Advance was the pinnacle of 2D art?
In some titles, yes, but there is one unfortunate thing about these handhelds. In one hand they offer an opportunity for devs to revisit older technical limitations but starting from a place when they have all the know-how acquired on past generations and after, plus access to much beefier dev tools (compare the price of the workstations used to render DKC 3D sprites, versus that of a PC that could do the same work when GBA was out). On the other hand, hardly do titles for these consoles recieve the same amount of polish, as the games from the TV consoles of similar HW capabilities. They often have smaller budgets and are developed by B teams. But the occasional gem on GBA, (or of the many 2D NDS games too) give us a glimpse of what a 32bit 2D Nintendo console game would have looked like. PS1 was almost 2D centric too, says the old story... I wish the industry had waited 5 more years on going 3d. Games like Earthworm Jim, DKC, or Yoshi's Island came late into the 16bit era. I can only think of what could it have been like, to have a whole new 2D gen where that was the baseline.
It's not just the ugly 3d games that bitter me most. Is that the industry at large abandoned 2D just when it learned to do it well. It was at the end of 16bit era that studios developed the art pipeline, tools, knowhow, and budgets to really replicate near TV/movie quality animation on those machines. Then they left all that behind.
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