Retro Games Analysis Technical Discussion *spawn*

The issue with Kinect on One was that it stopped being an add on. They were trying to shove it up everyone's throats, whether they wanted it or not, without having the function that could be universally applied in a fun way, which had a cost on price and performance and also made people worry about their privacy.

Kinect on 360 was literally an add on, an extra, for anyone who was interested for games specifically tailored for it. They should have kept it that way. Anytime though they tried to present Kinect as a device that was going to universally elevate your current experience it failed.

The eye toy likewise was amazing as it was a very affordable peripheral for a particular set of experiences that perfectly fit it's function.

Sega's add ons on the other hand, like how MS was trying to promote Kinect later, were supposed to bring you a universal elevated experience of your current gaming. That's a big promise that requires universal support that can truly be applied. 32X's 3D capabilities were lackluster and the Sega CD's biggest benefit was the storage to put video files and better sound in it.
 
Nesh said:
32X's 3D capabilities were lackluster
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Not really when compared to it's contemporaneous competitors. 3D games on 32x were competitive with 3DO and Jaguar, and often had smoother framerates. It's just that Saturn and Playstation were released so soon after.
Nesh said:
Sega CD's biggest benefit was the storage to put video files and better sound in it.
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Sega CD has a sprite scaler and Mode 7 style scroll plane rotation/scaling support, plus a faster 68000 (12.5mhz vs 7.67mhz), more RAM, and a new sound chip. The problem was that these capabilities weren't often used. There were some games that did, though, like Soulstar.
 
see colon said:
Not really when compared to it's contemporaneous competitors. 3D games on 32x were competitive with 3DO and Jaguar, and often had smoother framerates. It's just that Saturn and Playstation were released so soon after.
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Yeah but they were all bad at 3D.
Sega CD has a sprite scaler and Mode 7 style scroll plane rotation/scaling support, plus a faster 68000 (12.5mhz vs 7.67mhz), more RAM, and a new sound chip. The problem was that these capabilities weren't often used. There were some games that did, though, like Soulstar.
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In other words it brought it closer to the SNES.
 
see colon said:
Sega CD has a sprite scaler and Mode 7 style scroll plane rotation/scaling support, plus a faster 68000 (12.5mhz vs 7.67mhz),
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Interestingly there were upgrades for the Amiga that allowed a higher clock CPU, but doubling the clock made little difference to real world performance. There was zero cache so you were working from RAM at the system clock. I expect the same from the Mega CD.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Interestingly there were upgrades for the Amiga that allowed a higher clock CPU, but doubling the clock made little difference to real world performance. There was zero cache so you were working from RAM at the system clock. I expect the same from the Mega CD.
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But the ameha CD also had its own separate memory pool as well, no?
 
Nesh said:
In other words it brought it closer to the SNES.
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It allowed for games that relied on Mode 7 style playfields to be made for it, so in that case, yes. But SNES didn't have a hardware sprite scaler, it could only scale backgrounds. That's why the Bowser fight in Super Mario World takes place with a black background. Because Bowser is actually a a Mode 7 background element. Snes with SuperFX, though, was likely better even with 2d elements. Yoshi's Island shows off a level of complexity beyond anything on SegaCD, and looks better than any 2d platformer on 32X imho. Though that may be a result of development resources and ambition.
Nesh said:
Yeah but they were all bad at 3D.
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We can agree to disagree, I guess. At the time, all of these systems most impressive games were very impressive when compared to SNES and Genesis. It's easy to disregard them now, but at the time they were impressive.
 
As someone who owned a BBC Micro in 1982, Mode 7 means a whole different thing.

Old person Mode 7

(I've got my slippers on, I'm about to go out now with my care nurse, we're going to the park to feed the ducks)
 
see colon said:
We can agree to disagree, I guess. At the time, all of these systems most impressive games were very impressive when compared to SNES and Genesis. It's easy to disregard them now, but at the time they were impressive.
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Checking some videos now, yeah I do see some impressive games for it's time. I think the 32X was indeed much better than Jaguar and 3DO by a significant difference. But it is obvious that the ceiling of its capabilities in 3D was very low and thus very limiting in the experiences it could produce.
 
Nesh said:
Checking some videos now, yeah I do see some impressive games for it's time. I think the 32X was indeed much better than Jaguar and 3DO by a significant difference. But it is obvious that the ceiling of its capabilities in 3D was very low and thus very limiting in the experiences it could produce.
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It has limits for sure, but when compared to say, Jaguar, that system had releases from the end of 1993 until the beginning of 1998. That's basically an entire console generation, from a development standpoint. And developers had time to make sequels to games building and enhancing tech to squeeze extra performance or visuals out of that system. The differences between Iron Soldier 1 and 2 show this progression, where the first game was mostly single colored polygons, and the sequel having most surfaces texture mapped. 32x had about a year of releases, and came out of the gate showing promise and never had a sequel released for any of it's games on 32x. The closest we got were the 2 ports of the WWE games, released a couple months apart if memory serves. I don't know if 32x ever got to it's full potential, and while I think the same can be said for Jaguar and a lesser extent 3DO, I think the lack of time on the market really limited what software was able to achieve on that hardware.
 
One of the best years for me was 1998, when I got Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit, a game that I really liked. There is an article on why that year was so good.

www.theringer.com

1998: The Best Year Ever for Video Games

Taking a look back at everything from ‘Panzer Dragoon’ to ‘Pokémon’
www.theringer.com www.theringer.com

On a different note...

Nintendo forces Garry's Mod to delete 20 years of content — Garry confirms Nintendo is behind Steam Workshop purge

www.tomshardware.com

Nintendo forces Garry's Mod to delete 20 years of content — Garry confirms Nintendo is behind Steam Workshop purge

That's a lot of add-on content.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
 
Davros said:
I still play it although I like Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit 2 from 2002 more
Need For Speed III Modern Patch v1.6.1 [2016/10/28] (HD + Widescreen + Portable)

Need For Speed III Modern Patch v1.6.1 [2016/10/28] (HD + Widescreen + Portable) — VEG.BY

veg.by veg.by
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I stopped playing NFS after NFS III Hot Pursuit, 'cos I didn't have the money to buy the newest ones. I got Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (2010) but I never liked it more than the original NFS III Hot Pursuit which had excellent tracks, incredible music and graphics at the time.

Do you still download cars from the web NFSCars? I did at the time.
 
Davros said:
No.
I never did much of it back in the day either
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there are many interesting cars there. That being said, I just found out by myself back in the day that using Notepad, since it read the raw bits and didn't change them, I could change some specs of the cars. In fact I managed to get the F-355, my fav car, to weigh 100Kg, which made it as fast as a F1 car xD, 'cos the actual values could be plainly see and modified in Notepad...

On a different note, while not a retro year yet, 2024 is becoming one of my favourite years for videogames. It feels that you don't need to become hyped because a game is an AAA or the AAA + exclusive combo. High quality games most of the time for sure, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily fun.
 
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