tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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Someone is claiming that they've found one of the few prototypes made for the Nintendo/Sony console that was ultimately scrapped.  It makes me wonder what gaming would look like today if Sony had never entered the market.  Would the Dreamcast have been a success, with one less competitor?  Would Microsoft have ever entered the field?

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Seems fake? I don't buy that just Olaf, co founder of Sony Interactive, would just have a major console prototype in a box obviously labeled "junk" for some other dude's dad to throw out. They could have at least gotten a better story than that. The main thing that makes me think is not fake is the yellowing, but then that could be a nice attention to detail on a custom case.

 

Here's the video of the poster though:

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I agree it's not entirely credible, but I also do find it with the realm of possibility.  There are plenty of stories about how shit like this is found in the weirdest places.

 

And ultimately the system will prove to be real or a hoax, and the origin behind it is less important (the only reason that Olaf would be important would be to try and boost the price as a collector's item, and if it isn't true, that story will fall apart quick enough). 

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I hope he gets the plugs, which if you have access to any retro game store, should be easy enough in the same day. Looks like it would just take standard RCA cables or the SNES/64 cord for audio and video and then I would guess a regular SNES adaptor would work, but it might not fit. I wonder if anything on that cart plays, so hopefully he just doesn't disappear.

 

But that he has no A/C adaptor or A/V output before posting kind of makes me feel more skeptical.

 

Also I had never known that this version of the SNES CD was an actual thing. I had always known it to be this double decker looking thing similar to the Satellaview add on or how the 64 DD looked.

snescd2.jpg

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Super Metroid has given me an appreciation for 2d games that I never had before. I'm now trying Stider on ps4 again, and actually enjoying it. I don't know what it is about Metroid games, but they completely rewired my head to go from 2D is ancient to understanding what makes a 2D game good.

Last time I played I thought it was boring and tedious to navigate the map. Now it feels interesting to explore and find power ups. Yeah the combat is a little bland, but everything else is pretty good!

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Super Metroid has given me an appreciation for 2d games that I never had before. I'm now trying Stider on ps4 again, and actually enjoying it. I don't know what it is about Metroid games, but they completely rewired my head to go from 2D is ancient to understanding what makes a 2D game good.

Last time I played I thought it was boring and tedious to navigate the map. Now it feels interesting to explore and find power ups. Yeah the combat is a little bland, but everything else is pretty good!

 

I don't mean to sound condescending, but are you too young to remember when most games were 2D?  It just seems so foreign to me to hear someone say that they need to learn 2D games can be good when I needed to learn that 3D game could be good (and they weren't for a long time).

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Don't worry, it wasn't taken as condecending. I'm on the edge of being too young, many of my friends had a SNES or a Saturn?, but I wasn't allowed to have any sort of games console until I was deemed old enough, which meant my first was the N64.

I have zero nostalgia for 2D games, and actively avoided them until recently. I don't have those rose tinted specs when playing 2D stuff, which means I can judge them based on merits rather than because they remind me of being a kid.

I entered gaming with OoT, Golden Eye, Mario 64 (which I still need to finish) and Rogue Squadron. All of which were incredible entries into 3D gaming. Made it hard for me to care about 2D after forming my initial gaming opinions with those.

Well except Pokemon, but that was an exception to the rule.

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I like 2D a ton more not cause of nostalgia, but because they have a much higher fidelity of precise movement and exactness. 3D stuff is inherently looser because it has to be with that 3rd dimension. But good 2D games, like Mario and Spelunky benefit greatly from allowing the player to hone their understanding of the movement and develop their abilities accordingly.

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What about more recent ones like Super Meat Boy? It's pretty exceptional.

 

I've never played meat boy, but yes, I'm loving many of the modern ones. Rogue Legacy was a big hit for me. The Binding of Isaac too was another huge time sink.

 

I like 2D a ton more not cause of nostalgia, but because they have a much higher fidelity of precise movement and exactness. 3D stuff is inherently looser because it has to be with that 3rd dimension. But good 2D games, like Mario and Spelunky benefit greatly from allowing the player to hone their understanding of the movement and develop their abilities accordingly.

I didn't want to imply nostalgia is the only reason people like them. That's not true at all. I am really learning to appreciate that movement and how tiny details in the animations of background can mean huge things. While in 3D games, things tend to have to be clear for you to notice them (although not always).

Weirdly, I can't play 2D Mario. I find the movement hard to control, but the 3D Mario seems much more precise to me.

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I like 2D a ton more not cause of nostalgia, but because they have a much higher fidelity of precise movement and exactness. 3D stuff is inherently looser because it has to be with that 3rd dimension. But good 2D games, like Mario and Spelunky benefit greatly from allowing the player to hone their understanding of the movement and develop their abilities accordingly.

I basically can't play 3D platformers.  There are a few exceptions, but overall that is a genre that feels better with 2D games. 

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Don't worry, it wasn't taken as condecending. I'm on the edge of being too young, many of my friends had a SNES or a Saturn?, but I wasn't allowed to have any sort of games console until I was deemed old enough, which meant my first was the N64.

I have zero nostalgia for 2D games, and actively avoided them until recently. I don't have those rose tinted specs when playing 2D stuff, which means I can judge them based on merits rather than because they remind me of being a kid.

I entered gaming with OoT, Golden Eye, Mario 64 (which I still need to finish) and Rogue Squadron. All of which were incredible entries into 3D gaming. Made it hard for me to care about 2D after forming my initial gaming opinions with those.

Well except Pokemon, but that was an exception to the rule.

 

That's really interesting, huh. I could also see the no-nostalgia-for-2d thing happening if somebody grew up primarily on PC games or something. (Though, even there, i grew up playing Commander Keen.)

Me, i had a gameboy at a really young age and like... Metroid 2 was a formative experience for me.

 

I've always felt that there are certain things that 2D games are just really good at doing. Like the way 2d games have a crisp, instantly readable spacial awareness. It's why good 3d platformers are so rare, while it seems to be hard to make a truly bad 2d one.

 

But what you're saying about the 3D mario stuff, it's curious to me how much of that is potentially just what gets ingrained into us as kids.

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Funny how you say you can't play 3D platformers, cause I often find it much more irritating how it boxes in movement in FPS games (which is why TF2 is my FPS).

 

@Griddelol: Yeah I wasn't sure if you meant that or not, I thought I worded my response to be taken either way so sorry if it sounded off!

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 Rogue Legacy was a big hit for me.

 

Haha, that's strange to me, because that one in particular is more retro in terms of mechanics and gameplay feel than a good deal of the 2D nostalgia-bombs I play. The meta-structure stuff isn't, of course, but man the way sword swinging and jumping feels and even the way the graphics look (which, tbh, isn't that great), feels so old.

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I don't really agree that it succeeds in hitting that retro feel at all, but i've already argued at length in other threads that Rogue Legacy feels considerably worse to play than a lot of the old games it's trying to emulate, so i won't do that again here.

 

Kind of hated playing that game though.

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It's precisely because it doesn't feel great that it feels old. U:

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Rogue Legacy might not be a good at what it's trying to emulate, but as someone with limited experience of those things, it felt great. It could be a bad game, but it was really one of the first of that type that I tired and enjoyed. It is good enough at what it does that it pulled me in.

I'm sure there are better versions of that, which I haven't found yet though.

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The thing I like about 2D games over most 3D games is the viewing angle.  It's boggles me that "bad camera" is still a thing in 3D games (although admittedly much less so than it used to be).  In 2D games if you can't tell what's happening its usually because of bad design.  In 3D games you can have great design and mechanics but have everything be ruined by terrible camera control.  One of the reasons I prefer first person games is that I have more control over what I'm seeing even if I do lose some spatial awareness (and I prefer first over third for the precision). 

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I have some quibbles about You Must Build A Boat, but please understand they are quibbles from having finished it like six times by this point.

 

I'm curious what some of your quibbles about the game are.  I got it a few days ago and have beaten it once since then.  I don't like it as much as 10000000 and I'm not entirely sure why.

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I played 10000000 and I don't get why people like it. It was boring. I put it in my "fuck these games" category on Steam. U:

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I only played it on my phone and in that capacity it's a good time waster when I have a few minutes to kill.  It's not a game I'd ever play on something like Steam.

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Well that explains it. I hate phone games!

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I played 10000000 and I don't get why people like it. It was boring. I put it in my "fuck these games" category on Steam. U:

Amen.

I even thought it was a bad match three game, I'd much rather play Bejeweled.

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10000000 owned, sorry about your opinion.

 

 

It was an endless runner and a match 3 game that added new layers as you played, while ramping the difficulty the longer you played a single round until you hit the target goal.

 

The music was also great, same with You Must Build A Boat. You Must Build A Boat has a much better title treatment.

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