Emulation is better than modern gaming

[FlyingLemons]

This article popped up in my inbox today:

Although the titles developed for smartphones were unique and downright ingenious in the early 2010s, the situation is a lot different now. Sure, mobile games have always been designed for the casual audience who typically end their gaming sessions after short bursts. But the addition of freemium models slowly devolved the mobile gaming industry into a landfill for pay-to-win titles filled to the brim with ads and microtransactions. Today, it’s hard to find decent single-player games that aren’t shovelware or don’t have huge paywalls after every third level. In fact, the situation has gotten so bad that, barring a few amazing gems, most of the worthwhile games developed for mobile phones are ports of older PC and console games.

Meanwhile, the PC gaming industry is plagued by another set of ailments. The majority of the triple-A games don’t meet the standards set by the titles of yore. Over the last few years, the modern gaming landscape has become a cesspool of half-baked games that are released with missing features and enough performance issues and bugs to turn off even the most passionate gamer. Plus, it has become a trend to release incomplete titles and launch the rest of the game as paid DLCs.

And it got me thinking: most of the gaming I do nowadays is indeed emulated retro gaming. For instance, my dear departed PS3 (overheated due to sand building up over time in the innards, died) left me with a huge selection of blu-ray games that were just sitting there. So after a bit of fiddling about, I dumped the ISOs, and now regularly play things like Deadpool and the Killzone games which... are in many ways better than a lot of stuff we have today. Playing them upscaled on hardware that is far more powerful than what they used to be played on actually improves them in many instances.

I guess what does make them better for me is that the content's actually far more generous than what we get now. For instance, Timesplitters 3 has a lot of unlockable characters and levels for multiplayer that are just flatout given to you, whereas now they'd all be parceled up into little microtransactions, and even in the PS3 era (where the microtransaction/lootbox plague started) games are still coming to you relatively complete and far less miserly in content.

Old arcade games are also much more fun as well: they just are pure gameplay, and an arcade shooter is just a shooter, not a laundry list of things to do and collect. Sometimes there are still bugs that will never be patched by the developer (which of course, was common in those days as no internet) but it still often seems to be more polished and finished feeling than a lot of AAA releases today.

Does anyone else feel this way?

 

[BillJ]

To be able to go back and play the older Madden games, with modern upscaling and updates is a treat. Though I still enjoy picking up the new titles.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

I bought one of those super consoles x which came with 95,000 games, some of the emulators on it are Amstard 464, Speccy, Atari, Amiga, ST, Mame, C64, to name a few, amazing little box, well worth the 30 quid.

Oh and you can plug in a mouse and keyboard for all the old computers i listed above and enjoy.

 

[FlyingLemons]

The size of a PS3 game from 20 years ago is around 18GB. That would be considered a small patch today...

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I never buy games on release because it's way cheaper to wait a bit, so I've always been a little in the past, but I don't feel like I live in any one era. My backlog of games I need to check out spans decades and I'm fortunate that backwards compatibility and emulation allows me to play pretty much all of it. Especially considering that I've got a website to write, which continually hungers for screenshots of retro games. Funny thing is, I started it in 2011, so the modern games at the time were the PS3 games you're calling retro now.

I'd say that every generation of gaming has its issues and its strengths. 90s was the golden age of platformers and adventure games, but a terrible time for 3D graphics. Early 2000s has some wild and inventive PS2 games, but suffers from QTEs and unskippable cutscenes, etc. One thing that never changes is people feeling that things used to be better, and I'm sure the 2020s will eventually become someone else's golden age of video games. Assuming that anything still works when their servers are shut down.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I honestly never understood the allure of the Atari 2600. The game ports for that console from other consoles were absolute shit, with only 2 or 3 colors on the screen. Pac Man comes to mind - it looked nothing like the original. Now, ColecoVision had the games that looked (mostly) like the arcade originals. It wasn't until Atari released the 5200 (which was basically a repackaged Atari 800XL computer without a keyboard) that things started getting better, but Atari's limited GTIA graphics chipset really didn't give the same variety of colors needed to accurately reproduce the popular arcade games of the time.

The thing that people today don't realize about the "8-bit" world, is that they mostly think it's all about "big pixels with only 256 colors". The reality was that, while there was a palette of 256 colors available, it didn't have a good range of colors to use on the screen at the same time. I can't speak too intelligently about Apple ][ and C-64 - they had more colors available (the Apple cheated - more on that in a bit) - but the Atari only had up to 4 colors (depending on the graphics mode) that could be actively used at any given time. Coders were frustrated with this so a lot of them went to the other platforms and trashed Atari's ostensibly limited capabilities. Then Atari released Atari Basketball:


There are a lot more than just 4 colors, aren't there? People took notice and did digging and realized that some "undocumented features" of the Atari's machine code that Atari Corp wanted to keep hidden for their own exclusive use. This included something called "player-missile graphics". These were like "sprites" in other platforms, but instead of sharing the same memory space as everything else going on the screen, P/M objects existed in their own reserved memory block on top of the main graphics memory space. This allowed them to operate independently (and quite smoothly) from the restrictions of the baseline 4-color space, each with its own color and generating even more colors when overlapping.

There were other techniques discovered as well, like dithering, blittering and display-list-interrupting (DLI, also known as raster interrupting or vertical-blank-interrupting), which allowed for more interesting color abilities, coming near to full 256 color usage - but you had to do some serious bending-over-backwards coding to get there at the machine language level.

Commodore had a better graphics chipset - 'nuff said, full stop. That didn't keep the Atari/Commode-door rivalry from raging for decades, though!

Apple really only had two colors, but IIRC, their pixels were just small enough, that if you manipulated them correctly, they would light up a small portion of each RGB TV pixel in such a way that it would appear as if you could do multiple colors. This was called "artifacting". The rendered pixels themselves never had color, they just basically "hacked" the nature of NTSC color TV screens of the era, by making fake colors (hence my earlier "cheating" statement). If you looked at an Apple screen doing this with a non-color B/W or green-screen monitor, all you would see are hundreds of vertical lines painting an unintelligible picture. Atari could do this too in their "high resolution" mode (Graphics 8), but were only able to add 2 extra colors that changed depending on the kind of chipset you were using (CTIA/GTIA).

WHEW! Them's some 'memberberries for ya kiddies! This was the world before y'all were born.

 

[BillJ]

I honestly never understood the allure of the Atari 2600.

I still have one, been thinking about picking up the 2600+.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

I always think retro gaming is going to be fun, but then…

I subscribe to the Nintendo Switch service which gives you access to NES/SNES/GB/N64 games and… well, maybe it’s just me but loads of games I used to love are so sucky now.

I was excited to play Goldeneye, but after 5 minutes I was back onto (modern) Wolfenstein.

Some old games do really hold up though. So I guess it all depends.

 

[BillJ]

I always think retro gaming is going to be fun, but then…

I subscribe to the Nintendo Switch service which gives you access to NES/SNES/GB/N64 games and… well, maybe it’s just me but loads of games I used to love are so sucky now.

I was excited to play Goldeneye, but after 5 minutes I was back onto (modern) Wolfenstein.

Some old games do really hold up though. So I guess it all depends.

You can recreate the hardware and software, but you can't recreate the conditions and the world you played them in.

Nostalgia is a tricky beast.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

You can recreate the hardware and software, but you can't recreate the conditions and the world you played them in.

I think that’s it to some degree.

But then there are games that I can enjoy just as much as I used to.

I think it’s great having access to these titles though. Emulation itself is a fantastic thing.

 

[BillJ]

But then there are games that I can enjoy just as much as I used to.

Those are the one's that would likely still stick out in the crowd, today. Good games that stand the test of time and gaming evolution.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Those are the one's that would likely still stick out in the crowd, today. Good games that stand the test of time and gaming evolution.

From the Megadrive (you might call it Genesis) then the original Sonic games hold up. But then there’s stuff like Toejam and Earl, which I completed back in the day, that are just so tedious now.

SNES has a higher hit rate. Super Mario World and Link to the Past are as glorious as they ever were. Starfox is still pretty good.

N64 3D games are weird. I find Mario 64 to be borderline unplayable because modern gaming has me used to 2 analog sticks and I’m forever trying to adjust the camera when it just didn’t work like that back then… Heresy maybe, but 5 minutes into Mario 64 or Ocarina of time… nah, gimme Odyssey and BotW.

I fell out with gaming during PS1-PS2 games and didn’t get back in until I got an Xbox 360.

I’d love to play Farcry 3 again, but I’m so scared it would be shit.

It’s a mixed bag.

 

[BillJ]

Heresy maybe, but 5 minutes into Mario 64 or Ocarina of time… nah, gimme Odyssey and BotW.

Those are good games that, unfortunately, have terrible control schemes by modern standards.

 

[BillJ]

Though at 52, I have to say that the Atari 2600 controller, along with the Intellivision controller, should be considered crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Those are good games that, unfortunately, have terrible control schemes by modern standards.

Fixed for the 3DS remasters in the case of Zelda and it improved both Ocarina and Majora immeasurably. I played through both and loved them.

But Nintendo being Nintendo… they didn’t bother altering anything for the Switch.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I always think retro gaming is going to be fun, but then…

I subscribe to the Nintendo Switch service which gives you access to NES/SNES/GB/N64 games and… well, maybe it’s just me but loads of games I used to love are so sucky now.

I was excited to play Goldeneye, but after 5 minutes I was back onto (modern) Wolfenstein.

Some old games do really hold up though. So I guess it all depends.

Yeah, some games have stood the test of time, while others have become too archaic to be fun anymore. Either because of dated controls, frustrating design choices, or because the genre has evolved and something else does what it does way better. Quake is more fun than Quake 4 in 2024, with its slick source ports and limitless user-made content, but Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 pulls off tactical combat a lot better than Rainbow Six did.

I’d love to play Farcry 3 again, but I’m so scared it would be shit.

FarCry 3 is so good that Ubisoft basically remakes it with every sequel. I still love the game, but it's hard for me to choose what my favourite FarCry is because 3-6 are all so similar. In fact Ghost Recon is basically FarCry as well now.

 

[Akiraprise]

I tried playing N64 Goldeneye months ago, I used to dominate, and found myself barely able to control it. The N64 is hit and miss as far as older games. MarioKart64 is still a blast as is StarFox64. I also have an issue paying for these same games emulated after already having purchased them once and still having the consoles.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I was deadly with the grenade launchers

 

[FlyingLemons]

I always think retro gaming is going to be fun, but then…

I subscribe to the Nintendo Switch service which gives you access to NES/SNES/GB/N64 games and… well, maybe it’s just me but loads of games I used to love are so sucky now.

I was excited to play Goldeneye, but after 5 minutes I was back onto (modern) Wolfenstein.

Some old games do really hold up though. So I guess it all depends.

Yeah, I find that with some old games. The design methods are dated, or the collision detection is trashy. Some of the earlier 3D stuff is a bit crappy because they were figuring out the ins and outs of it, but on the other hand Super Castlevania IV is always awesome, and a lot of the old Sega, Namco and Capcom stuff is too.

I have stuck to a lot of PS3-era stuff though. Maybe it's just because I was young then, but it's the "goldilocks zone" of games for me.

 

[BillJ]

I have stuck to a lot of PS3-era stuff though. Maybe it's just because I was young then, but it's the "goldilocks zone" of games for me.

Original Xbox, PS2 and GameCube were the sweet spot for me. Soooo much time wasted.