Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2016 - 2017]

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Holy crap I went down a forum wormhole last night. Wolfenstein 3D for the Sega Genesis is amazing.

Sorry if this is the wrong thread.
not the wrong thread at all. My best childhood friend had a Megadrive. But tbh I had never heard about this game, nor I can imagine the Megadrive running it, actually.
 
not the wrong thread at all. My best childhood friend had a Megadrive. But tbh I had never heard about this game, nor I can imagine the Megadrive running it, actually.

You should try it in an emulator. The rom comes with the shareware levels. He even recently improved it with slightly higher resolution and performance.
 
You would think that we would only see better graphics from there
Strict graphical improvement from one game in a series to the next is hardly ever a hard rule.

Even when systems get replaced by systems that most people call "better", there are often particular cases or respects in which the old system has benefits.
Like, the lighting system in games like the original Doom is in some respects very crude compared to later lightmap approaches; it's only able to apply flat light levels across big chunks of geometry, and can't handle stuff like the smooth radiosity gradients that a lightmap bake gives you. But it trivially and efficiently allows for, say, sharp hard environmental shadows.

But oftentimes things just plain get downgraded. A lot of the "improvement" that happens across a generation is developers deciding which things to prioritize, and which things to slash.
Sometimes this can even persist across generational leaps. Halo 5 almost certainly doesn't have a system analogous to Halo 3's "area specular", since objects in the game suffer from tons of anomalous rim lighting.

Changing game design can also have a huge effect on what you can and can't get away with.
Even weird stuff like tweaks to camera acceleration and whatnot can have a big impact. It's amazing what FFXIII gets away with just because it has a camera that's very difficult to parallax without rotation; there's tons and tons of giant pre-rendered cutout background objects, which would be very obvious if it wasn't so hard to stop the camera from swooping to align with your movement direction. (Probably a big part of why FFXIII-2 "has worse graphics.")

Developers usually try to make each new game get perceived as "more graphically impressive/modern/whatever" than the last, but whether that works out in any given case is ultimately subjective...

Thanks for the insight, as usual. Why aren't those walkable objects in Duke Nukem 3D stackable? Could you stack them and create a perfectly convincing true 3D perception? Like playing a completely vertical level from platform to platform...
I'm not very familiar with their functional constraints, but at the very least there'd be a performance cost associated with them.
 
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talking of impressive games for the machine they were running on... I always wondered how the original Xbox could run Ninja Gaiden Black at 60 fps -plus it had a 720p iirc-. The game looked incredible overall. However it was its perfect gameplay and progression which makes it one of the 10 best games ever made -in my personal list-.

As you can see it still holds fine and it passes the test of time.

 
talking of impressive games for the machine they were running on... I always wondered how the original Xbox could run Ninja Gaiden Black at 60 fps -plus it had a 720p iirc-. The game looked incredible overall. However it was its perfect gameplay and progression which makes it one of the 10 best games ever made -in my personal list-.

As you can see it still holds fine and it passes the test of time.

I remember playing this at a friends house. It was outstandingly awesome in every way. A perfect game
 
It's a technical marvel:


Yep. It's insanely good.

MD still had a lot in the tank at the end of the generation - at least in terms of performing effects on the CPU . Pity that the M-CD wasn't properly supported and the 32X took focus away from the core system towards the end of its life.
 
it makes me wonder why such port was not made at the time? they made it for the SNES and complained about the Nintendo restrictions...
 
It didn't have 720p, but supported 16:9 properly.
ah okay, I remember discussing in forums back in the day how Ninja Gaiden Black allowed to be set at 720p, but that was before the HD generation so... I think it is upscaled, not true 720p
 
360 BC didn't change res, but they did add MSAA. Ninja Gaiden and DOA2U might have been 2xMSAA.
 
Strict graphical improvement from one game in a series to the next is hardly ever a hard rule.

Even when systems get replaced by systems that most people call "better", there are often particular cases or respects in which the old system has benefits.
Like, the lighting system in games like the original Doom is in some respects very crude compared to later lightmap approaches; it's only able to apply flat light levels across big chunks of geometry, and can't handle stuff like the smooth radiosity gradients that a lightmap bake gives you. But it trivially and efficiently allows for, say, sharp hard environmental shadows.

But oftentimes things just plain get downgraded. A lot of the "improvement" that happens across a generation is developers deciding which things to prioritize, and which things to slash.
Sometimes this can even persist across generational leaps. Halo 5 almost certainly doesn't have a system analogous to Halo 3's "area specular", since objects in the game suffer from tons of anomalous rim lighting.

Changing game design can also have a huge effect on what you can and can't get away with.
Even weird stuff like tweaks to camera acceleration and whatnot can have a big impact. It's amazing what FFXIII gets away with just because it has a camera that's very difficult to parallax without rotation; there's tons and tons of giant pre-rendered cutout background objects, which would be very obvious if it wasn't so hard to stop the camera from swooping to align with your movement direction. (Probably a big part of why FFXIII-2 "has worse graphics.")
Although I agree to a large extend to what you say, I believe that in the case of Tekken Tag vs the rest of the Tekken games on PS2 it had obvious overall graphical advantage minus the artistic aspect which is of course more subjective but can improve the visual appeal. Maybe the game design prohibited from replicating the lighting, materials etc. But it is still a different case compared to other titles where shift in priorities produced significant and unquestionable improvements in areas that more than compensated for the reduction or luck of other graphical features.
The case is also much more interesting with Tekken Tag because it overall produced effects and detail that were generally not thought possible or reproduced by any other game on the PS2 across its lifespan and that was one of the first games on the console.
The idea I get from the particular title is that Namco tried "unconventional" ways due to lack of tools and experimented with various effects because the capabilities of the console were not fully understood and standardized. IFIRC Namco did say they were challenged a lot with TTT in old interviews trying to figure out how the console worked
At a later point Namco maybe abandoned using the same approach as it consumed too much time and money
 
Weird. I wonder what the performance bottleneck would be if Xenos could do 4x MSAA per rop, and shouldn't have been fillrate or memory bandwidth bound.
hm... the simplest rationale would be if the game already used MSAA on Xbox, and they didn't want to interfere with the engine emulation at all or....... maybe the renderer was doing something else that required more buffers simultaneously. There'd be no reason not to try to maximize usage of the 10MB space.
 
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new article featuring Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...f-kain-the-genesis-of-todays-open-world-epics

This is a game I have on GoG and never played when it came out, so when I tried it I was lost, I felt I was using a quite polygonal character with pointy fingers in his hands and feet, wandering around without knowing what to do. I was confused. I also played Blood Omen, a pirate version, using a ISO and daemon tools, before that, and I played that one a little more.


The seamless world had to be so impressive at the time.
 
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