Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2024]

Nesh said:
What I find outstanding is how well Wipeout aged. There is something about it's style, sound and motion that compose a more pleasing aesthetic compared to the modern wipeouts and similar games.

The environments have elements of believability and groundedness compared to the overdone futuristic sterile looks of the new games. There is an identity vs the generic futuristic designs of Wipeout Omega. The logo designs and weapon icons are much more pronounced as part of the game's identity. It has Designers Republic talking to you.

The sound effects, such us the boost, the weapon acquisition, the warning and starting voice , the collision effects, are very unique, stylized and much more fitting with the whole theme and composition. The music is varied and stylish, fully describing the theme compared to the generic, mainstream beats found in newer games.

The ships have a more realistic control and much more believable physics. The ships physics give the impression of wind and gravity were the pilot is fighting with forces of nature. Like how Gran Turismo would have been if anti gravity racing became a thing. The new Wipeout games don't convey that. The ships are just floating as if they are on ice and on a flat rail.

There is also a very interesting detail with the camera work. The camera doesn't stick behind the ship. The ship gets off center on different parts of the screen while the camera follows the track, farther adding to the experience and also creating an atmosphere of the observer of the whole game as a composition of sound, motion and visual effects
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Wipeout was an incredible game at the time, and this comes from a F-Zero guy. I loved the feeling of how the ships seemed to float over the track..., if F-Zero could imitate that it'd be even better. I had the MS-DOS version of Wipeout at the time, and ever since I liked Wipeout like games, but without the weapons. The last one I got is Pacer. F-Zero speed with Wipeout camera, physics and sense of gravity would be ideal F-Zero game.

Another game of the video John mentions is Ridge Racer. I played Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer 64 via emulation quite a few years ago.

Ridge Racer was sooooo addictive, and as I mentioned many times, they got it right. Any car you unlocked meant you were doing a significant advance.

A new car meant having the possibility to beat some tracks that were difficult until then.

This is where games like Forza are so boring in comparison. You end up having a garage filled with a lot of cars they give you away that you never use and they aren't exciting to unlock, 'cos you unlock so many cars and there is no story to it. Just play events and unlock cars left and right.

The progression of Ridge Racer games was super well thought out. That's something that seems to be underrated, but there are roguelike games that get it right nowadays, like Vampire Survivors or Army of Ruin, where any unlock is really important.
 
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Davros said:
Redout is a modern take on Wipeout if your interested (its on steam)
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more like F-Zero to me, 'cos there are no weapons. I have both Redout 1 and Redout 2 (this one has XeSS support which is great). I liked the first more, Redout 2 overwhelms me with too much things happening at once on the tracks and the screen, I told that to developers and stopped playing a while ago.

Sometimes you can get lost so easily in Redout 2, at least in my case, and that's why I usually played with minimum settings at almost everything, so it became a bit more playable for me. Dunno if they ever got my feedback seriously when I commented on discord, but it's been a while since I launched the game again. I had advanced in the main mode, but it got to a point that I couldn't memorise the tracks due to having too much vistual information everywhere, that confused me a lot and I didn't concentrate.
 
Onslaught is just so much fun even against bots (Steven Polge is the master)
Cyan said:
Facing Worlds is probably the most fun multiplayer map I've played since I've been playing games
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Do you know the trick of placing the translocator on the slope at the top of the tower then hitting it with the air hammer it gets launched right into the enemy base a few feet from the flag
 
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Cyan said:
my first and my favourite OS to date. 29 years later they ported thousands of apps and games to Windows 95.
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Did you ever see Workbench on Amiga? You could throw application after application at it with pre-emptive multitasking running them all at the same time and it just kept going, 10 years before Win95 introduced multitasking to Windows. Phenomenal OS.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Did you ever see Workbench on Amiga? You could throw application after application at it with pre-emptive multitasking running them all at the same time and it just kept going, 10 years before Win95 introduced multitasking to Windows. Phenomenal OS.
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did you have an Amiga? It's the first time I hear about Workbench. If it was ahead of its time, it's a pity that it didn't gain traction. Amiga always sounded to me more like a computerised console rather than a full-fledged computer -excuse me if I am wrong-, a la MSX. Maybe that's why it wasn't as popular as Mac or Windows....

A cousin of mine had one of those, but it was an Amstrad. It was a captivating machine with all those keys, but I was really young, I don't remember it well, just remember the keys and how engrossing it was looking at it and imagining yourself pressing those keys.
 
It was more computer than any other computer. It had hardware similar to a console for gaming (and media productivity - it was a natural fit for TV work at the time), but also more flexibility and functionality than other computers of the period. It had a full colour mouse and windows interface with full preemptive multitasking, something not matched in the home space for another 10 years after its release. Of course, it was the most expensive computer too outside of overpriced, less capable corporate PCs so it had more hardware budget to play with. But it was the most interesting and competent hardware design coupled with the most effective OS implementation.

And it did gain decent traction, but it lost out to Windows due to 1) not being properly supported by the Commodore business, who didn't refresh and improve the hardware quickly enough and 2) not having the work software to match PCs which, thanks to clones, offered the corporate world the most cost effective computing platforms.

Windows only won because IBM's computer was low effort and easily copied by other companies, driving a race-to-bottom pricing wars between vendors. It's one of the great technological travesties. Although I guess some will argue that PC's evolved into an open-ended system and that is its greatest strength, being able to piece together different components for different requirements as opposed to be locked into a standard hardware. But they'd be wrong - the Amiga came with expansion slots in the big-box versions. :p The only thing PC really brought was a completely open market with lots of competitors killing each other until only a handful remained, so a much cheaper platform for the hardware.
 
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i remember when we bought an amstrad CPC 6128, was playing buggy boy, and looking at the game box, saying that does not look like that, of course, on the box they were showing Atari ST or Amiga screenshots !
 
Shifty Geezer said:
It was more computer than any other computer. It had hardware similar to a console for gaming (and media productivity - it was a natural fit for TV work at the time), but also more flexibility and functionality than other computers of the period. It had a full colour mouse and windows interface with full preemptive multitasking, something not matched in the home space for another 10 years after its release. Of course, it was the most expensive computer too outside of overpriced, less capable corporate PCs so it had more hardware budget to play with. But it was the most interesting and competent hardware design coupled with the most effective OS implementation.

And it did gain decent traction, but it lost out to Windows due to 1) not being properly supported by the Commodore business, who didn't refresh and improve the hardware quickly enough and 2) not having the work software to match PCs which, thanks to clones, offered the corporate world the most cost effective computing platforms.

Windows only won because IBM's computer was low effort and easily copied by other companies, driving a race-to-bottom pricing wars between vendors. It's one of the great technological travesties. Although I guess some will argue that PC's evolved into an open-ended system and that is its greatest strength, being able to piece together different components for different requirements as opposed to be locked into a standard hardware. But they'd be wrong - the Amiga came with expansion slots in the big-box versions. :p The only thing PC really brought was a completely open market with lots of competitors killing each other until only a handful remained, so a much cheaper platform for the hardware.
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well, I'd love to see a device like that with its associated OS made in this continent to have success and to somewhat take over the world, but it wasn't mean to be. Windows 95 was pretty nice though. No Windows was as interesting afterwards, even with all of the improvements over W95 which were a few. Maybe Windows 2000, which has a nice looking interface, but it was meant for servers.

There are people who blame a certain game as the culprit of the demise of Amiga and similar devices.

www.tomshardware.com

Enthusiast adds microtransactions to DOOM — QR codes direct to payment UI every time you pick up an item

The game's original shareware business model seems preferable
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

Actually, DOOM’s success is bittersweet to some of us, as it became the killer app for PCs, relegating home computers like the Amiga and ST to history.
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Cyan said:
There are people who blame a certain game as the culprit of the demise of Amiga and similar devices.
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That was a turning point. The bitplanes rendering of Amiga that was so useful for scrolling and 2D games was slow for DOOM like 3D. Devs hacked solutions with tiny little chunky rendertargets - I think resolutions were something like 100x80 upscaled. However, the Amiga had been out for 7+ years before Wolfenstein 3D released. PC processing power had been growing and growing from the business sector, while the Amiga was stuck with a generation older tech. The hardware equivalency was the same as PS1 versus Sega Master System. It still held its own impressively though.

And though it got a next-gen upgraded, it was too little too late.
 
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