Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2018 - 2020]

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.
I guess there are also significant inconveniences in production for high quality animated sprites.
One of the best 2D work to have ever been done in a game I believe was in King of Fighters 12.
This quote from Wikipedia: "Kukino addeds that each character took between sixteen and seventeen months to be done by 10 designers together along with Nona, who revised them. However, due to the difficulties that it took to make this new designs, there were only 20 playable characters for the arcade version, the lowest number ever in a game from the series."
Indeed these characters were very well made and very smoothly animated. Creating every single frame of animation with proper shading so that characters would not seem out of place in various situations on each stage must have been a pain.
I suspect this is why Street Fighter III also had very few characters. The animation was top notch. It probably has the smoothest 2D animation in every fighting game to date.
Guilty Gear XRD choose the more efficient solution by designing 3D graphics with advanced cell shading, zero camera perspective on characters to make them look like 2D and low frame animation placed exactly where a 2D sprite would have been.
2D hand drawn graphics have a special charm though which I also wished had more widespread use.
 
Sega Saturn says no. Also, not sure if this is the most technically advanced 2D game ever, but it's weird and beautiful.
wowww ,that's gorgeous.

On a different note, but also 2D art is involved, AI Lowe reveals his Sierra source code... He says..."This is the only copy!" (referring to King's Quest III, the only copy of the code on earth) and "I backed everything up because I knew Sierra didn't." There are games never seen nor revealed like Gelfling Adventure. And pre-Sierra games.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...-code-collection-then-puts-all-of-it-on-ebay/

 
Sega Saturn says no. Also, not sure if this is the most technically advanced 2D game ever, but it's weird and beautiful.
As @Nesh said, it's beautiful, indeed! Do you know that feeling when you see a game for the first time and you want to play it so bad? That's just what happened to me, and this feeling is very special, since it doesn't happen quite often.

Also, it slightly reminded me of Abe's Oddysee, which is good! Maybe the developers were inspired by this SEGA title, who knows.
 
[ Initial Article from DF -- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-playstation-classic-emulation-first-look ]

PlayStation Classic mixes PAL and NTSC games - and the results disappoint
There are performance problems, too.

Something's up with the Sony PlayStation Classic - what should be a celebration of a truly iconic console is compromised by an uneven selection of games, sub-par emulation and the bizarre choice of using a mixture of both NTSC and PAL games in a machine with a locked 60Hz high definition output.



First impressions of the quality of PlayStation Classic gameplay leave something to be desired then. We'll return with a full review soon, along with a deeper look at the form-factor and the overall quality of the emulation, but in the here and now, it's difficult not to be disappointed with this release.


[ Follow up Article from DF -- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-playstation-classic-review ]

PlayStation Classic review: the games are great but the emulation is really poor
A profound disappointment.

With its remarkable, varied game library, the original PlayStation stands as one of the best console platforms in gaming history. For Sony as a corporate entity, the PlayStation brand remains a key part of its lineup and one that has arguably saved the company at points during its long history. For gamers though, the original grey box represents an era of discovery and wonderful memories - a time when previously niche genres were given the chance to thrive the world over and well-worn genres were given new life in the transition to 3D.

A product like the PlayStation Classic seems like a smart move then. Package 20 great PlayStation games in a small plug and play replica of the PlayStation with two controllers and you have the recipe for a great product, a celebration of one of the most important gaming devices of all-time. Nintendo has found great success with its Classic mini line of micro-consoles so why not Sony? Unfortunately, as you may already know, this particular story doesn't have a happy ending.

The PlayStation Classic falls short of expectations in many key areas, but while the major deficiencies of the product have already been discussed, I wanted to explain in more detail what went wrong, and why the PS Classic falls short - and it begins with the already high standard of PS1 emulation that Sony has championed in past PlayStation hardware.

 
Since this is a retro thread and I didn't want to start a new thread about it I wanted to ask if any of you encountered the following weird occurrence.
Back in the 32 bit days, my Playstation was modded. It could play copies and all regions.
In an occlusion or two, while I was playing Tekken 3 (I think it was Japanese version), the game was loading much faster and was running faster than normal. I am not sure if the mod or the copy of the disk had anything to do with it.
I was surprised these few times it happened. It was blazing fast. But it never happened again. Anyone had any similar strange experience with Tekken 3 (NTSC) version or any other game?
 
Since this is a retro thread and I didn't want to start a new thread about it I wanted to ask if any of you encountered the following weird occurrence.
Back in the 32 bit days, my Playstation was modded. It could play copies and all regions.
In an occlusion or two, while I was playing Tekken 3 (I think it was Japanese version), the game was loading much faster and was running faster than normal. I am not sure if the mod or the copy of the disk had anything to do with it.
I was surprised these few times it happened. It was blazing fast. But it never happened again. Anyone had any similar strange experience with Tekken 3 (NTSC) version or any other game?
There's also a generic retro thread not just for DF's articles.

And to answer your question, nope, I haven't had a similar experience.
 
No dual-shock controller, no internet connectivity, bad emulation, and a fairly limited library of games. Let's hope that Sony actually starts releasing updates to install through the USB port (assuming it's not just for power only). If price to add wireless connectivity was an issue, they could've cut the amount of internal flash storage (and number of preloaded games), while offering some free game downloads or something like that with other titles for purchase.

Talk about a huge mess and missed oppurtunity.
 
No dual-shock controller, no internet connectivity, bad emulation, and a fairly limited library of games. Let's hope that Sony actually starts releasing updates to install through the USB port (assuming it's not just for power only). If price to add wireless connectivity was an issue, they could've cut the amount of internal flash storage (and number of preloaded games), while offering some free game downloads or something like that with other titles for purchase.

Talk about a huge mess and missed oppurtunity.

Give it a few months and I'd imagine there'll be an interesting behind the scenes story about the development of this little box.
No engineer wants to release a broken product like this, it's on par with some of the worst kickstarter retro boxes, there must have been some behind the scenes politics or unreasonable timescales.
 
[ Initial Article from DF -- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-playstation-classic-emulation-first-look ]

PlayStation Classic mixes PAL and NTSC games - and the results disappoint
There are performance problems, too.

Something's up with the Sony PlayStation Classic - what should be a celebration of a truly iconic console is compromised by an uneven selection of games, sub-par emulation and the bizarre choice of using a mixture of both NTSC and PAL games in a machine with a locked 60Hz high definition output.



First impressions of the quality of PlayStation Classic gameplay leave something to be desired then. We'll return with a full review soon, along with a deeper look at the form-factor and the overall quality of the emulation, but in the here and now, it's difficult not to be disappointed with this release.


[ Follow up Article from DF -- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-playstation-classic-review ]

PlayStation Classic review: the games are great but the emulation is really poor
A profound disappointment.

With its remarkable, varied game library, the original PlayStation stands as one of the best console platforms in gaming history. For Sony as a corporate entity, the PlayStation brand remains a key part of its lineup and one that has arguably saved the company at points during its long history. For gamers though, the original grey box represents an era of discovery and wonderful memories - a time when previously niche genres were given the chance to thrive the world over and well-worn genres were given new life in the transition to 3D.

A product like the PlayStation Classic seems like a smart move then. Package 20 great PlayStation games in a small plug and play replica of the PlayStation with two controllers and you have the recipe for a great product, a celebration of one of the most important gaming devices of all-time. Nintendo has found great success with its Classic mini line of micro-consoles so why not Sony? Unfortunately, as you may already know, this particular story doesn't have a happy ending.

The PlayStation Classic falls short of expectations in many key areas, but while the major deficiencies of the product have already been discussed, I wanted to explain in more detail what went wrong, and why the PS Classic falls short - and it begins with the already high standard of PS1 emulation that Sony has championed in past PlayStation hardware.

it has been discovered that you can actually change some settings, like adding scanlines and so on, in a hidden menu accessible if you connect a keyboard to the PS Classic usb port. Kinda ironic they added an option to show the FPS.

You can do things like use Disable Frame Limiter, change Region and so on and so forth.

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Retro Gaming Arts youtube channel created a video on how to enable it.

 
Why anyone would buy this is beyond me, other then for the PSX looks? You get a superior experience emulating the psx yourself with many more options, you can use your own whole library too.
Or simply by using a PS2 which plays both psx and ps2 games. Two classics in one.
 
Give it a few months and I'd imagine there'll be an interesting behind the scenes story about the development of this little box.
No engineer wants to release a broken product like this, it's on par with some of the worst kickstarter retro boxes, there must have been some behind the scenes politics or unreasonable timescales.

Does/has Sony used the same Allwinner SoC in any other products? Either they had a surplus of them for some other product or they got offered a great deal. If Sony really wanted to win our hearts and minds, they would've used a MIPS SoC ;)
 
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